Moral compass? Good guys triumphant over bad guys? Forget it. Sergio Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy and the hordes of spaghetti westerns that followed in its wake tossed out morality like yesterday's trash. 'Good' guys were greedy, heartless bastards only marginally less repulsive than the designated villains.......and everyone freely indulged in nihilistic killing of all the other characters.....including innocents.
And as for the killings themselves, Sam Peckinpah's l969 "The Wild Bunch" introduced orgiastic, balletic slaughter into the already in progress Western deconstruction......complete with blood squibs duplicating the agony, horror and spewing gore of gunshot wounds........the hopeless, mindless violence seemed to arrive as a natural response to the real life, obscene tragedies of l968....
American filmmakers, besotted with the idea of creating images of perforated actors gushing out their guts in slow motion, jumped at the notion of using the Western as a Vietnam parable or an indictment of corporate,authoritarian, Nixonian America........and out they rolled, films like "Soldier Blue", "Little Big Man", "Ulzana's Raid" and a host of others.....
Even that family audience iconic monument John Wayne was not immune to this trend.....his rollicking, jocular "Big Jake" kicks off with a Peckinpah-style massacre.....the villains include a beastly hulk who hacks up women and children with a machete.....
But when it comes to bringing the crazy to any genre, nothing could ever beat the lunacy of an international co-production.......which brings us to "The Hunting Party"
British-financed, written and directed by Hollywood veterans and filmed in Spain, "The Hunting Party" threw it all into one big overflowing bloody stewpot........spaghetti western cruelty liberally peppered with Peckinpah slo-mo slaughters. And if you really wanted to reach for a political parable.......well, you have a bunch of working class outlaws struggling to survive against super-wealthy corporate bigwigs.......
Candice Bergen, after a painful but unsuccessful rape by her impotent cattle baron husband (Gene Hackman), gets kidnapped by a scruffy outlaw (Oliver Reed, glowering in close up like he wandered in from "Once Upon A Time In The West"). Reed's purpose is to have Candice teach him to read but wouldn't you know it......after raping her, the big lug falls head over heels.....with some amount of reciprocating by Candice.
Meanwhile, Hackman, a hot-tempered, limp-dicked sadist, is hot on her trail, along with the four fellow entitled Land Barons he'd previously invited on a hunting/whoring train excursion. After passing out high powered, telescopic-sighted rifles to his buddies as party favors, Hackman enlists his uppercrust bunch to go on a sniping expedition for Reed and what looks a two dozen strong gang......from a safe distance of over 800 yards, Hackman and company commence splattering and smearing lots of Reed's minions across the landscape.
Nobody dies easy here. The camera lingers on every twitching, convulsing victim as they gasp out their final agonized moans. Reed, in the throes of his lifelong hangover, continues to glower while the much abused Bergen spends almost the entire film with her mouth wide open in shock and horror.......... (depending on your attitude in viewing this film, you may find Bergen's ultimate fate either profoundly symbolic and inevitable......or an unintentional laugh riot...)
If nothing else, "The Hunting Party" stands as an accurate snapshot of what was happening to the Western.....and filmmaking in general as the 70's got started. But it's a grim, miserable thing to sit through........and it's entirely possible that movies like this might a comeback.....to react to an America living under the dark, evil cloud of Trump.......God, we can only hope Baby Orange is gone before someone contemplates remaking this movie......
1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2)
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