The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: The Shooting (1966), directed by Monte Hellman

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Theme For An Imaginary Western", by Mountain

     As I’ve mentioned previously, this Marathon is one particularly devoted to callbacks and traditions, and one of those traditions of the last couple of years has been devoting a spot to a Western film. Not your average ham-and-egg Ford Western of course, this is supposed to be a Halloween movie marathon after all, but something that takes the aesthetic or the characterization of the genre and goes in another direction with it. Last year we had the Agatha Christie by way of Sergio Leone thriller known as Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, the year before that was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic pilgrimage known as El Topo, the year before that was Westworld, and even before that we had films like Cannibal! The Musical. A long and storied legacy if I do say so myself, the longest recurring theme on this blog besides self-pity, so it would be almost negligent of me not to do one this year as well. Of course, as with everything in my life, finding a properly ‘weird’ western is tougher than you might think.

     Filmed in  Utah all the way back in 1965, The Shooting was the product of a back-to-back film session by director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, The Greatest), a session which also produced the quite similar Ride in the Whirlwind. Directed by Hellman, written by Carol Eastman (Five Easy Pieces), and co-produced by and co-starring Jack Nicholson (a whole bunch of stuff), The Shooting stars Warren Oates as Willet Gashade, a bounty hunter who returns to his run-down mining camp to discover that his friend Leland Drum has been shot and killed by an unknown shooter, and that his brother Coin has run off after allegations of child murder in a nearby town. It’s a lot to take in, but Gashade only has a night to ruminate over it when a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) arrives at the camp. It seems that she’s looking for a guide to a town called Kingsley, and while she offers a lot of money to get there, she’s also not going to take no for an answer. So Gashade and his friend Coley (Will Hutchins) take her up on her offer and set off, with a nagging sense of unease growing in the back of his mind. A sense which turns out to be accurate, as this Woman isn’t really all that interested in Kingsley. She’s on a hunt, and she’s decided that these men are going to help her make the kill.

     The Shooting is listed as one of the first so-called ‘acid westerns’. Not quite a properly defined subgenre, acid westerns could be understood to mean the films that helped to take the genre out of the sterile, cliche Tonto days and firmly submerged it in the then-modern mindframe of the late 1960s, a time of political turbulence, violence both domestic and foreign and journeys both philosophical and chemical. A truly wild west, blessed with beauty and cursed with a cruelness that left the people living there struggling to find purchase and purpose. This new iteration of the western is most commonly associated with the works of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, whose films of moral ambiguity and occasional brutal violence have now become synonymous with the genre. Acid westerns kind of just slide right on in there; sharing in the violence and the spectacle of its ‘spaghetti western’ peers, but with a focus on the metaphysical, the deeper meanings if you will. A lot of the movie audience were on drugs, a lot of the movie makers were on drugs, the time was right.

     That’s what you should come to expect when it comes to The Shooting. While not as surreal as, say, El Topo, much of the screen time of this film is dedicated to characters either riding somewhere on a horse and talking with each other in dialogue filled with innuendos and hidden meanings. Which is a bit trying even if you’re used to these kinds of movies as I am, but if you’re one of those people who are used to seeing Django or Clint Eastwood blowing holes in people I can see it being a little bit of a let down to those craving a bit of action. In fact, a gun is only fired at a living thing about a handful of times in this movie, one of those being a dying horse, so if you’ve got a bit of a bloodlust this straight up isn’t the film for you. Unless that bloodlust is specifically directed at horses, of course, in which case there is a lot of equine abuse here to enjoy.

     The major hurdle for potential viewers however is almost certainly the acting. While Warren Oates is decent enough as perpetual hardass Gashade, and Jack Nicholson can’t really fuck up being ambiguous threatening, Millie Perkins as the Woman perhaps does her job too well. She is a self-righteous, condescending, intentionally cryptic character, and every word she speaks are imbued with those traits in just the way that gets right underneath your skin. It’s the kind of thing that depending on your tolerance level could end up taking you right out of the film, so just be aware of it.

     It’s a beautiful looking film at times, as westerns should be, and if you’re the kind of person that prefers more cerebral stories then you might go for this one. On the other hand I found it to be a bit of a slog in spite of its 90 minute runtime, in large part due to the issues I listed above, and once it’s over there’s not much there that makes you want to go back. It gets the recommendation, but this is definitely another one that’s not top of the queue material. Unless you dress up as a cowboy and drop acid, I guess. That tends to make everything better.