Ride in the Whirlwind

Director Monte Hellman

Writer, co-producer, and actor Jack Nicholson

Lake Powell in Glen Canyon today

RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND          B                                                                                     USA  (82 mi)  1966  d: Monte Hellman

Shot back-to-back with The Shooting (1966) in the Utah desert outside Kanab during a combined six-week shooting in 1965, each given a $75,000 budget by legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman with a crew of just seven people, both shot by cinematographer Gregory Sandor, who would go on to shoot the cross-country road movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) as well, each one conceived by young American director Monte Hellman before he established himself in the industry, yet what’s noteworthy is that the reddish Glen Canyon setting for this film no longer exists, as all of their locations are currently submerged under several hundred feet of water by a man-made reservoir, Lake Powell.  Though the film was screened at the San Francisco Film Festival in the fall of 1966, it failed to interest U.S. film distributors and never obtained an American theatrical release until 1972, and was instead immediately sold to television, though it was shown out of competition at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and played theatrically in France for six months in 1969, where it gained cult success on the French arthouse circuit, well received and critically acclaimed, endorsed by the editorial staff of the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma, describing the film as “something new and original,” bringing attention to Hellman abroad before he was recognized in America.  By the early 60’s, westerns were already starting to be given a different look in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962),  and David Miller’s vastly underrated LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962), while Sergio Leone started the spaghetti western craze with A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964).   Hellman eschewed widescreen compositions that capture the expansive panoramic landscapes of the American West, as was the custom at the time, and instead narrowed the focus to accentuate the tense claustrophobic anxiety.  Hellman studied drama at Stanford, then film at UCLA, taking a job as an apprentice film editor at ABC Studios, but he also founded the Theatergoers Company, and with financial help from Corman staged the Los Angeles premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, turning it into a western with Pozzo as a Texas rancher and Lucky as a Native-American Indian.  Not so much a story, but more of a collection of incidents and character studies, what’s so essential about this film is that it completely subverts the western genre, which typically glorifies the good guys against the bad guys, with a heroic hero at the center leading the action, usually a character audiences can sympathize with.  In this film you’d be hard pressed to find a hero, while dialogue and action sequences are minimized to the bare essentials.  What that means is that the story is advanced through visuals, which simply was not done at the time, becoming more in line with an art film, and a predecessor to the dour fatalistic excursions of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).  The minimalist script was actually written by Jack Nicholson, who was also a co-producer and lead actor in the film, creating an ambiguous moral drama about frontier justice and how easily it was to be swept away by an ingrained culture of incessant violence, where the motto may as well have been “shoot first and ask questions afterwards.”  With similarities to the lynch mob hysteria in William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), both are spare and uncompromising, yet also elusive to the core, where this reveals a couple of innocent cowhands who mistakenly get swept up in a bloodthirsty posse’s push for vigilante justice.  The wide open spaces of the American frontier are a fertile ground for lawlessness and indiscriminate killing, where the barrel of a gun sets the tone for the absence of justice. 

