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TODAY'S HIGHLIGHTS:
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TODAY'S HIGHLIGHTS:
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Ride in the Whirlwind **+ (1966, Westerns)
Sypnosis Three cowhands, between jobs, have the bad dumb luck to pitch night camp in the same valley as a cabin full of guys who just robbed a stagecoach and killed the guard. Come morning, a posse arrives, forms up along the ridge, and takes for granted that everyone down below is guilty--fit for either shooting to bits or hanging from a tree, whichever comes first. Precisely half of Ride in the Whirlwind's 82 minutes is devoted to tapping the matter-of-fact, absurdist horror of that situation. In the remaining half, the two surviving cowpokes (Jack Nicholson and Cameron Mitchell) seek shelter at a farmhouse where they reluctantly threaten the farmer, accept breakfast from his wife, flirt with his daughter (Millie Perkins), play some checkers, and hope to remain undetected till nightfall.
Somehow, when people speak of the two existentialist Westerns that Monte Hellman made on a single trek into the desert in 1966, Ride in the Whirlwind never gets as much attention as The Shooting. All right, so it doesn't star Warren Oates (though it does have Harry Dean Stanton, Oates's clear successor as sainted American character actor), and Jack Nicholson's screenplay isn't as infatuated with arty enigma or coffeehouse-quaint dialogue as Adrien Joyce's Shooting script. But of the two, Ride arguably cuts deeper as a meditation on things Western, and it's surely the one that would bring nods of recognition from a Parnassian review board comprised of William S. Hart, Harry Carey, and the various casts of The Virginian.
The Unforgiven *** (1960, Westerns)
Sypnosis No relation to the 1992 Clint Eastwood film of almost the same name, The Unforgiven is based--like John Ford's The Searchers--on a novel by Alan LeMay. Again the story focuses on a frontier family divided by racism. But instead of the complex, endlessly resonant demonology of the Ford picture, John Huston aims in The Unforgiven for a pat, civil-rights-era allegory of loving solidarity triumphing over societal prejudice--and, to be sure, some noble but dangerous Kiowas. Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn costar as, respectively, the eldest son of a ranching family and the beloved sister who's not his sister at all, but an Indian. However, the film's dark heart belongs to Joseph Wiseman as an avenging ghost who materializes out of the wind, and Lillian Gish as the matriarch who will do whatever she must to protect her clan. With Audie Murphy, Charles Bickford, Albert Salmi, John Saxon, and Doug McClure.
