A young Jack Nicholson starred in this hidden gem of Western cinema

Summary

  • Jack Nicholson, at the beginning of his career, played a series of very interesting roles in different genres between the 50s and 60s.
  • The shooting
    It was widely considered an experimental film compared to most Westerns of the time, which were full of big set pieces and big stunts.
  • The film was not well received, but remains a hidden classic that survives in academic archives and is screened in film schools.



Often, when fans think of Jack Nicholson, the first things they associate with him are his big, toothy grin, his sly, gravelly voice, and the infuriating eyebrows behind his indoor sunglasses. Yet, early in his career, in the 1950s and 1960s, he had a solid roster of character roles in Westerns and other derivative genres that used similar plot devices. Jack Nicholson was also involved in the production of some of these films, especially when they were more independent projects. The shooting It is one of those projects that is often forgotten in Hollywood but remembered by film buffs and academics. 1966 The shooting It included Hollywood big names like Billie Perkins, Warren Oates, Will Hutchins and Jack Nicholson, who were thriving in their respective careers, especially with Westerns.


Being a very independent production, most of it The shooting's production budget surrounded the hiring of these top-notch western actors to convey the quality of this film's promise to distributors. Unfortunately for director Monte Hellman, this would not have been enough when compared to his very European style of shooting, editing and storytelling. However, The shooting It was shot consecutively to another western that Hellman would make with Jack Nicholson as screenwriter, Ride in the vortex which was received somewhat better in the long run. This relationship between Hellman and Nicholson would create a strong desire in the actor to ensure that his passion projects were seen on the big screen in one way or another, and this led to The shooting becoming a hidden gem in European arthouse cinema circles.


Jack Nicholson was a man of many kinds


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  • Millie Perkins, who plays Donna, was Monte Hellman's neighbor. The shooting It was his fifth film.
  • The shooting It was shot on a budget of $70,000, most of which was spent on the actors and the cowhands, who were the only unionized people on the production.
  • Although it was never released in the United States, Jack Nicholson's legal battle to gain distribution was successful in Paris, where the film ran for a year and became an arthouse favorite.


Although his later career showed a wealth of roles in comedies and dramas, Jack Nicholson's early career was much more diverse and included many westerns, gangster and biker films, television sitcoms, horror films, and political dramas, to name a few. Jack Nicholson could play anything from a gun-toting mercenary to a pleasure-seeking hippie, and his range was utilized throughout Hollywood and was recognized by more experimental directors such as Monte Hellman. Monte Hellman's unconventional auteur filmmaking style intrigued the creative and ambitious filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s to break convention in established genres such as Hollywood's established spaghetti westerns.

Although she still dabbled in genre, Hellman's slower, quieter approach to characterization and drama made the films like The shooting AND Travel in the vortex not so well received by the usual audiences of the genre, but abroad in Europe, these films would gain great popularity as pioneering works of art that brought a rebellious flavor to the overproduced Westerns of the past. With such a long tradition of conventional film and television behind him, Jack Nicholson was keen to work on projects that departed from Hollywood norms and his creative working relationship with Hellman is an example of his ambition to champion new cinematic methods of storytelling.


The shots are more authorial than western

Jack Nicholson in The Shooting Knocked Out, auteur western film

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Movie

The shooting

Director

Mount Hellman

IMDb Rating

6.5


One important reason why The shooting is a film so forgotten in the great lexicon of Hollywood westerns, it is because of its pacing, its subcontext and its minimalism. Of course, westerns were already known as slow-burning action dramas with vast landscapes that lend quiet and mysticism to the plot. However, The shooting took these conventions to the next level, placing audiences in a position not only to be entertained, but also to be immersed and involved in the isolating situations with the characters on screen. The shootingThe scenes explored the silent tension of being indebted to another person, and how that changes when survival becomes dire, juxtaposed with being a prisoner of the barren landscape. Although the film is minimal in its score and rooted in its performances, The shooting It's for the old Hollywood westerns what No Country for Old Men It's for westerns from the 90s-2010s.


Unfortunately for director Monte Hellman, his love for the established conventions of the Western genre was still strong, and The shooting would not find distribution in the United States. That said, Jack Nicholson was passionate enough about the film to fight legally to find and sell its distribution rights elsewhere, and the vanguard of fashion and art in the West responded, France. In the European arthouse scene, The shooting would be shown in Paris for a whole year, which was a great victory for the film's reputation and survival. Despite its mixed popularity, it won the love of critics in Europe, while Hollywood continued with its usual array of gunfighter adventures.

His legacy lives on as a lesson

The wide shot of the mercenaries and the woman

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  • The shooting It received critical acclaim during its run at the Montreal and Cannes film festivals.
  • Director Monte Hellman is said to have spent a year meticulously editing the film.
  • Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates clashed several times on the set due to creative differences, which also caused the director great frustration.

Due to its popularity abroad, The shooting has found its place among the most critically academic cloisters of the film world. Many film schools have The shooting in their archives and is often mentioned in school curricula when teaching literary genres and how to break their conventions to create new stories. The shooting is a bare bones plot about an unnamed woman who enlists two men to help her carry out a plan for revenge. Eventually, Billy Spear, played by Jack Nicholson, joins the trio, who also appear to have been hired by her. Billy is antagonistic to the other two men, and tensions between them mount during their time in the desert as they face moral and logistical dilemmas. Once they run out of water and horses, things come to a head and everyone except The Woman turns against Billy.


Her hunt for someone ends with a mutual gunfight between The Woman and her target. Of the hired men, only Billy and Willet are left alive. Willet realizes that the target of the woman's revenge is his doppelganger brother. With its highly abstract plot and its moments of agony, as they cross the desert among distrustful allies, The shooting created an incredibly unique film that had not been tested in the Western genre. Made on a shoestring budget of just $70,000 and with a crew of mostly non-union workers, the film remains a milestone in Hollywood history, when filmmakers experimented and tried to construct unconventional stories, and hired well-known actors to play these untold stories.

Stars of the Western Genre

Western

Western stories, often set in the American West in the mid-1800s, are usually inspired by folk tales of the region. These tales typically feature cowboys, outlaws, and frontier adventures.


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