Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Jack Nicholson
Stars: Cameron Mitchell, Millie Perkins and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

The second of Jack Nicholson’s westerns for Monte Hellman, shot back to back in the Utah desert with the first, The Shooting, isn’t quite as stripped down but it’s almost as nihilistic and it’s an excellent companion piece.

Like with The Shooting, the poster is notably misleading as this predates Easy Rider and Jack is not the star of the film. This time out, that’s Cameron Mitchell, as Vern, the leader of three cowboys heading for Waco, with the other two being Wes and Otis, played by Nicholson and Tom Filer respectively.

Unfortunately, they’re in a dangerous area, as they surely guessed when they came across a man hanging from a tree. There’s an outlaw problem in these parts, it seems, as we saw in the opening scene when a bunch of them hold up a stagecoach. It’s pure bad luck that they’re aiming straight for the outlaws’ hideout in the aftermath of that heist.

The outlaws look suitably shady, but they’re welcoming to the newcomers, presumably in a firm attempt to throw off suspicion. Even with Adam dealing with a knife wound, they say he merely fell onto his knife, as if it’s believable. They give the cowboys some food and let them camp outside for the night, all friendly like.

Of course, Vern and his colleagues guess at the truth and they’re very close to leaving in the morning when the posse shows up, neatly surrounding the hideout. Needless to say, they hightail it on out of there during the ensuing gunfight, because they don’t want any part of it but Otis is shot dead in the crossfire.

There’s plenty of good here already.

For one thing, this outlaw gang includes an eyepatched Dean Stanton—yet to add Harry—and a black man, oddly named Indian Joe, in the capable form of Rupert Crosse, who would become the first African American to land a nomination for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar three years later for The Reivers. It’s fair to say that African Americans were all over the west but you wouldn’t ever guess it from watching Hollywood westerns.

For another, this posse is highly capable and the outlaws have absolutely no chance against them. That’s something else that’s refreshing, because posses are typically inept mobs whose prejudices outweigh any hint of justice. Here, this posse knows precisely who held up the stage, killing a guard in the process and they plan their siege of the outlaws’ hideout well.

Their only mistake is to assume, once Blind Dick and Indian Joe are hanged, that there are two more outlaws that got away, namely Vern and Wes. So they go after them, in a manner as carefully planned as their siege, rendering this a sort of quest for injustice. There’s an irony in good guys getting it wrong for once instead of bad guys getting it right.

If there’s any bad, it may be restricted to the shakycam when Gregory Sandor puts a camera on the stagecoach in motion.

Maybe it’s a little longer than it needs to be and maybe it’s a little slower, but it continues to be thoughtful throughout, courtesy of Jack Nicholson’s script. He may have been coming into his own as an actor around this time, the best in Back Door to Hell and very able support in The Shooting, but he was doing strong work off screen too and the times were catching up to his strengths.

Oddly, he isn’t second billed here, even as a clear second character after Mitchell. Vern is a leader, Wes a follower, but they’re a double act even before Otis is shot. It’s Millie Perkins who gets second billing, which was appropriate last time out in The Shooting but isn’t here.

In fact, while she proved to be a powerful, if often annoying, presence in The Shooting, she’s underwhelming here as Abigail, the daughter of a couple of homesteaders. Vern and Wes are increasingly willing to do whatever it takes to escape their pursuers, which ends up meaning that they hold these homesteaders hostage in their own home.

Now, they’re gentle about this, being good guys, and Wes even aches to help Evan in his attempts to remove a stubborn stump, but the circumstances won’t allow it. There’s irony in this too, given that they’re good guys who are mistaken for bad guys by other good guys who turn them into bad guys to survive. That’s not remotely close to the usual western mindset of a path towards justice, even if it does serve as an unusual path to freedom.

Well, kinda sorta. I’m not going to spoil the picture but there’s plenty of the acid western path to death here too and not merely for Otis. I appreciated the ending, because, as hopeful as it may seem, it leaves a lot of questions well and truly unanswered.Is that a good guy who succeeds in escaping injustice or is it a bad guy who’s accepting his fate and starting a new life on the other side of the law? The colleague he leaves behind is still a good guy, given that he deliberately aims to miss the pursuers he’s distracting.

Or, of course, will he be caught anyway, on the next mountain or the one after that? Does the posse give up? Who knows? Write a sequel so we can find out!

It’s easy to see how both of these westerns weren’t what the industry wanted to release in 1965, which is when they were shot. It’s also easy to see, from the benefit of hindsight, that they weren’t far ahead of their time, with the counterculture right around the corner.

Nicholson seemed a little out of place when he made The Broken Land, but he’s absolutely at home in The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, just as he would be in more overt exploitation fare over the next few years, in biker movies and psychedelic flicks and gangster films.

However, as much as I’d praise Nicholson as an actor here, alongside Mitchell, Stanton and others, I think I want to praise him more for a script that focuses carefully on detail without it ever affecting the story. The siege is capably handled by a posse that knows precisely what it’s doing, but it also makes for good action. The wariness of the homesteaders is palpable and for good reason—everything they meet in the west is a threat—but it doesn’t slow any of those scenes. The ending is just where it needs to be, able to read in many ways.

Suddenly I wanted to watch more films that Nicholson made for Monte Hellman, but this was the last of the four. I’m still rocked by the difference in quality between the first two and the second two. Flight into Fear and Back Door to Hell are curiosities. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind are essentials.