Synopsis
Monte Hellman is generally considered as a western film director. An interesting part is how he started to direct such movies. Before starting to film The Shooting, Hellman and Nicholson planned to make a movie on the theme of 'abortion,' but Roger Corman who held the purse strings wanted more commercial films. Corman recommended western films and advised to make two films. This is the story behind The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. The introductory part of the movie is comprised of flashbacks, which are rare in western films. A woman arrives at a gold mine guarded by two men and asks to be taken to a place named 'Kingsley.' Being tempted by fifteen hundred dollars, the beauty of the woman and curiosity about the adventure, the two men agree to take her to the place. The woman who refuses to tell her name and about the purpose of the journey takes a gunman into their journey after a while. A man is abandoned in a bleak desert and two men get into a fight. The woman takes aim with her rifle at a brother of the man. At the time when the revisionist Western and the Spaghetti Western emerged in another place, Hellman made a unprecedented western film which will be left as an existentialistic western film. The Shooting is a tremendous mystery, the solution to which has been lost, and an outcome resulting from the merger between films and unfamiliar esthetic experiments. The ending scene deserves to be remembered as the most horrifying but mysterious one in the film history. This movie was properly released after Jack Nicholson became famous for Easy Rider, but it is not far-fetched to say that this is a western masterpiece as well as the most underestimated film. (LEE Yong Cheol)