Ride in the Whirlwind

Practitioners of minimalism argue that less can sometimes be more.  But, of course, the peril is that less may simply be less.  Monte Hellman's Ride in the Whirlwind, the second of two Westerns shot in 1965 -- the other is The Shooting -- raises the question of whether its stripped-down austerities, its elliptical irresolution and skeletal narrative is interestingly suggestive or, merely, frustratingly incomplete.  Jack Nicholson, who stars in the film, wrote the script which is starkly ingenious.  A group of bandits led by Harry Dean Stanton as the one-eyed "Blind Dick," ambush a stagecoach.  They murder a couple of the security guards and flee with their loot to a cabin in a remote desert canyon.  Three cowhands, apparently lost on their way to Waco, ride up the canyon, encounter the bandits, and spend the night enjoying Blind Dick's hospitality.  The cowboys, one of whom is played by Nicholson, know that the men in the cabin are outlaws; this makes them a bit nervous, but they plan to be on their way to Waco at dawn the next morning.  Unfortunately, a large posse of vigilantes surrounds the cabin in the darkness and attacks the men sheltered there at dawn -- "it's going to be a long day," Harry Dean Stanton (here credited as "Dean Stanton") says wearily shouldering his rifle as the vigilantes blast away at the shack.  One of the three cowpokes is killed in the attack.  The other two men know that they will be lynched if they surrender to the posse --it's a classic case of guilt by association -- and so they vamoose into the hills.  The surviving outlaws are burned out of the cabin and summarily hanged.  Then, the posse turns its attention to hunting down the hapless cowboys.  Nicholson is with a cowboy played by the veteran Western actor, Cameron Mitchell (I remember first seeing him on the TV show High Chaparral).  The two cowboys hide-out at a settler's cabin.  Ultimately, the posse arrives and Nicholson, in making his escape, guns down the farmer who has sheltered them -- the sodbuster shoots at him when Nicholson and his buddy steal the man's horses to make a getaway and Nicholson returning fire kills him.  Badly wounded, Mitchell delays the posse and, in the last frame, Nicholson's hunted cowboy rides down a canyon, vanishing in the twilight as the last rays of the sun ignite into gold the dust swirling around his stolen pony.  The ending comes so abruptly as to be breathtaking and, of course, the viewer's first response will be:  Is that all?  Whether the unresolved conclusion to the film is a satisfyingly ambiguous ending or simply a lazy example of filmmakers who didn't know how to bring the movie to a close is a question that each viewer will have to answer for him- or herself.   Although the film is frequently beautiful in a bleak sort of way, I tend toward the response that the moviemakers didn't know how to end the movie and so I am suspicious of the Antonioni-style ambiguity of Ride in the Whirlwind's ending.  (Jack Nicholson would later, more or less, disappear again at the end of  Antonioni's The Passenger, a film that seems a gloss on Ride in the Whirlwind.)  The reason that I opt for the view that the film is unfinished in a frustrating sort of way is internal to the movie itself.  Certain aspects of the movie seem to me to be poorly imagined, not sufficiently thought-out -- ellipses, in my view, conceal lapses in the narrative.  Why do the outlaws locate their cabin in a box-canyon from which escape through the "back door," as it were, is an impossibility.  The famous "robber's roosts" of the West were always located in a way to allow the bad guys an egress if attacked from one of the hideouts approaches.  Second, Nicholson and Cameron spend a lot of time scrambling up the face of the box canyon when they find that the gorge has no outlet.  This is an important plot element -- in Hellman's Westerns, landscape is destiny and, on the commentary track, Hellman notes that he spent a lot of time scouting Utah to find the box canyon featured in this film.  But the box canyon is not used in any meaningful way.  We see the protagonists clambering up its steep walls and they note that it will be impossible for them to escape.  But, then, a few shots later, they seem to be in an entirely different landscape -- how did they get out of the canyon?  Unlike Anthony Mann's great Westerns, films that Hellman's movies superficially resemble, the geometry of terrain and combatants is not convincingly rendered.  Although the dialogue is well-scripted and Nicholson's performance is very charming, I don't think the film is ultimately convincing.  The notion of innocents caught up in circumstances and, indeed, becoming criminal in their very effort to avoid being implicated in someone else's crime is a staple of film noir -- in many ways, film noir aspects of ill-fate and cruel destiny predominate in this movie.  Another example of irresolution that, perhaps, can be read as artistic ambiguity is the expression on Millie Perkins' face when her domineering father is shot down -- is she secretly pleased? Mournful?  Comtemplative.  Perkins seems miscast in both of Hellman's Westerns and the fact that we can't read her expression when her father is killed in Ride in the Whirlwind is either genius or simply poor acting -- I'm inclined toward the latter option.