The late Monte Hellman had a great run in the late ’60s and early ’70s directing an unusual series of low-budget films whose surface resemblance to popular genre pictures belied a smoldering ambition to forge a distinctly American mode of art cinema. Among these were three films produced by Roger Corman: The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966), a pair of taut, unsparing Westerns made back-to-back with Jack Nicholson, and Cockfighter (1974), an ambling, tragicomic portrait of a hapless gambling man played with battered grace by Warren Oates. And then there was Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Hellman’s visionary and now undisputed masterwork, a radically uncompromising film that simultaneously announced his arrival as an auteur and his permanent exile to the far edges of Hollywood. By declaring Hellman a cult director, some have tried to rescue, and even exalt, the many compromised films and jobs-for-hire that marked the zigzag path of a career defined as much by unrealized and fugitive films. Not discounting the occasional offbeat merits of his other works, in these four films Hellman’s vision finds its fullest expression, and upon them firmly rests his legacy.
A set of singular approaches unites the four films: a distrust of language; a reduction of narrative to its starkest minimum; and a desire to capture the alienating strangeness and beauty of quintessentially American landscapes. Hellman’s training, first in theatre and then in Corman’s unofficial exploitation film school, guided his exploration of a territory somewhere between the European art film of Bresson and Antonioni and the genre cinema that gave fertile ground to maverick independents such as Budd Boetticher and Sam Fuller as they navigated the flux of the postwar studio system. Indeed, Hellman’s restless, unmoored characters seem to inhabit both worlds, embodying archetypal roles, innovatively staged as a Western. This was, in fact, what inspired Corman to invite Hellman to join the growing cadre of young filmmakers working for his various independent production companies, a group that paved the way for what would optimistically be called the New Hollywood.
