Today is the birthday of the one-of-a-kind American-B-movie-but-also-French-existentialist film director Monte Hellman, who died last year.
For a really good roundup-overview of this iconoclastic American director, check out David Hudson’s “Monte Hellman’s Sly Humor and Existential Dread” over on Criterion – ostensibly a roundup of all of the pieces written about Hellman in the wake of his death last year, but also provides a chronology and background of this outlaw-director who got his start, as so many did, on Roger Corman’s B-movies.
I’ll never be “over” Monte Hellman, and I will never stop being surprised by films like Ride In the Whirwind or The Shooting or the road movie to end all road movies, Two-Lane Blacktop. There is something uncapturable in their sense of existential space, the space fraught with the tension of waiting for some indefinable event that may never come. Hellman was Beckettian in sensibility and outlook.
The month after his death, I wrote a tribute on Monte Hellman for Film Comment.
Monte Hellman and James Taylor during the filming of “Two-Lane Blacktop”.
Have you seen Cockfighter from 1974? Unsuccessfully marketed by Corman as an exploitation film, it is, like most of Hellman’s films, an existential art film in disguise. Based on a splendid novel by Charles Willeford (Miami Blues), I actually think it is Hellman’s best film, if you can stomach the animal cruelty. Warren Oates is superb in it (big surprise) as he is in the less successful China 9, Liberty 37.
I love Cockfight! The animal cruelty is a tough one for me – but the character study provided is just beautiful. His FACE does it all.