Both Hellman films are considered to be the earliest examples of a revisionist acid Western that brought contemporary 60’s counterculture ideologies into the classic realms of western lore, and while both are quiet films, accentuating the interpersonal relationships between a few people, they’re also very different films, where the grim, fatalistic tone reflects the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.  The Shooting, written by Carole Eastman, features Warren Oates in his first starring role butting heads with a ruthless female protagonist (Millie Perkins), becoming altogether abstract, uncompromising, and hallucinogenic in its fatalistic, existential moral ambiguities.  But don’t be fooled by the supposed critical favoritism heaped upon The Shooting, declaring it the masterpiece between the two, more challenging in its minimalist structure, with its relentless expression of existential despair, as this underestimated yet more authentic film is defiantly realistic, more conventional and plot-driven, exhibiting a spare, austere quality, where the simplicity and naturalistic tone sets this apart from most all other westerns you can think of, bringing to mind Peter Fonda’s largely unseen The Hired Hand (1971).  At the outset, a bumbling group of outlaws rob a passing stagecoach, yet Hellman slows the action down so the scenes play out in real-time, turning morbid when one of them takes a bullet, where there’s only two passengers and barely any money, hardly worth it you might think, but this botched robbery makes you realize not every heist pays off, which is the chance you take.  Simultaneously, three cowboys are seen riding home to Texas after the rodeo they were to perform in got canceled.  As they travel through a similar terrain, Wes (Jack Nicholson), Vern (Cameron Mitchell) and Otis (Tom Filer), stop to view the gruesome remains of a hanged man strung up to a tree, the kind of thing that makes you think twice about entering the territory, as it’s just such an ominous sign, like a Shakespearean witch’s prophecy.  They don’t react much, offering a few stoic comments, but these are not articulate men, outsiders most of their lives, never staying in any one place very long.  The sparse dialogue is actually taken from the frontier diaries and journalistic accounts of the time, like Andy Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy, a real-life account of his experiences on the trail, or A.S. Mercer’s The Banditti of the Plains (Asa Mercer and The Banditti of the Plains) and The Cattlemen's Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the Ages), a true account of the crimes against homesteaders by cattle barons, with a scathing exposé about Wyoming’s Johnson County War (The Johnson County War: 1892 Invasion of Northern ...), including the siege and burning of a ranch house to draw out the inhabitants who were shot on sight, read by Nicholson when he was writing the script, providing insights into the characters he was writing about, crafting a story of simple men caught up in the cruelties of the time, and an authentic reflection of the American West.  As fate would have it, the three cowhands mistakenly wander right into a remote cabin holing up the stage outlaws, sensing no trouble at first, just a place to bed down for the night, spending the night sleeping with the horses.  The cowboys are suspicious of the ragged crew, but the one-eyed leader, Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton), is hospitable enough, sharing food and corn whisky, but by morning they’re greeted with a hail of bullets, surrounded by a vigilante posse aiming to either shoot them or string them up to a tree, thinking they are all part of the stagecoach holdup gang, with Otis shot trying to make it to his horse.  Like Mercer’s historical exposé, the posse burns down the cabin, executing those inside, with Wes and Vern trying to make an escape on foot up a high ridge of a box-canyon that offers no real chance of getting away.    

