A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, August 8, 2026

The Shooting (Monte Hellman, 1966)

Millie Perkins in The Shooting

Cast: Warren Oates, Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins, Jack Nicholson, Charles Eastman, Guy El Tsosie, Brandon Carroll, B.J. Merholz. Screenplay: Carole Eastman. Cinematography: Gregory Sandor. Art direction: Wally K. Burns. Film editing: Monte Hellman. Music: Richard Markowitz. 

Part of the very odd effect that Monte Hellman's The Shooting makes on the viewer is caused by Hellman's distaste for exposition. He reportedly tossed the first ten pages of Carole Eastman's screenplay and began filming with only elliptical references to the events that set up the film's trek through the Utah desert. Two gold miners, Coley (Will Hutchins) and Willett Gashade (Warren Oates), are approached by a woman (Millie Perkins) who shows up at their camp and hires them to guide her to a place called Kingsley. Along the way, they are joined by a gunslinger called Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson), who has a prior relationship with the woman. Nothing ends well for anybody, including members of the audience, who are left to piece together the backstory after an enigmatic ending. The Shooting is such an unconventional movie that theatrical distributors wouldn't touch it until after it was well received in France (of course), and even then it was released to television before it was ever shown in U.S. theaters. It has been called an "acid Western," meaning it's a harder trip than "stoner Westerns" like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973). The performances are solid, though Nicholson, a few years before his breakthrough into stardom, hasn't yet developed full presence on screen. Gregory Sandor's camera makes the most of the desert setting, and Richard Markowitz's score is appropriately unsettling. 

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