RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND - #735

Made immediately after The Shooting in 1966 [review], Monte Hellman’s second western, Ride in the Whirlwind, lacks the existential poetry of his previous effort, but it searches for the same dread. This time around, the movie not only stars Jack Nicholson, but he also wrote the script.

For Ride in the Whirlwind, the star adopts the role of Wes, a world-weary cowboy traveling cross-country with two of his friends. Their journey starts with a predictive portent: a man has been hanged along their trail. Yet, the trio ignores the warnings, as well as all the other suspicious signs, when they come upon a cabin that’s been staked out by a gang of five gunslingers. They are hospitable to the strangers, most especially their one-eyed leader Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton), who offers them food and shelter, but underneath all the politeness is an obvious eagerness for the visitors to move along. They don’t. Not even when introduced to a convalescing man who is said to have fallen on his knife. You can’t get more obvious than that.

Things go from questionable to terrible the next morning when a posse chasing Dick’s gang arrives. They open fire on the cabin from the hills, and Wes and company are caught in between, having spent the night sleeping with the horses. It’s an ingenious set-up. The innocent riders are trapped, susceptible to bullets from either side, and with no way to distinguish themselves from the bad guys. Blocked from any easy escape, they are forced to head into difficult mountain terrain. One of their number (Tom Filer) is shot before he even makes it to his horse. Wes and Vern (Cameron Mitchell) have no choice but to flee on foot. Can they survive long enough to get beyond the violence and find horses to carry them to safety?

Ride in the Whirlwind is a tense 80 minutes. Even before the gunplay begins, there is palpable nervousness surrounding everything. Something bad will happen, it’s just a question of where it will come from, who will kick it off. The enclosed desert landscapes don’t provide much relief, with the horizon blocked off and a heavy wind consistently pushing against everyone and everything. Most film crews would shut down in such conditions, but Hellman makes the most of it. There is a punishing inevitability at work, Wes and Vern can only get so far.

The final third of the film is set on a small farm, run by an elderly farmer (George Mitchell) who is as tough as his life is hard. He lives alone with his wife (Katherine Squire) and his daughter, Abigail (Millie Perkins, returning from The Shooting). Vern and Wes take them hostage, with plans to steal their horses come nightfall. The presence of the young woman adds another layer of tension to the movie. The famer is afraid the men will harm her, and she seems intrigued by them herself. It’s perhaps the best example of Hellman’s technique of withheld release. Just as we waited for Dick and the outlaws to reveal their true nature back at the first cabin, we wonder here how this fearful anticipation will pay off, if our “heroes” will take further advantage.

Because at this point in Ride in the Whirlwind, we are unsure of how much we should continue to lend our sympathies to Wes and Vern. Though we believe them to have been wronged, we don’t know them all that well when the attack happens. This means we aren’t clear of how good they really are, of how close the line has been when they cross it. They continue to insist they aren’t criminals even as they eat the family’s food and rationalize they are justified in stealing their only horses. Nicholson’s script doesn’t make it any easier by holding back info on both Dick’s gang and the men chasing them--referred to throughout as vigilantes. This means the “good guys” aren’t the law, they are some other form of justice. If they are justice at all.

As a viewer, this puts us in the position of wondering what we would do in a similar situation. Would we surrender and hope the “law” buys our story, or do we resort to whatever it takes to survive, effectively becoming exactly what our persecutors believe us to be? It’s a moral quandary that retains its relevance. Ride in the Whirlwind’s allegory is illustrative of all manner of prejudice, and can be applied to class, race, or what have you.

Hellman doesn’t leave his audience with many answers. There are no winners in Ride in the Whirlwind. And if there is any fault in the film, it’s that maybe there should be. It doesn’t feel like enough pays off to give the movie’s end much impact. Unless that’s the point, to not feel a sense of triumph or success, just measured relief.

THE SHOOTING - #734

Everything is mysterious about Monte Hellman’s 1966 western The Shooting.

Gashade, played by everyman tough guy Warren Oates (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia [review]), is a former bounty hunter looking to make an honest living. He returns to his mining camp to find his brother gone and his friend Leland (B.J. Merholz) dead. The only remaining miner, the simpleminded Coley (Will Hutchins), explains that the two other men went into town, only to come back in a hurry. An incident there left someone dead, perhaps a child, and Gashade’s brother accused of the murder. The brother left again, but the next day someone shot Leland. There’s no clue as to whom.