There are overlaps in the two films, each a story of paranoia and pursuit, expressed through alienation and existentialism, with Hellman claiming all his films have been informed in some way by Samuel Beckett, asking fundamental existential questions like “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?”  While this is a dark and brooding, psychologically intense western, introducing both slow-motion and realistic violence, while also using a limited musical score that never overshadows what happens onscreen, it lacks the suffocating dread that elevates The Shooting, where all the characters are bigger than life, yet the stripped down, bare minimum aspect of this film is highly unusual, with minimal dialogue, which is a true standout, among the most economic scripts of the 1960’s.  Yet its brazen depiction of a roving posse bypassing the legal system by taking the power of the gun into their own hands reflects the current power unbalance that continues to haunt America’s racial crisis through perpetual police shootings on the streets of America today.  What it also captures that other westerns seem to omit is the pervasive sense of loneliness from such extreme isolation, essentially cut off from the rest of humanity.  The enveloped emptiness from traversing vast distances on horseback can only be described as incredibly monotonous, where the land poses such a physical challenge, as it’s even difficult to do today in a car with all the newfangled gadgetry, so imagine the difficulties encountered going on such long distance rides, wearing the same clothes, struggling to find water, eating the same basic meals of biscuits and beans, having little to talk about on those grueling days in the saddle under the hot sun.  Not anyone’s idea of a good time.  Hellman reimagines what the West was like from a personal perspective, working against tradition, so instead of focusing his attention on action sequences, he instead shows us what happens in between the bursts of gunfire and furious chases, offering the perspective of those being hunted down.  This alternative vision of the West is immediately apparent, where you need look no further than seeing Harry Dean Stanton step behind a rock and take a piss.  This is just not something you see in other westerns.  There are bookended scenes of a family homestead, where the ranch is run by an older man (George Mitchell) and his wife (Katherine Squire), along with their attractive 19-year-old daughter Abigail (Millie Perkins).  The posse visits them first, inspecting the house and barn for the escapees, and leave satisfied they’re not harboring criminals.  Shortly afterwards, however, Wes and Vern have commandeered the women inside while the old man continues to work outdoors, taking an axe to a giant tree stump.  But once he sets foot inside, he is disarmed as well, suddenly at the mercy of these supposed dangerous outlaws who attempt to explain their innocence, to no avail, as what is the family supposed to believe when they take their horses, viewing them as little more than common horse thieves.  The quietness and non-threatening manner of this home invasion, however, speaks volumes, attempting to be polite while at the same time exposing the desperateness of their situation, protagonists on the lam from a lynch mob, as that hanging posse has promised the settlers, “They’ve seen their last sunrise.”  In this film there are no heroes or villains, just victims of tragic circumstances that reveal the hardships of trying to settle the American West, where even for those who somehow manage to make it, there is a devastating cost associated with everyday survival, where there’s an underlying feeling of sorrow that saturates every frame of this film.    

