![]() Hellman's steady interest in performance as a central focus and eventually a major theme of his films points back to his own roots in the vibrant West Coast theater scene of the 1950s and culminates in his best-known film, Two-Lane Blacktop. Lewis, and Nicholas Ray, Hellman's Westerns also reveal his singular approach to performance and his meticulous distillation of narrative into nuanced and mysteriously intense character studies. While extending the eccentric approach to genre defined in the 1950s by a group of maverick American filmmakers prominently including Samuel Fuller, Joseph H. Together the two films took Hellman's stylistic minimalism to a new and unyielding extreme, refining the tight economy of image and narrative displayed in Beast into frighteningly elliptical fables of innocence mercilessly destroyed by rabid posses and cold-blooded contract killers. ![]() The early stage of Hellman's career was, however, crowned by two relentlessly dark and violent revisionist Westerns, Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) and The Shooting, both produced by Corman and shot just weeks apart from one another in the barren hinterlands of Utah. Hellman's debut feature and improbable entry as an auteur director was, in fact, a horror picture – Beast From Haunted Cave (1959), an almost impossibly threadbare – creature feature – produced by Roger Corman and transformed by Hellman into a gripping, visually striking crime drama that announced his unusual talents as a bold stylist and intuitively resourceful artist. In influential major films such as The Shooting (1966) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Hellman defined a distinct brand of art cinema by reinventing traditional genre formulas – here, those of the Western and the road movie – to create boldly minimal and mesmerizing portraits of characters inexorably driven by obscure desires. 1932) has remained simultaneously at the cutting edge and the very farthest margins of the post-studio-era American cinema. ![]() Throughout a long and extraordinary career, Monte Hellman (b. ![]()
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