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.