There is also no explanation for who has been following Gashade--he felt a presence on the trail--or whether it’s the woman who appears in the camp next. She never gives her name, but she’s played by Millie Perkins, who many will recognize for having played Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank. The woman wants to hire Gashade to take her to the next town, but once on the road, it’s clear she has other intentions. She tries to lead the trio off the route to follow the trail of a horseman--or perhaps horsemen, the tracks keep changing--ahead of them. Oh, and she has her own shadow, another man following behind.

He turns out to be a mean gunslinger named Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson, who also produced the picture). Billy’s been keeping an eye on things, and like so much else, it’s never fully explained why. What is his relation to the woman? He claims he is being paid, but Gashade senses something more.

What transpires is a long trek across the desert, as the woman’s bullheadedness and Billy’s misplaced self-confidence lead them all into dangerous territory. Food is in short supply, water is dwindling, and horses are dying. Gashade tries to keep them on pace, and then tries to keep the peace, but there is only so much he can do. He is forced to work with what is immediately apparent, and the prospects become more dire the longer the sun shines.

The Shooting is a minimalist western. Hellman uses the expansive desert and the ambiguous script--written by Adrien Joyce, a.k.a. Carole Eastman, the writer of Five Easy Pieces [review]--to create a nigh-surreal landscape where the lack of reference points leaves his characters exposed. The absence of explanation throughout The Shooting not only keeps you guessing as to what is happening, but also on what exactly Joyce and Hellman mean. Is this a feminist revenge picture, and we are meant to root for the woman to catch up to her quarry? Is it a treatise on violence, rendering the standard shoot-’em-up as a Beckett-like trek through emptiness? Is Oates the last of a dying breed, a good man in a bad world?

It’s kind of all of these things and none of them. Though uncredited, Roger Corman was the executive producer of The Shooting, and it would be easy to see it this western as simply what happens when a couple of young filmmakers take advantage of his indie studio system and spend three weeks playing around with horses and pistols. On that front, The Shooting works rather well. The narrative never pauses long enough to allow for boredom, and the performances are uniformly solid. Hutchins in particular is effective, playing Coley so he is both infuriating and empathetic. You want to throttle him for his dumb innocence, but can’t help but feel for him when his good nature gets taken advantage of. By contrast, Oates is a rock, always looking for the right move, never giving up an inch of intellectual superiority even when forced to go against his own self-interests. There is a classic morality play weaving through here, noirish in construction: the righteous man caught up in the machinations of a femme fatale and her sadistic boyfriend.

In those terms, The Shooting comes to a grand existential conclusion. The consequences suffered aren’t just those of the murder that kicked the whole thing off, but of the frontier lifestyle in general. Gashade is dogged by his past greed, and what lies ahead is directly related to those sins. There’s a cliché that I could attach to this that would give it all way, but like Gashade, you best just get to where it’s all going and find out for yourself.

DEATH RACE 2000 - FILMSTRUCK/CRITERION CHANNEL

Hey, what gives, Paul Bartel? The year 2000 you show in your movie Death Race 2000 is nothing like the turn of the century I lived through.

Or maybe it’s a little like it. Reality television competitions, a worship of celebrity--these things were very much in vogue. And we were just a year away from the tyrannical reign of The Fast and theFurious. So, Bartel’s broad satire about a cross-country race where trumped-up celebs mow down unsuspecting pedestrians maybe wasn’t that far off the mark.

Death Race 2000 stars David Carradine, fresh off of TV’s Kung-Fu, as Frankenstein, the leather-clad, mysterious, dark hero of the government-sanctioned race. Purported to be sporting robotic limbs after losing arms and legs from crashes in years previous--and covering the scars of the same--he is the rebellious antihero inspiring imitators and groupies. His main competition is Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (pronounced like “Turbo”), a throwback East Coast gangster-type, played by a young Sylvester Stallone. They are two of five racers, with the other major players being the lusty cowgirl Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov, also in Bartel’s Eating Raoul [review]) and the Nazi temptress Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins). Each driver has a tricked-out car and a navigator riding alongside them. That the co-pilots are all members of the opposite sex means these companions will do more than navigate.

A B-movie from Roger Corman’s infamous low-budget studio, it was prerequisite that Death Race 2000 would have plenty of sex and violence--though the latter is of the cartoonish, “red paint” variety. Yet, like most enduring exploitation pictures, there is more going on around the race than the simplified premise would suggest. Based on a short story by Ib Melchior (Robinson Crusoe on Mars [review]), the screenplay by Charles Griffith (The Little Shop of Horrors) and Robert Thom (Bloody Mama) frames the race as a televised event, complete with colorful commentary from disc jockey Real Don Steele and gossip-mongering reporters. It also cuts away from the action to show a counterrevolutionary movement looking to shut the race down. Their beef is that the government, run by the generic Mr. President (Sandy McCallum), is using the bloody shenanigans to distract from starvation and oppression. Think The Hunger Games [review] on wheels.

