The Shooting (1966)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Adrien Joyce
Stars: Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins, Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates

Index: The First Thirty.

Before this project, I hadn’t seen any of the four movies Jack Nicholson made for and often with Monte Hellman, given that he wasn’t just an actor; he wrote Flight to Fury and Ride in the Whirlwind and he co-produced Back Door to Hell and The Shooting. After seeing the first couple, shot back to back in the Philippines, I can’t say I had much hope for the second couple, shot back to back in the Utah desert.

How wrong I was! These two westerns turn out not only to be good movies but important ones too. They’re arguably the very first acid westerns, which weren’t necessarily all about drugs but about flipping a genre on its head. It has been said that westerns are a path towards freedom and justice, while acid westerns are a path towards death.

It was first used as a term by Pauline Kael in a review of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1971, but Jonathan Rosenbaum later applied it to these earlier films. I’ve long appreciated the alternative list he put together to counter the AFI’s annoyingly safe 100 Years... 100 Movies list, including films that dared to be different and sparked change in film. The Shooting is on that list, because that’s precisely what it did.

Except it didn’t do that immediately, as the poster suggests. It was shot in 1965 and made film festival screens in 1966 but it didn’t get picked up for distribution until 1968 and even then not theatrically. It, along with Ride in the Whirlwind, was sold to television. So, when the poster was put together, Adrien Joyce, which is a pseudonym for Carol Eastman, had written 1970’s Five Easy Pieces and Jack Nicholson was a bona fide star. The poster exploited that.

Back in 1966, neither of those things had yet happened, of course, and it’s misleading. This is as unlike Five Easy Pieces as High Noon and it’s not a Nicholson picture. In fact, while he does play a major part, he doesn’t show up for half the film and even then doesn’t drive it.

Four actors are credited before the title and the top billed is Will Hutchins, best known at the time as the lead in the unusual TV western Sugarfoot. He’s a dim witted miner called Coley Boyard. He has a part to play and good reason to be in the film but he’s the least of the four.

The character that we and Coley both follow as we would a protagonist is Willet Gashade, a tracker and bounty hunter who’s worked the mine before and is returning to it as the movie begins, only to find a fearstruck Coley firing bullets at him. Their partner Leland Drum was killed two days earlier, possibly in revenge for an act he didn’t commit. Willet is as sharp as Coley is dim and he’s played by one of my very favourite seventies actors, Warren Oates.

That act isn’t ever made clear but it was the work of Gashade’s brother, Coigne. He may or may not have trampled someone to death with his horse, accidentally or deliberately and that someone may or may not have been a child.

While we follow Willet throughout, Willet is following a mysteriously unnamed young lady who shows up at their camp looking to hire an escort to Kingsley for a thousand bucks. Willet isn’t remotely convinced by her stories but the money talks so he takes the job. Coley comes along, not least because has a crush on her.

We never do learn her name or what history brings her to this point but she’s the one with the money and she calls the shots. She’s often entitled, often annoying and often suspicious, but the trail leads ever onwards, so far that we realise that it’s only ever about the journey. It doesn’t matter where it begins or ends. It only matters for its own sake. She’s played by Millie Perkins, last seen in Ensign Pulver and soon to be seen again in Ride the Whirlwind, but known widely for her debut role as the title character in 1959’s The Diary of Anne Frank.

When Nicholson shows up halfway, it’s clear that he’s been following them from a distance. He’s a hired gun, appropriately a man in black to represent death, and he’s been working for Millie Perkins’s character all along. He’s tough, callous and sadistic, all qualities that help him as the road gets harder and the water starts to run out. His name is Billy Spear and things are a little less brutal before he shows up.

Nicholson has a blast playing someone this openly dark. He’d had villainous roles before, from the accidental kind in The Cry Baby Killer through the weak kind in The Wild Ride to the kinda sorta by default kind in The Broken Land, but even his weird psychopath role in Flight to Fury didn’t reach the levels of Billy Spear.

One reason that this plays so well is that the back story is kept deliberately vague. That’s a result of Hellman adhering to Eastman’s script closely except for throwing the first ten pages away. “Exposition, by its nature, is artificial,” he said and ditched all of it. Roger Corman, the uncredited producer of this pair of films, had him mention one crucial detail three times so moviegoers weren’t completely blindsided by the ending, but that was it.

And it really is as stripped down a western as they come. A very bad thing happens (or so it seems) and revenge is sought (or so we come to believe). That’s pretty much it, though the few characters are seriously built and the way the film ends adds a whole other level to how it unfolded. Sure, it’s an inexorable journey to death but it’s a fascinating journey too.

There are no drugs in play but the desert is a good equivalent, because dehydration bites hard and there are some trippy scenes out in the middle of nowhere, a.k.a. Kanab, Utah, the small town known as Little Hollywood. At one point, our leads run into a bearded man with a broken leg sitting in the middle of the desert waiting to die. It’s agreeably weird but the key is that he’s no worse off than they are. Even if they get to where they’re going, there’s little guarantee they’re going to get back again.

I liked this movie while watching it, but it’s camping out in my brain because of just how much it does with not a heck of a lot. Much of it is pure cinema. The mysterious lady doesn’t say much, Willet listens far more than he talks and Billy Spear lets his demeanour do much of the talking. Only Coley runs his mouth but he never has anything useful to say, so it ends up amounting to much the same thing.

Instead, we fall into the quest at the heart of the story and so fall into the desert too. There is a scene in a tiny town called Crosstree, but it all starts in a mining camp and spends most of its time in what seems to be remote desert. We don’t see a lot of people and we don’t see a lot of anything else either. We just feel. Deeply.

And westerns were never the same again.