Ride in the Whirlwind | Jack Nicholson  full movie, YouTube (1:22:06)

Johnny Guitar

 

Director Nicholas Ray

Ray with Joan Crawford

Crawford (left) with Mercedes Cambridge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHNNY GUITAR         A                                                                                                             USA  (110 mi)  1954  d: Nicholas Ray

Never seen a woman who was more of a man.  She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not.    —Sam (Robert Osterloh), one of the blackjack dealers

Easily Nicholas Ray’s most subversive film, coming after They Live By Night (1948),  In a Lonely Place (1950), and On Dangerous Ground (1952), doing well at the box office but trashed by the critics, completely misunderstood at the time, refusing to conform to expectations of the male-dominated Western genre, which is typically an amalgamation of racism, sexism, and xenophobia, viewed by Ray as the biggest failure of his career, a continuance of his brooding outsider theme while also an indictment of mob psychology.  Conceived as a blatant response to the Hollywood blacklist and the witch hunt period of McCarthyism, this was a Cold War-era pursuit of men and women who were accused of being communists, most were falsely accused and imprisoned, their livelihoods and careers ruined by men who blatantly pushed the conspiracy theories of the day, yet the film’s reputation has been resuscitated by Martin Scorsese and other film scholars, beloved in Europe, including François Truffaut, who hailed Ray as “the poet of nightfall,” describing this film as “the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns,” listed at #9 for best picture in 1955 from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Cahiers du Cinema: 1951-2011, with many now praising this as among Ray’s best work.  Based on a 1953 novel by B-picture screenwriter Roy Chanslor, with a script largely credited to Philip Yordan, though blacklisted writer Ben Maddow may have contributed, heavily revised by Ray, it was written for Joan Crawford, who bought the rights for the movie, basically the producer for her own picture, the one calling the shots, often altering the script to suit her, with Crawford at the time an aging film star who grew paranoid about her fading career, constantly making demands that only heightened her insecurity, where there was constant friction on the set between her and her leading man, Sterling Hayden, with Crawford calling him “the biggest pill in Hollywood,” while Hayden exclaimed, “There is not enough money in Hollywood that could lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford.  And I like money.”  Yet within this cauldron of Hollywood combustion and turmoil lies a truly magnificent script, among Hollywood’s greatest poetry, as the dialogue is crisp and fiercely antagonistic, filled with shots and counter shots at one another, where this is the epitome of a town that’s not big enough for the two competing interests, with Joan Crawford as Vienna representing the new world dream of the railroad, hoping to cash in on the future, and Mercedes Cambridge as Emma Small representing the old world of cattle interests, where they don’t believe in fences or anything restricting the far reaches of vast and unlimited lands.  Vienna even has a miniature model of a town in her saloon, destined to become a railroad stop, referenced by Sergio Leone when he created Claudia Cardinale’s character in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968).  Subverting the Western as a male vehicle, Nicolas Ray pits two women against one another, both detesting the other, with the film seething with their outright contempt, becoming an eroticized antagonism, with both distinguishing themselves in the roles, while Hayden as Johnny Guitar serves as the love interest, a role usually reserved for a woman, yet his pretty boy image is mocked by his direct and straightforward approach, standing up to any man, though often from the shadows.  Due to the camp nature of the film, wildly flamboyant with exaggerated stereotypes and operatic melodrama, some may question the feminist intent, but that’s the baffling nature of the film, examining the costs of a woman’s independent action through lurid, violent exaggeration, where Vienna isn’t willing to sacrifice her autonomy for Johnny, and just as surprisingly, he never asks her to.  Described as “a revisionist western, a feminist polemic, a vibrant fairy tale, a subversive cold war parable, maybe even a queer cult classic, ReFramed No. 23: Nicholas Ray's 'Johnny Guitar' (1954),” it has a beloved stature in the gay community (who loved to do Crawford in drag), openly embraced for how it has undermined the sexual roles, leaving audiences confused at the time of its release, with Vienna bitterly reminding Johnny, “A man can lie, steal, and even kill, but as long as he hangs on to his pride, he’s still a man.  All a woman has to do is slip – once, and she’s a ‘tramp!’  Must be a great comfort to you to be a man.”  There are also lesbian undercurrents, with Emma having a delusional fantasy about the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), yet her real interest, it seems, is Vienna, yet the sentiment is not reciprocated, which only leaves her more incensed, subconsciously repressing that interest and wanting her dead if she can’t have her.  It’s a strange alignment of stars, certainly among the most mysterious of all Westerns, yet it has all the standard conventions, a stagecoach holdup, a bank robbery, a hired gun, a posse turned into a lynch mob, a villain’s lair, a barroom brawl, a woman with a past, and a kid trying to prove himself.  Hayden’s tough guy persona is used to brilliant effect, as he doesn’t carry a gun, carrying a guitar on his back instead, introducing himself as a disinterested bystander at one point, “I’m a stranger here myself,” completely confounding the outlaw gang who don’t know where he stands, making the barroom confrontation even more wonderful, as the standoff isn’t with guns but with words, a delightful turn of events, and the rapid-fire dialogue doesn’t disappoint, ever more mythologized over time, endlessly quoted and repeated, including his maxim for living, “When you boil it all down, what does a man really need?  Just a smoke and a cup of coffee,” a line that diffuses armed conflict from escalating. 

