The Shooting

Monte Hellman directed The Shooting, a minimalist western shot in remote Utah locations in 1964.  Hellman cut his teeth directing Beckett's End Game in Santa Monica and the film certainly shows an affinity with the Irish writer's work.  Most specifically, the film resembles Beckett's novel Molloy:  The Shooting is the chronicle of a nightmarish trek to nowhere, a journey across increasingly desolate landscapes, that begins on horseback and ends with isolated figures staggering across a wasteland on foot or scrambling up ramparts of dirt on their hands and knees.  Hellman had made a couple of exploitation pictures for Roger Corman starring Jack Nicholson. (Although in this film, the great Warren Oates is the major star and moral anchor to the story.)
Corman assigned Hellman two micro-budget Westerns, each to feature Nicholson.  When the two films, shot more or less simultaneously, were complete, Nicholson took them to Cannes and sold them to an admiring French distributor.  The movies were packaged as made-for-TV productions in the US and never really released theatrically in this country.  The Shooting and its companion, Ride the Whirlwind (with a script by Nicholson) were not shown in the US until 1969, although they were a success d'estime in Paris.  "The Shooting" features a perversely elliptical narrative -- some sort of killing (involving a man and "a little person") has happened in a mining camp; we don't see this event, but merely hear about it. A cowboy related to the killer involved in the shooting intentionally leaves a trail so that he can be tracked to a mining stake where the other men involved in the affray are holed-up. (One of them is shot by a sniper as shown in a flashback.) A mysterious woman appears and hires the two men to take her somewhere.  The trio cross increasingly barren territory and, halfway through the film, Jack Nicholson, playing a murderous gunfighter named Billy Spear, joins them.  It becomes increasingly evident that that woman is seeking revenge for the killings in the mining camp and that the real purpose for the trek is to hunt down the surviving murderer.  One by one the horses die.  Sun and heat begin to kill the travelers.  In the end, a mysterious figure is glimpsed at great distance, scrambling up a butte in a completely desolate badlands.  A chase ensues and there is another shooting, filmed in slow-motion and very confusing.  It isn't clear who is shot or why.  The film ends with an image of Nicholson's gunfighter, his pistol hand completely crushed, staggering across the desert to his inevitable death.  A curious aspect of the film is that the peculiar and disorienting climax is carefully foreshadowed by the movie's dialogue -- but, for some reason, you don't hear the necessary clues and so the film's ending seems either to make no sense or to be some kind of metaphysical riddle such as those presented in the movies of Antonioni.  The movie begins with a nervous-looking horse shot from a strange angle -- the animal is justifiably alarmed since, at least, four horses die in the course of the trek, leaving the protagonists on-foot in some of the most hostile terrain ever shown in a film.  (The movie was filmed in a stony desert, something like a huge completely arid gravel pit, near Kanab, Utah -- the area where the movie was made no longer exists:  Lake Powell has now inundated the clay and sand arroyos featured in the film.)  The movie has mediocre acting -- the performers are like actors in a TV western, something like Gunsmoke or Rawhide -- and the first third of the film is ugly and very slow-paced.  There are some interesting images -- a man fleeing from a sniper while carrying a sack of white flour, and two men riding across a desolate wilderness on one horse.  The film feels like it has very little dialogue, although, in fact, there is a lot of talk, all of it stilted, weirdly poetic, and unnatural.  The movie is short (only about 85 minutes) but tedious, mannered, and affected.  Nonetheless, the film's last half hour is very effective.  A savage fight between two men so exhausted that they can't stand up highlights the absurdity of the quest and the enigmatic woman's final revenge is brilliantly staged -- tiny figures dashing about in a vast, inhuman landscape.