Death Race 2000 is entertaining and schlocky in all the right ways, though it’s lost some of its sexiness over time. I am not sure if it’s the fact that critiques of the vapidity and prurience of some pop culture has become so prevalent that Death Race 2000 no longer feels necessary or special, or that Bartel works with such a broad hand that the satire wasn’t that sharp to begin with, but the critical aspects of Death Race 2000 don’t carry much force all these years on. It seems a little too aligned with the thing it means to lampoon. The fun of watching Death Race 2000 is reveling in the comical deaths and dirty play. And it’s hard to pretend to be above celebrity culture while enjoying a hammy Stallone eating clam sauce with his fingers. We only care because he’s Sylvester Stallone, his reputation precedes him. It’s hard to say how famous this movie would still be with any other personality in the part. (Carradine fares better, delivering his usual ice-cold intensity.)

Luckily, the film is mercifully short, and perhaps Bartel’s smartest move is not striving for a greater point that his shoestring budget might not have allowed for. I haven’t seen any of the remakes or sequels, but something tells me they probably get it a lot more wrong than the original; Death Race 2000 is at least a quaint relic with a few visceral pleasures.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS - #836

Maybe I should start timing how long I procrastinate with a review when I’m writing about a movie I didn’t particularly care for. It’s been over an hour since I first fired up this document, and I’ve done many things, checked the laundry room a couple of times to see if the other tenants finally moved their clothes to the dryer, tried some of this Jameson Caskmates, cycled trough all for sides of DJ Shadow’s The Mountain Will Fall and moved on to Avalanches’ Wildflower.

In other words, I didn’t enjoy watching Beyond theValley of the Dolls very much. Even approaching it from the point of view of looking at it as a product of its time, trying to embrace the spirit of 1970 and the cultural changes that Russ Meyer’s movie both embraces and lampoons, it doesn’t quite work. The gag doesn’t land. I guess, as they say, maybe you had to be there.

Despite the disclaimer that opens Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, this film very much began as a sequel to the 1967 original [review], but when author Jacqueline Susann objected to the new take on it, she threatened to sue. And so the studio had the names changed of the returning characters and tacked on the title card. The lineage remains, however, as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls offers another melodramatic showbiz narrative, once again taking a lance to the Hollywood lifestyle, but this time focusing on an all-girl rock-and-roll trio. Lead singer Dolly Mac Namara (Playboy Playmate Dolly Read) goes to Los Angeles to visit her Aunt Susan (Phyllis Davis, playing the character that would have been Anne Welles), and she and her bandmates end up embroiled in the California party scene and in servitude to a shady record producer everyone calls Z-Man (John LaZar, who in his sideburns and hip haircut looks a bit like one of Jack Kirby’s supernatural characters; someone should have cast him in a Witch Boy movie). The narrative follows both the trajectory of Kelly’s band and the way she and the other girls sink into a life of booze, drugs, and sex, the act breaks signaled by yet another night of debauchery at Z-Man’s groovy pad.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls comes off as one big car-crash of divergent intentions. Hoping to cash in on the late-’60s counter-culture cinema as typified by Easy Rider [review], the studio heads handed sexploitation auteur Russ Meyer the keys to this kingdom. While he delivered all the kooky lingo and the hippies and psychedelics, his final product feels like one big wind-up, a parody of the fat cats’ perception of what these kinds of movies represented. Meyer basically takes the feel of the Roger Corman acid movies and puts them together with the campy tone of the 1966 Batman TV show, ending up with something closer to the Monkees, minus the earworms and laughs. What makes the whole thing really odd, though, is the underlying sincerity that drives the picture. For however much Beyond the Valley of the Dolls feels like a put-on, it also comes across as a film made with serious intent.

Perhaps this is down to the screenwriter, the famed film critic Roger Ebert, his first contribution to an actual fiction film (he didn’t do much more, but it was all with Meyer). I’d certainly credit him with the script’s ludicrous climax, in which every soap opera cliché is trotted out and tossed into a big pile, a grinning homage to all the sudsy love stories that came before it. You’d also expect to lay the blame on him for the mash-up of characters in Z-Man’s final party: a jungle man, a Nazi, King Arthur, and a pair of superheroes. (Cynthia Myers and Erica Gavin, playing the film’s lesbian couple, dress up as Robin and Catwoman, using the actual costumes from the aforementioned Batman series.) The film nerd is checking off a bunch of items in his bucket list (however much he denies it in his commentary track...but more on that later).

