Monte Hellman
He also helmed The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, two sparse Westerns starring a young Jack Nicholson.
Monte Hellman, the maverick director and protege of Roger Corman who helmed the existential cult classics
The Shooting and
Two-Lane Blacktop, died Tuesday. He was 91.
Hellman died at Eisenhower Health hospital in Palm Desert a week after he had fallen in his home, his daughter, Melissa Hellman, a producer, told
The Hollywood Reporter. He was my best friend, she said.
Cahiers du Cinema, the influential French magazine, once called Hellman the most gifted American filmmaker of his generation, and critics likened the idiosyncratic director to Michelangelo Antonioni and Sam Fuller.
Monte Hellman, Director of Two-Lane Blacktop, Dies at 91
msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Quentino Tarantino hymns Ride in the Whirlwind
bfi.org.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bfi.org.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Monte Hellman, Cult Director of Two-Lane Blacktop, Dies at 91
nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Something was happening to the western in the 1960s and ’70s. The old screen heroes were ageing out and so were their moralities. The Shootist (1976) saw John Wayne confronting his age and mortality, while Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Peckinpah’s Pat Garett and Billy the Kid (1973) cast the western’s classical heroism into an elegiac doubt. This was what came to be known as the revisionist western, a wave of westerns demythologizing, mourning, and critiquing John Ford’s west of good guys in white, bad guys in black, cowboys and Indians. Meanwhile from out of Italy came the so-called, spaghetti westerns, notably those of Sergios Corbucci and Leone, themselves already a kind of cynical deconstruction of the traditional western which replaced morality with greed and heroism with brutality.