Monte Hellman

2021 Farewells: Behind the camera

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Michael Apted. Photo credit: First Run Features courtesy Everett Collection

In 2021, we lost writers, directors, cinematographers and composers who produced classic of cinema:

Director Michael Apted’s 9 Seven Up movies constitute the greatest documentary series in the history of cinema. Got to see him in person at the 2019 Mill Valley Film Festival.

Giusepe Rotunno’s cinematography in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno was a master at creating images that told us about the characters and their relation to each other. Here’s my remembrance with some of his images, plus a link to a brilliant video essay.

Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in Monte Hellman’s COCKFIGHTER

Monte Hellman, my favorite cult film director, was described by the New York Times as a “hero of the American independent film movement“. Working in low-budget genre movies, collaborating with the likes of Roger Corman Hellman could elevate the sparest of scripts and the most minuscule of budgets into film classics. Hellman showcased Warren Oates’ gift for playing a tough, bottom-feeding grasper who needs a little too much luck in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and the Hellman masterpiece Cockfighter (1974).

Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones in Larry McMurtry’s LONESOME DOVE

Writer Larry McMurtry told powerful, unflinching, character-centered stories of the Old West (Lonesome Dove) and the contemporary West (The Last Picture Show). He won an Oscar for his Brokeback Mountain screenplay, and his novels were the basis for Hud and Terms of Endearment.

Melvin Van Peebles was a Renaissance Man (see his NYT obit) who wrote, directed, edited and produced 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Along with Gordon Park’s Shaft, that film launched blaxploitation cinema and was a landmark in indie filmmaking. His son Mario directed and starred in Baadasssss! (Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube) about this seminal project.

Jean-Marc Vallée directed The Dallas Buyers Club, Wild and The Young Victoria, which earned acting awards for Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Reece Witherspoon, Laura Dern and Emily Blunt.

Monte Hellman

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Harry Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in Monte Hellman’s COCKFIGHTER

My favorite cult director, Monte Hellman, has died at age 91. The New York Times called him a “hero of the American independent film movement“.

Hellman worked in low-budget genre movies, collaborating with Roger Corman, Jack Nicholson and Hellman’s great muse, Warren Oates. Hellman could elevate the sparest of scripts and the most minuscule of budgets into film classics.

Hellman showcased Oates’ gift for playing a tough, bottom-feeding grasper who needs a little too much luck in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974). Cockfighter, a movie that even Hellman couldn’t make today, is probably his masterpiece.

Road to Nowhere, in 2010, was the first film in twenty years from the then 79-year-old Hellman. It’s a multi-layered riddle that challenges the audience.  Road to Nowhere is far more stylish and ambitious than Hellman’s 1970s films, but far more baffling.

I can’t find Two-Lane Blacktop available to stream, but the Blu-Ray DVD is available from The Criterion Collection. Cockfighter can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime) and a few other outlets. Road to Nowhere is available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD/Stream of the Week: COCKFIGHTER and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP – two more unforgettable performances byWarren Oates

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Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER
Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER

Last week I wrote about the actor Warren Oates and last night’s Oatesathon on Turner Classic Movies.  I even included the 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border.  I hope that I’ve kindled (or rekindled) some interest in Oates, so here are two Warren Oates classics that TCM didn’t play last night.

They are both from cult director Monte Hellman: Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974). There’s a Criterion Collection DVD for Two-Lane Blacktop which is available from Netflix. You can stream Cockfighter on Amazon Instant Video.  Hellman was making low-low-budget exploitation films for Roger Corman, and both of these movies are fine specimens.  In both, Oates plays a tough, bottom-feeding grasper who needs a little too much luck.

Two-lane Blacktop is a car chase/road trip movie that was a vehicle for two rock music stars, James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.  Taylor plays a guy drifting across America and challenging drivers of other souped-up cars to races (The Driver); Wilson plays his mechanic (The Mechanic).  They pick up a comely hitchhiker played by Laurie Bird (The Girl) and challenge the Warren Oates character (G.T.O.) to a road race from New Mexico to Washington, D.C.

Two-lane Blacktop turned out to be the only feature film for both James Taylor and Dennis Wilson.  Taylor is pretty good in a very laconic role.

Laurie Bird made only three films – Two-lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and Annie Hall.  Having worked as a model, she was cast by Hellman to co-star in Two-lane Blacktop, and soon a romance blossomed between the 41-year-old Hellman and the 18-year-old Bird.  Bird also was the movie’s still photographer.  After Cockfighter,  she moved on from Hellman and became Art Garfunkle’s partner.  Before she turned 26, Laurie Bird committed suicide in the NYC apartment that she shared with Garfunkle.  In her very limited movie career, she proved to be an appealing and natural actress.

The only professional lead actor in Two-lane Blacktop was Oates. Of course, he was perfect for the role of G.T.O., a guy masking his insecurities with aggressive braggadocio.

In Cockfighter, Oates isn’t the foil, he’s the main guy.  But he’s still a low-life, a guy with a cockfighting compulsion that threatens to consume everything he has – his money, his family, his home and his sanity – as he bets more and more on his fighting chickens.  For those of us not intimately familiar with this pastime, Cockfighter is a soup-to-nuts procedural on cockfighting.  Warning:  Cockfighter contains the very definition of animal cruelty- lethal cockfights staged for the camera; (you couldn’t make this movie today).

But the whole reason to watch Cockfighter is Warren Oates’ performance as a guy with too much desperation and not enough luck.  (And Harry Dean Stanton and Laurie Bird are in the movie, too.)

Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, here’s the scene in Two-Lane Blacktop that sets up the car race.

Warren Oates: a gift for desperation

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Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

I love the character actor Warren Oates for his idiosyncratic performances in the period 1969-74 – and this is Warren Oates Week at The Movie Gourmet.  Friday, I’ll write about the upcoming Oatesathon on Monday night, when Turner Classic Movies will be presenting SEVEN Warren Oates movies.  And next week’s DVD.Stream of the Week will feature two Oates cult classics that TCM will be missing.

Oates was one of those actors whose performances always make an impression.  He could turn a stock Western Bad Guy into a memorable character by adding a touch of cowardice, dimwittedness or venality.  In Barquero, he was formidable enough to go gun barrel-to-gun barrel with Lee Van Cleef for 115 minutes.

Oates had a special gift for portraying desperation, so he triumphed in neo-noirs like Chandler, Cockfighter, The Brinks Job and his crowning achievement, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.  By early 1970s,  the counter-culture was bringing lots of screenplay cynicism and anti-hero roles to the movies – both perfect for Oates.

Warren Oates died in 1982 at age 53.  He has 123 acting credits on IMDb, mostly Westerns.  He was a favorite of directors Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman.  Indeed, he is most well-known for playing one of the Gorch brothers in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Sissy Spacek’s father (blown away by teen punk Martin Sheen) in Terence Malick’s Badlands.

Some of Oates’ best work was in 1974 as the leads in Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Hellman’s Cockfighter.   He was also unforgettable in the offbeat Barquero (1970), Hellman’s Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971).

The 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border  includes clips of Oates’ work, along with commentary from his widow Teddy Oates, Hellman, and fellow actors Ned Beatty, Robert Culp, Ben Johnson, Peter Fonda, Stacy Keach and Millie Perkins.  Here it is.

DVD of the Week: Road to Nowhere

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Road to Nowhere could be subtitled Monte Hellman’s Jigsaw Puzzle.  It’s the first film in twenty years from 79-year-old cult director Hellman, and he has delivered a multi-layered riddle that challenges the audience.  There is the story of a crime as it was originally understood, the story of what really happened and the story of a film being made about the crime.  The same actors play the characters in all three stories.  One of the actors in the movie may actually be one of the participants in the original crime.

It’s not a film for everyone.  You must be willing to accept that the story is not going to make sense for a while, and some issues are never going to be resolved.  If you can engage in the puzzle, there’s enough of a payoff.

My guilty pleasures include Hellman’s 1974 Cockfighter with Warrren Oates and his 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop with Oates and James Taylor (yes, the singer-songwriter James Taylor).  Road to Nowhere is far more stylish and ambitious than those films, but far more baffling.

In Road to Nowhere, the director of the film within the film discovers and becomes besotted, even obsessed, with his leading lady – and things do not turn out happily.  I had to think of the female lead in Two Lane Blacktop, Laurie Bird;  Hellman had a relationship with Bird, who later became Art Garfunkle’s companion and committed suicide in Garfunkle’s apartment.

 

Other recent DVD picks have been Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman and The Music Never Stopped.

Movies: Best bets for late July

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You can see trailers and descriptions of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Beginning on July 22, in Sarah’s Key, Kristen Scott Thomas stars in another French film, this time as a journalist tracking the story of a girl during the WWII roundup of Jews in France.  Co-stars Niels Arestrup (A Prophet) and Aidan Quinn.

Also on July 22, 1970s cult director Monte Hellman presents Road to Nowhere, just after he turned 79 on July 12.  His signature is the hard-edged road movie.

On July 29, we’ll have another showcase for Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges)  in The Guard,  an Irish dark comedy about a lowbrow cop happening upon an international drug conspiracy.

On August 5, we’ll see The Names of Love, in which Sarah Forestier has gotten great buzz for her performance as a flighty lefty Frenchwoman who seeks to educate and convert conservatives by sleeping with them.

Here’s the trailer for Sarah’s Key.

 


Congrats, Roger Corman!

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This week’s DVD release of Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics is my occasion for celebrating the prolific low-budget producer Roger Corman.  So far, Corman has produced 395 titles –  mostly shameless and delicious exploitation movies for the teen market.  In one four-year period, he produced The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses – and 21 other movies!

Corman’s great gift to us all is his mentorship of young and talented filmmakers.  Filmmakers who got their first assignment from Corman (called “the Corman Film School”) include Oscar winning directors James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.  Not to mention cult directors Paul Bartels and Monte Hellman (Corman produced Hellman’s Warren Oates classic Cockfighter).  And Chinatown screenwriter Robert Townsend.

Jack Nicholson first got some attention playing the masochistic dental patient in Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors.  Nicholson showed up again in Corman’s 1967 The Wild Angels (biker gangs), 1967 The Shooting (trippy Western) and 1967’s LSD flick The Trip (more on that tomorrow).

Probably the best movie that Corman has produced was St. Jack (1976), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.  Corman had given Bogdanovich his start, and in the intervening 12 years Bogdanovich’s star had risen (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon) and fallen (Daisy Miller).   Ben Gazzara and Denholm Elliott delivered great performances in this story of a hustling American expat running a GI brothel in Singapore during the Vietnam War.

Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics includes three films that I haven’t seen (or don’t remember seeing): Attack of the Crab Monsters, War of the Satellites and Not of this Earth.  Although I may not have seen them, I can tell you that 1) they don’t have fancy production values; 2) they are fast paced and not too long; and 3) they’re a kick.