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Beckett and the Stetson (Comment c'est), "perishing to the tricks of my own mind." Stark and humorous, Monte Hellman's existentialism is evidenced in a marvelously odd early scene: The former bounty hunter (Warren Oates) sits by his tent, squinting ahead with coffee cup in hand while in the distant background the skittish prospector (Will Hutchins) warbles "When the Work's All Done This Fall," something's amiss, the camera leisurely turns 90° as a sudden gunshot sends the sidekick scuttling through a cloud of spilled flour. (The cowboy intently ponders the vacant hilly horizon, is distracted for a second by a vulture and then beholds a feminine figure in the distance.) The sulky gamine in black (Millie Perkins), unnamed and unreadable, the spark of the trudging journey into the desert. Jack Nicholson as the hired gunslinger completes the abstruse quartet, entering like Palance in Shane and seen last à la Greed. "It's a feelin' I got to see through," mumbles Oates on the edge of the sandy void, trying to justify the morbid pull. Pared to the bone yet luxuriantly phantasmagoric, Hellman's great frontier cryptogram charts a trek through a circular, increasingly lunar landscape. The depleted horse under the blasting sun, the solitary makeshift grave, the desperado's shattered hand: An exhaustive winnowing of classic Western themes into surrealistic signposts, the genre's "whips and jingles" as if in a dream. A disorientating mirror of the decade's political assassinations, a crossroads of old and new myths where characters flicker from surly ramrods into projections of haunted states. Striped candy for the dying and snake eggs in stagnant water, the self encountered (cf. Bertolucci's Partner). Fantastically concentrated and closer to Frost than to Sartre, the heat-cracked realm out of which Jarmusch and Almereyda and Reichardt ride. Cinematography by Gregory Sandor. With Charles Eastman, Guy El Tsosie, Brandon Carroll, and B.J. Merholz.
--- Fernando F. Croce |