![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/monte-hellman.jpg\")
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\nToday is the birthday of the one-of-a-kind American-B-movie-but-also-French-existentialist film director Monte Hellman, who died last year. <\/p>\n
For a really good roundup-overview of this iconoclastic American director, check out David Hudson’s “Monte Hellman\u2019s Sly Humor and Existential Dread”<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n I’ll never be “over” Monte Hellman, and I will never stop being surprised by films like Ride In the Whirwind<\/i> or The Shooting<\/i> or the road movie to end all road movies, Two-Lane Blacktop<\/i>. 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. <\/p>\n The month after his death, I wrote a tribute on Monte Hellman for Film Comment<\/i><\/a>. <\/p>\n \n 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\u2019s Sly Humor and Existential Dread” over on Criterion … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/148498-e1657537367664.jpg\")
\nMonte Hellman and James Taylor during the filming of “Two-Lane Blacktop”. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"