The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Ride in the Whirlwind (1966), directed by Monte Hellman

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "On the Run", by Blackfoot

       In last year’s Marathon, I wrote a little something on a little known western film called The Shooting, directed by Two Lane Blacktop’s Monte Hellman and starring Warren Oates as well as a young Jack Nicholson. What I probably mentioned then and am reiterating now is that the filming process was something of a double feature, as Hellman decided to get the most bang for his buck and make a second movie while he was on location. That film would eventually become known as Ride in the Whirlwind, despite featuring no whirlwinds (spoilers), and since I’ve already talked about The Shooting, I might as well cover the other side of the coin this time around. 

       Three men, Otis (Tom Filer), Verne (Cameron Mitchell) and Wes (Jack Nicholson) are on their way to Waco when they agree to share a meal and some company with some other men in an old wooden shack. The next day, as they’re getting ready to leave, they’re treated to a rude surprise: Those men that they shared corn whiskey with are bandits hiding out after a simple stagecoach robbery ended with a man dead, and the noose-hungry band of vigilantes that have arrived to mete out some bloody vengeance are firm believers of guilt by association, or in this case guilt by close proximity. The Waco try to make a run for it, with mixed success, as the vigilantes are in hot pursuit. The concepts of law and order are alien things in this wild (wild) west, justice being something the strong impose upon the weak. In this world, what is the recourse for the innocent man who has been denounced as guilty? To what lengths will a man go to ensure his freedom? You’ll have to watch to find out.

       That Ride in the Whirlwind is a counterpart to The Shooting is obvious, even without the knowledge of their shared origin. Both films are of the western genre, both films star MIllie Perkins as well as a young, pre-Easy Rider Jack Nicholson (he also wrote Whirlwind by the by) and both films are built around a pursuit of someone, The Shooting based on the perspective of the hunters and Whirlwind the hunted, with the subtext centered around the act of vigilantism, murder, and the ethical gray areas that these actions are said to inhabit. Where The Shooting takes it in a more ‘artsy’ direction, with an ending taken straight from the Rod Serling playbook, Ride in the Whirlwind feels more in-line with how the genre shifted with the advent of spaghetti westerns. I don’t know if that was intentional on Hellman’s part or simply the fact that the larger cast keeps things from feeling too claustrophobic. The Gunsmoke to Shooting’s Seventh Seal, if you will.

       If I had to choose between the two, I’d have to go with Ride in the Whirlwind. The Shooting is fine, and as the pioneer of the totally-not-real acid western subgenre has the bigger legacy, but Whirlwind is the more well-rounded film. There’s a nice balance of action and suspense, and there’s an easy to follow arc in the friendship between our two main characters Wes and Verne (Cameron Mitchell. I don’t think it’s enough to blow anybody away, I mean it’s like the western is an unproven concept in cinema, but then it wasn’t meant to be. It was a budget movie that was popped out because they had the time and inclination, and the main reason people would even bother to seek it out is because a young Jack Nicholson is in the credits. It’s still a competently made movie however, and if the only reason people would remember it is because Nicholson is in the credits, it’s much better to be a Ride in the Whirlwind then, say, The Terror.

       Ride in the Whirlwind gets the recommendation. While it doesn’t have the gimmicks that I usually use to justify putting non-horror, non-sci-fi in the Marathon, it’s also better than several movies I’ve inducted that did fit the criteria. Slip it into a double feature with The Shooting as it was meant to be, or if you’re feeling especially like a 60 year old man, just watch it straight. Not a bad way to spend a night.

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

The Trailer
and
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.

Easy Rider (1969), directed by Dennis Hopper

One week later. I've almost used up all my prewritten entries, so daily entries are an unlikely possibility. Doesn't seem to matter that much though.

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "The Pusher", by Steppenwolf

     The paragraph I had originally wrote to begin this entry was a lot more impassioned than I had anticipated. In that paragraph I decried the tendency in our society to reduce pieces of our culture, or counterculture in this case, into stereotypes and pastiche in order to more easily consume and dispose of it. We are so happy to listen to ‘classic’ rock and wear tye-dye shirts, but we dismiss their dreams and ideas as ‘hippie ramblings’. True, I conceded, that their goals were a bit lofty, and maybe the majority of what we call hippies were simply going with the, but couldn’t we at least acknowledge them. Do we have to so fervently dismiss every idea that we deem as strange? We may be set in our ways, and though it may feel at times that we are irrevocably bound by them, that doesn’t mean we are. It just takes a bit of effort.

