The Shooting, perhaps the most famous Western hardly anybody ever saw, takes deadpan survey of the fallout from a casual atrocity, or perhaps only a ludicrous accident, in a nameless town. We never see the atrocity/accident, or even the town. Word simply reaches a prospector's camp, a wood-and-canvas pimple on the blankness of the wasteland, that someone "rode down a man and a little person... maybe a child." Was the someone Willett Gashade's brother Coin, who has gone missing? Was it Leland Drum, Coin's companion, who gets shot from ambush at his fireside--perhaps by an unknown avenger, perhaps by Coin? The death of Drum explains the film's title, but there's a long list of things we never know in The Shooting, and most (all?) of the characters in the movie never know them either. Still, the small, relentlessly enigmatic cast of characters gets into motion and keeps moving--chasing something, running from something, headed for somewhere that may turn out to be nowhere, or deep inside themselves.
Monte Hellman made The Shooting (and a second movie, Ride in the Whirlwind) during one brief trip into the desert, anonymously financed by Roger Corman, in the summer of 1966. His material was a script by Adrien Joyce (later of Five Easy Pieces fame), the patient camera of Gregory Sandor, and the faces, voices, and brazenly modern presences of Warren Oates (Gashade), Jack Nicholson (a white-collar killer), and Millie Perkins (a pinched Medusa, freckled with trail dirt, bitchy light years from Anne Frank). Over the intervening decades the Beckettian movie has been sporadically available only on late-night TV or via scrappy 16-millimeter prints at film societies. That now triumphantly changes with this crisp, color-saturated DVD release, whose modest letterboxing eloquently enhances the unsettling power of Hellman's compositions and eerie long takes. --Richard T. Jameson
2.
Monte Hellman reinvents the Western genre with THE SHOOTING, a cryptic tale of revenge that has become an underground masterpiece of existentialism. The story follows Willett Gashade (Warren Oates), an ex-bounty hunter who returns home searching for his brother, only to discover that he has disappeared. He is met by Coley (Will Hutchins), a frazzled cowboy who is recovering from having witnessed the murder of his best friend. When a beautiful but tempestuous mystery woman (Millie Perkins) arrives, Gashade reluctantly agrees to escort her through the Utah desert. Along the way, Gashade begins to suspect that she is trailing someone, which is confirmed after Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson), a ruthless bounty hunter, joins the party. Unsure of their target, Gashade and Coley continue to inch forward, leery of Billy Spear’s menacing presence. When Gashade finally discovers the hunted victim, he is left stunned and bewildered. Hellman's subversive, enigmatic tale, shot concurrently with RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND, assures the director a place in Western history. Nicholson and Oates, who appear in almost all of Hellman’s early films, slip into their roles with the ease and smoothness that has turned them into acting legends, giving cinephiles yet another reason to call THE SHOOTING an unadulterated classic.
3.
Catch this tale of revenge and mystery set in the Wild West and get set for a whirlwind ride! Willett Gashade is a former bounty hunter who decides to trade in his crime-fighting ways to tend to his family's mining business.
He returns home to find his brother missing and ends up on an adventure through the Utah desert with a beautiful mystery woman and a ruthless gunfighter (Jack Nicholson) who may or may not be responsible for his brother's disappearance and the murder of one of his old friends!
4.
Two cowboys (Jack Nicholson, Warren Oates) are caught up in the vengeful plans of a young woman in director Monte Hellman's cult western, filmed simultaneously with "Ride in the Whirlwind" in 1965.
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