Former bounty hunter Willet Gashade (Warren Oates) returns to his small mining camp to find his friend Coley (Will Hutchins) in a state of distress. Coley tells him that their partner, Leland Drum had been shot to death two days before by a mystery killer. Before the shooting, Wills brother Coin had ridden off in a panic. Coley surmises that it may have been a retaliatory killing for the horse-trampling death of a little person, maybe a child in a nearby town. While the two men are attempting to quell their growing sense of paranoia, they hear a gunshot, which they find was fired by a young woman (Millie Perkins) shooting her horse, which had gone lame, but which upon examination, Will declares was perfectly healthy. The woman, who never reveals her name, offers to pay Will and Coley to help track down a man, reasons why not fully explained, and they take her up on the offer. On the ride, the woman is continuously rude and hostile, and matters become more complicated with the arrival of Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson), a gunslinger also hired by the woman, who had been secretly following the travelers. Billy appears no friendlier than the woman, contemptuous of Coley, and coldly threatening his and Wills lives. As the group rides through the hot desert, the horses die, as does Coley when he attempts to confront Billy, leading up to a final moment that shocks Will in its suddeness and his realization of what his participation in this trek has led to. Shot in six weeks by director Monte Hellman back-to-back with another film, Ride The Whirlwind, on a meager budget of $75,000, the screenplay was filmed as written, with no rewrites, and its bareboned, mysterious quality raises this apparently simple story into a completely different realm. Oates and Hutchins, by then old vets at Westerns, are dependably right for the material. Perkins (a long way from her starring role in 1959s The Diary of Anne Frank) is bone-chillingly cold, even in the scenes where she comes close to baring her emotions (and she would be equally adept at emotional coldness in 1986s Slam Dance). Nicholson, not yet the big star, is, well, Jack Nicholson, playing the creepy heavy (he also co-produced the film with Hellman, which Hellman later claimed to be a big mistake, as Nicholson was a wee bit persnickety in how things were done). One of the best low-budget Westerns of the 1960s bar none. The Shooting. A-. (1966).
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 08:47:37 +0000
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