     That’s what I first wrote as the opener for this entry, before I decided to erase it. Try as I might to reach a higher standard for myself, I’ve been guilty of the same consumerist behaviour I had attacked other people for. Maybe it doesn’t really matter, since so few people are going to read this anyway. Maybe all the things I’ve said up to this point don’t make any fucking sense to anyone but me. I don’t know.

     Those are the thoughts running through my mind after watching Easy Rider, that I’m viewing a culture quite similar yet foreign to my own. The film tells the story of two L.A. bikers, the introverted Captain America (Peter Fonda and the extroverted Billy (Dennis Hopper), as they travel to the East Coast in the hopes of retiring after a particularly lucrative drug deal. After being jailed for ‘parading without a permit’, they meet up with a quite drunk George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), who joins them in their mission of going to Mardi Gras, home to some of the finest whores around. A great idea, but how well can you do when everyone you meet hates your fucking guts?

     The shortest summary I’ve written so far right there. Soak it in.

     Freedom, that’s what this movie is about. The freedom to dress how you like to dress, to do what you like to do, and live how you want to live. Easy Rider makes it a point to to state that those who preach the virtues of freedom the most are the most fearful of it, and I can’t say that’s an inaccurate way of looking at it. If our heroes Captain America and Billy aren’t causing others to suffer, does it really matter if they like to smoke marijuana and ride motorcycles? We are shown very clearly that no, it doesn’t really matter at all, except to the uneducated and the authoritarian (the film takes place entirely within the South, which I doubt was unintentional). Yes, freedom is the key word here, whether you’re living in a commune in the desert or in the heart of the city. I’d keep my eyes out for the mime troupe though, if I were you.

     You can’t have a motorcycle in a movie without having someone ride it, and a significant portion of Easy Rider is dedicated to Captain America and Billy driving through the American countryside. Some truly amazing countryside, if I do say so myself. My favorite traveling scenes in the movie have to be near the beginning of the movie when they’re going through the Southwest, you take in these absolutely gorgeous red hills and clear open skies that stretch out as far as the eye can see and it makes you happy to know that this beautiful imagery is real, it has form and substance away from the painted backdrops of the Hollywood backlot. I was so intrigued by the locations used by Easy Rider that for a while I wished to visit a place like Texas or New Mexico, just to get a glimpse of that near-mythical landscape. It’s the first time I’ve genuinely wanted to go to the Southwest of my own volition, which speaks of the power of this film to provoke such a bizarre reaction.

     Coming into this film, I expected guys driving around on motorcycles, and I expected rock ‘n’ roll music. Easy Rider has motorcycles and rock music, certainly, but the overall tone of the soundtrack is much more mellow and less ‘classic rock’ than I had anticipated. Of course you have Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”, the song so intricately connected with this movie that Dennis Hopper abruptly cuts it off before it’s even finished. Also making an appearance is the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Byrds, Roger McGuinn (former member of the Byrds), with some unknown-but-appreciated groups like the Holy Modal Rounders rounding out the cast. As someone who bathed their minds in 60’s rock music for several years I might be a little biased in saying this is a great soundtrack, but it does exactly what I want a soundtrack to do: Helping to set the tone for the scenes being presented, making average scenes more appealing, and transporting me into the world of the film. There’s much more a soundtrack than just taking cool songs and throwing them without thought into the gumbo that is the movie. In that metaphor, the film soundtrack is represented by the shrimp. Cinematography is the dirty rice.

     There’s plenty of times in my life that I’ve hungered for escape, to toss away responsibilities and to live a life of quiet comfort. That’s the appeal of Easy Rider really, that deep down we wish we could be Captain America and Billy; men who live by nobody’s rules but their own. Hell, I guess that’s what everything’s about, isn’t it? Movies, music, television, video games, art, it’s all about getting the fuck out of our own lives without actually doing it.

     The point is that I liked the movie, everything else I’ve written is tacked on bullshit.

Result: Recommended