The career of Monte Hellman
When the Venice Film Festival awarded Monte Hellman a Special Lion for his entire body of work last year, it was on the occasion of his triumphant return to the screen with the rich and personal Road to Nowhere (2010). In the 21 years since he made his last feature, Hellman’s name has passed before more filmgoers’ eyes as executive producer of Reservoir Dogs (1992) than as the director of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), the epitome of that lonely American cinema of the 1970s; never mind his pair of eerie metaphysical westerns, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (shot back-to-back in 1965); or the oft-suppressed Cockfighter (1974). He is the secret auteur of American cinema, too infrequently spoken of, his films even less frequently seen.
‘I don’t think a lot about the movies that I’m making and I kind of take the script at face value and deal with it’. Monte Hellman rolled into Hollywood at the tail end of the studio period, in a climate that discouraged a view of director-as-artist. Most seemed happy that way, professionals at work. He got a thorough apprenticeship in Roger Corman’s back room, re-editing and re-shooting, and has undertaken for-hire ever since, with a hand in everything from Head (1968) to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973); he even directed second unit on Robocop (1987).
For his most significant outings as director, however, he enjoyed remarkable latitude: Corman trusted him to do what he wanted with the westerns and with Cockfighter; and whilst Two-Lane Blacktop may be the real-life Easy Rider (1969) (shot sequentially as the unit made its way across the country), the freedom afforded Hellman would not have been permissible without the earlier film’s success. He prefers to take an anti-intellectual approach to his own filmmaking, but his Laurel Canyon home is lined with books and movies and art, and the craftsmanship is mingled with the instinct and emotion of a poet. He may not be the director to run around declaring that his vision must be seen, yet a personal vision is exactly what has emerged in his films, through one of the clearest and most consistent authorial voices in anything like mainstream American cinema.
The title of Hellman’s latest film, which opened in the US earlier this year, is as neat a summation of his philosophical outlook as any, and returns once again to man’s powerlessness in a world of dubious purpose. Even in his debut, the likeable, low-rent Beast From Haunted Cave (1959), Hellman allowed the two young leads to discuss whether we humans make our own luck, or if our luck makes us. In his next two films, shot back-to-back in the Philippines, he has one of the soldiers of Back Door to Hell (1964) offer the observation of human beings that ‘they get born, they stumble around in life for a while, they die’; this is then perfectly epitomized by the second film, the shaggy dog chase Flight to Fury (1964). Ever-wary of over-intellectualizing, he rejects the significance of the lines however: ‘They might sound like (authorial statements) but I didn’t write those lines. I didn’t cut them out, but I think a lot of that stuff is really sophomoric: it’s what we talk about late at night when we’ve finished cramming our books in college, you know. And I don’t think you can take any of it too seriously apart from the fact that everybody thinks that stuff, it’s out there.’
