So, after watching Pale Rider, I went to see if it was on my Fill-In Filmography poster so I could, you know, fill it in. It actually wasn’t, but I was curious as to which of two Westerns might have been. I couldn’t remember if John Wayne’s The Shootist or Jack Nicholson’s The Shooting was listed on the poster. It turns out both were, but The Shooting was there in a subsection called “Acid Westerns”. I don’t really know what that might be, but I do recall that The Shooting was on HBO Max and it was short at under 90 minutes. The fourth season finale of Stranger Things was longer than that.

I mean, I prefer not to do the same genre of film twice in a row, but I really wanted to know what an Acid Western was.

Former bounty hunter Willett Gashade (Warren Oates) returns to his mining camp to find one of his partners dead under mysterious circumstances. His brother Coigne ran off for some reason, and the sole remaining man, Coley (Will Hutchins), isn’t all that bright and doesn’t know what happened. Not long after that, a woman (Millie Perkins) rides in looking for help getting somewhere out in the desert. She won’t provide a name or a reason, but she’s paying well, and while Gashade doesn’t trust her, Coley is smitten more or less instantly.

Whatever it is that’s happening, the three aren’t alone in their journey as they are followed and eventually joined by the malevolent gunslinger Bill Spear (Nicholson). Gashade knows something is wrong with the whole scenario, but he needs the money and Coley almost certainly seems to be looked after. The woman is hiding something, Spear is dangerous, and the further the group goes into the wilderness, the more their horses get exhausted and their supplies run low. Can Gashade get out of this alive?

So, after watching this, I still am not sure what an Acid Western is. The Shooting looks like a somewhat low budget Western with some elements I saw in Easy Rider where the whole point of the trip seems vaguely ambiguous and explanations are not forthcoming. If anything, it’s just going to end up being a bit disappointing for the characters because no one is going to get what they want, even if Gashade would just settle for some answers. Coley will be insulted and manipulated by the woman and Spear. Spear will be left in a state where he may never threaten anyone ever again. And the woman? Well, she might get what she deserves after all this. Movies like this and the aforementioned Easy Rider are more about the experience than the narrative. It’s disorienting, no one seems all that trustworthy, and it’s a good example of the sort of low budget filmmaking that was something of a rage in the 60s.

That said, my usual habit of doing a little light research before I write a review tells me the making of this movie might itself be potentially more interesting. Director Monte Hellman asked Nicholson to act as the movie’s producer, leading to a lot of fighting over finances as Nicholson turned out to be something of a penny-pincher. Likewise, Nicholson and Oates fought like crazy, and Oates gave Hellman some hard times on his own. Then Nicholson and Hellman couldn’t find a US distributor, and a French producer went bankrupt before the film could be released. The film would be an arthouse hit in Paris before any American rights came along, and it might have been for television before someone finally released the movie to American theaters in 1971 due to Nicholson’s rising fame. That is quite the journey, and the movie itself is quite the film.

Grade: B+


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