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In the 1960s and 1970s, producer Roger Corman attracted talented young filmmakers with a simple promise: If they were willing to make commercial pictures, and could stay within his minuscule budgets, they’d gain hands-on experience and might even be able to experiment a little. Few directors took as much advantage of the Corman system as Monte Hellman did in the spring of 1965, when Corman gave Hellman and actor Jack Nicholson $150,000 to go out into the Utah desert and make two Westerns back-to-back. Hellman emerged from the wilderness with The Shooting and Ride In The Whirlwind, a couple of spare, elliptical chase pictures that arrived at the start of what would become a whole wave of existential art-Westerns. The films played at Cannes, won raves from the New Wave crowd, and were both sizable hits in France—though in the U.S., they were sold into a package of films for television, and never had a theatrical release.

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The Shooting’s script is credited to “Adrien Joyce,” a pseudonym for Carole Eastman, a former actress who a few years later went on to co-write the Oscar-nominated script for Five Easy Pieces with director Bob Rafelson. Like Five Easy PiecesThe Shooting has a mysterious quality, as though key information about the characters and the situation is missing. Some of that is due to Hellman, who says he ditched the first 10 pages of Eastman’s script because he generally prefers to cut to the chase, so to speak. But The Shooting as a whole is so sketchy that it almost demands to be read as allegory, or myth. It’s the archetypal tale of “The Woman” and “The Killer” leading “The Haunted Man” deep into the desolate American frontier, far from civilization.

“The Shooting keeps making the Western genre feel new, as though it had no conventions.”

“An ambiguously motivated and almost surreal revenge film so open to interpretation it could be the ‘2001’ of Westerns.”

“What is most intriguing about “The Shooting” is the constant sense of undefined menace throughout.”