Yet, it’s also Ebert who takes credit for the ludicrous last act reveal about Z-Man, which--without giving too much away--employs a regular Brian De Palma trick years before De Palma ever would, and yet is totally of the times, given that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls came out the same year as that other X-rated multi-car pile-up, Myra Breckenridge. To hear the writer tell it himself, this was not an organic plot development, but a last-minute inspiration. Which, frankly, seems even more De Palma than De Palma, whose final-scene turns usually feel like a filmmaker without a conclusion copping out.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not all bad. For those who indulge in Russ Meyer movies for the leering voyeurism they provide, you won’t be disappointed--there are plenty of bosomy women in various states of undress. That said, the surprise for me was the displays of technique. The plot may be bogged down by plodding staging and stiff acting, but the mis-en-scene is often agile and even Godardian. Editor Dorothy Spencer, who also worked on Valley of the Dolls as well as such classics as Stagecoach [review] and Foreign Correspondent [review], employs quick cuts to keep things moving, reducing some shots to just a few seconds. Look, for instance, at the scene where Kelly ditches her former boyfriend and manager Harris (David Gurian) to go home with gigolo actor Lance Rocke (Michael Blodgett), sending Harris into the arms of pornstar Ashley St. Ives (Edy Williams). Spencer cuts from one action to another before the first is even finished, jumping back and forth between the heartbreaker and the heartbroken. Even more impressive, though, is the slam-poetry montage of Los Angeles at the start of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and the intercutting of Harris and Ashley’s first sex scene with automobile hood ornaments, effectively connecting America’s obsession with flesh and chrome. In these moments, Meyer gets closer to realizing the more avant-garde aspects of Godard or Dennis Hopper than he maybe even realized.

Too bad these brief flashes of brilliance don’t make up for the rest. For me, the biggest sin is how bad the music is. I hate when movies about bands don’t deliver quality tunes. Put together by studio regulars rather than legitimate rock writers and producers, but also featuring the Sandpipers and the Strawberry Alarm Clock (appearing as themselves), the musical numbers performed by the onscreen bands are heavy and intensely dull, striking an inauthentic chord that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls never manages to escape. I suppose many will watch this cult film to laugh at its many faults and fumbles, but I’ve never subscribed to the so-bad-it’s-good school of moviegoing. There’s enough that’s genuinely good to negate the necessity for laughing at the missteps of others. Once transgressive and cutting-edge, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls now just strikes me as tame and misguided. Your mileage may vary.

To match the artwork of the Valley of the Dolls release, Criterion brought in multi-talented comics artist Jim Rugg to create a composition for their Beyond the Valley of the Dolls that riffs on the original imagery while utilizing the larger cast. Just about every major and minor character is crammed in there. You should check out Rugg’s own work, including the blacksploitation tribute Afrodisiac and his delightful action comic StreetAngel.

Criterion also loads the disc with extras, including a commentary with Roger Ebert that they had the foresight to record in 2003 (apparently there was a long negotiation for rights). Ebert gives much insight into how the movie was constructed, including admitting that it was pretty much made up as he typed. He shows a genuine reverence for Russ Meyer, and suggests that much of the exaggeration in the performances is down to Meyer’s love of silent film. Interestingly, Ebert never embraces nor addresses any notion of the movie being bad--on the contrary, just as I imagined he did during production, the scribe treats Beyond the Valley of the Dolls quite seriously. I find it funny that he questions the choices of the wardrobe people and set decorators as being too exaggerated, but never quite acknowledges the same thing in his writing. Actually, what’s really fascinating is how rarely Ebert even acknowledges he is the writer. He eventually confesses that Kelly, as the main character, is subject to the whims of the author--and then sort of coyly notes that he’s that author--but outside of the very beginning and the very end, he approaches it from a less invested stance. As commentaries go, it’s disappointing, because he’s essentially defending his movie from the position of a critic who likes the final product, not as someone who had a hand in bringing it together. Which may suggest something about why this movie hits with such a resounding thud a quarter century later: the writer only sees the humor in terms of specifics, but the reality is that it was played so broadly, it has turned into a cartoon as time’s marched on. When it comes to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Roger Ebert is not a credible witness.

But again, maybe you just had to be there.

Russ Meyer on set with John LaZar.