The last film shot on Trucolor, a highly saturated two-strip, red and blue process, much of it shot in some stunning outdoor landscapes of Sedona, Arizona by Harry Stradling Sr, while other scenes were filmed near Oak Creek Canyon between Phoenix and Sedona, where the rocks have a reddish tint, yet Crawford refused to subject herself to the desert setting, so all her outdoor close-ups were actually shot in studio, using a double for long shots.  Shot at Republic Pictures, Ray’s first after leaving RKO, a smaller low-budget studio known primarily for B-movies that was a step down from Crawford’s days as the glamorous star at MGM and then Warners, so she let Ray and everyone else on the set know it, making their lives a living hell with temper tantrums and constant demands for more scenes and close-ups, even attempting to sabotage actress Mercedes Cambridge, bullying her on the set while ripping her costumes to shreds, thrown along the side of a highway in a drunken spree.  Ray reportedly vomited several times before arriving to work each day, as the heightened tension working with Crawford was unbearable.  Not like any other cowboy drama, playing havoc with Western conventions while reveling in sexual role-reversals, where in the middle of it all is Victor Young’s enchanting musical score, Ray sets his film shortly after the Civil War, taking place outside a fictitious town of Red Butte, Arizona (identified by the bank), as a stranger wanders into town by the name of Johnny Guitar, but along the way he witnesses a stagecoach robbery from high above a mountain vista, unable to see details, while all around them explosions are going off to make way for the coming railroad.  Entering town is like entering a dream, arriving during a sandstorm, where all you can make out is the name of the saloon, Vienna’s, with a casino inside, yet it is eerily empty, with no customers, yet the barkeep and dealers are all eyeballing the man who walked in out of a storm, discovering Vienna, now the owner, is a former saloon hostess, with short cropped hair, dressed entirely in black boots, pants and shirt, with dark red lipstick, yet carrying a holster, just like a man.  Seen early on having a business meeting with a railroad executive, she more than holds her own, viewed as a domineering force who is defiantly self-reliant, even barking out orders in her low voice to her casino workers, yet this establishment is peculiarly built right into a rock, which accounts for some of the jagged walls.  The leisurely pace of the opening is interrupted by the arrival of an angry mob led by Emma, including John McIvers (Ward Bond), a cattleman mayor, Marshal Williams (Frank Ferguson), and a motley group of men, providing a dead body as evidence, calling out for Vienna to be charged with the murder of her brother in the stagecoach robbery, though no evidence points to her.  Emma claims it was done by the Dancin’ Kid gang, friends of Vienna, claiming she’s harboring a gang of criminals and needs to be run out of town.  Vienna starts out on the top of the stairs, eyeballing the group, calmly proclaiming her innocence, indicating “Down there I sell whiskey and cards.  All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head.  Now which do you want?”  But when Emma makes it personal, making threats, she walks down the stairs, with Emma warning, “I’m going to kill you.”  Vienna answers, “I know.  If I don’t kill you first.”  And therein lies the dramatic theme, radiating a persistent anxiety about change, as the two protagonists are dead set in their intentions, both fiercely independent, yet stubbornly persistent.  Emma’s hysteria is matched by Vienna’s calm restraint, never backing down, but holding her own against heavily stacked odds.  McIvers gives her and her ilk 24-hours to get out of town if they want to avoid trouble, an ultimatum at odds with the Marshal’s law, but he means business, with threats setting the stage for future hostilities.  In the midst of this showdown in the saloon, Johnny distinguishes himself as the only man without a gun, yet his calmness and good humor belies the situation, egged on by Bart (Ernest Borgnine), one of the Kid’s gang, and the two get to tussling, mostly happening offscreen, as the camera stays on Vienna and the Kid, who stand around a blackjack table discussing their feelings, returning to the fight only when it’s over, a forgettable brawl of no consequence whatsoever, with Johnny beating him senseless.  While no one says it out loud, this stranger seems surprisingly at ease, appearing out of nowhere, raising the question, “Who is this guy?”  Johnny and Vienna have a history together, yet broke it off five years ago, with Vienna calling him back as hired protection, yet her underlying motivation is to rekindle that love affair.  She hides her feelings, however, behind the bravado of the brawl, with each dancing around the inevitable, creating a mysterious ballet of emotional standoffishness, yet then instantaneously they apparently reconnect, awakening the next morning with their relationship reassured.  Vienna has some unfinished business, making a withdrawal from the bank to pay off her staff, as she’ll be closing down.  But they’re met by the Kid and his gang, who are there to rob the bank, thinking so long as they’re run out of the premises, they’ll at least have some traveling money.  While the timing couldn’t be more peculiar, the outlaw escape is equally harrowing, as they head into the mountains at the same time as dynamite explosions are closing down the pass, making the crossing impossible, returning to their hideout tucked away from it all, perched atop a mountainous rock, yet completely out of sight behind a waterfall, with the anxious men seething in anger and discontent.

While this is a Joan Crawford picture, Mercedes Cambridge steals the show as a raving psychopath, insanely over-the-top, serving as the town instigator, stirring the men into a frenzy, underscoring the men’s sheepishness, quickly forming a posse headed by McIvers (which mirrors Ward Bond’s anti-communist role in spearheading the McCarthy attacks), but she spurs them on at every turn chasing after the Kid and his gang, banishing Vienna from town, and even worse, instilling the men with a lynch mob hysteria, veering into territory explored by Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), where ordinary citizens can be bullied into a psychotic rage, completely transformed into a communal bloodlust for killing.  While McIvers is the man in charge, she is the pathological force that actually drives this picture, playing an unforgettable role of pure evil incarnate, getting a maniacal reaction after torching Vienna’s business and burning it down, and while the community may be responsible for carrying out a hanging, she goads them all along the way, pushing them further and further into following their worst instincts, crossing the line into criminality and even murder.  The half-crazed, pathological mania behind her neurotic vengeance is at the heart of the picture, standing for the ruthlessly corrupt power behind the McCarthy hearings, whose rigid standards are driven by a delusionary, Puritanical repression, matching Emma’s own deeply repressed sexual identity, with Vienna explaining that the Kid “makes her feel like a woman, and that frightens her,” instead instilling a poisonous venom over every frame of the film.  Identity fluctuates throughout this picture, as Vienna changes from pants to dresses (butch to femme), Johnny goes from being unarmed to wearing a gun, Johnny has changed his name, while Vienna has changed her profession.  Moreover, the Kid and his gang are charged for a stage holdup they didn’t commit, Vienna is repeatedly charged with masterminding crimes she had nothing to do with, while her sexual role from male to female also fluctuates with the costume she wears.  She is financially independent, owning her own business, and is always in control of her relationships, whether it be with the Kid or Johnny, always choosing the man she wants rather than be chosen by them.  Meeting an angry lynch mob in her saloon after the bank robbery, she’s alone in a cavernous saloon wearing a flowing white dress of innocence, seen calmly playing a sad song on the piano, an astonishing yet remarkably unforeseen image with the interior rocks adding an eerie backdrop, but when the vicious mob overruns her claim of guiltlessness, she’s hauled off for a hanging with her saloon gleefully burned down by Emma.  The lynch mob possesses evil intent, consumed on getting vengeance, browbeating a terrified kid into implicating Vienna (pressuring many well-known actors and directors into naming names is precisely what was so heinous about the McCarthy hearings), promising him immunity, but breaking every promise they make, hanging him anyway while Vienna is gallantly rescued by Johnny with the noose still around her neck, a last second reprieve from the gallows’ rope.  A figure of female power in a traditionally male-dominated West, she maintains her composure even after her business is burned to the ground, viewed as a rugged, tough individual, an equal in every respect to Johnny Guitar, or any other man, switching back into pants afterwards, easily exuding both masculine and feminine traits, but what’s missing is any sense of vulnerability or female mystique, where any romance is more suggestive than real or visibly expressed onscreen.  While Mildred Pierce (1945) breathed new life into Crawford’s flagging career, this film coincided with a downturn in her star status, where the exaggerated fever dream of this film only heightened a prevailing view of her as camp.  Figuring into this public descent was Crawford’s open attack on Marilyn Monroe’s flaunted sexuality, which she likened to a “burlesque show” unsuitable for the screen, claiming her films weren’t doing any business.  The story was a sensation in Hollywood, with most defending Monroe, who would, of course, become a huge box office star, while Crawford was viewed as an over-the-hill actress whose star had faded, openly revealing her jealousy of Monroe’s quick ascent into the Hollywood mainstream.  Even during the filming of this film, the press viciously attacked her, claiming her behavior on the set was unprofessional, accused of bullying Mercedes Cambridge, with Sterling Hayden echoing that thought, so her personal life matches a character that hates all other women, viewing them all as rivals, which greatly accelerates her exaggerated view as camp.  The finale, however, really tops it off, where there is an inevitable shootout between the two female stars, taking place at the outlaw hideout, while the men are reduced to secondary characters who simply watch it all happen, but the film begins and ends with Johnny, elevated to an intoxicating degree with a lover’s kiss in front of a waterfall to Peggy Lee’s wistful and melancholic rendition of the final theme song, Johnny Guitar (Title Song) YouTube (3:11), singing “There was never a man like my Johnny, like the one they call Johnny Guitar,” as if the entire film has been narrated by her.  Out of nowhere, viewers are reminded that the title of the film is in name only, as Crawford is the one wearing the pants and pushing all the buttons.  Described as part fatalism, part romanticism, the cinema of outsiders and loners, and also the cinema of gun fighting women, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described this as the “first existential western.” 

Martin Scorsese introduces Johnny Guitar (USA, 1954) dir. Nicholas Ray YouTube (3:27)