“I really had no desire to do a horror film,” Monte Hellman says re: Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!, his one and only and very faux-serious contribution to the American slasher genre. Which makes sense, even if the movie doesn’t, always.
“It was a film that I kind of backed into. I didn’t want to do it, I turned the script down, but one of my best friends [Arthur Gorson] was producing it as his first movie, and he finally wore me down. We threw the script out and wrote another one in a week, and then I brought in some friends and added a lot of jokes and I just did it as a lark, you know?
“It was just kind of a way to poke fun — or pay homage — to the genre. That whole scene with the tape recorder was, in my mind, Touch of Evil.”
Suffice to say, it’s not Two-Lane Blacktop, but so what? Wednesday night’s Alamo Ritz triple-bill scored a perfect trifecta on the Blown-Mind Scale: cowboys, cars and crazed killers? It’s the American way.
It’s not every day you get to hang with the man who made the finest American road-movie ever committed to film, but that’s what we love about the 512: Monte Hellman tends to show up here once a decade or so, with the shades of Warren Oates, Laurie Bird, and Dennis Wilson (all late of Two-Lane) trailing close behind, like leaded petrol fumes, the blurs of speed gone by.
Hellman pulled into town to screen his existential-freakout western The Shooting and the rarely-seen Silent Night, Deadly Night III in addition to the aforementioned macadam madness, and for a little while the bad-craziness at the pumps outside gave way to the magic of Hellman’s singular cinematic vision.
Fans of Hellman already know that Two-Lane works as both sixties dog-end metaphor and a timeless, teen-angst cri de coeur for the Mopar set, but eyeballed from the contemporary, gas-deprived smash-up that defines both Cormac McCarthy‘s and Hellman’s dead-empty, purgatorial highway-to-hell, the film, seen on the big screen as intended, is likely even more of a revelation than it was during its initial, confounded theatrical run. A serpentine speedway of Route 666’d emotional disconnect, it’s bleak, and then it’s hopeful, and finally it crashes into oblivion with the deafening silence of a waking nightmare.
Chew on this the next time you’re sitting behind the wheel, playing the human humidor, idling in line, passing time waiting on some Hi-Test with the sweat running down your temples because you don’t want to run the AC on account of it sucks too much gasoline, which is suddenly way too pricey and far too exhaustible:
The internal combustion religion gets us where we’re going — metaphorically and otherwise — and it does so in style and sorrow simultaneously, the phallic gearshift in hand and the warm, welcoming back seat behind. It’s our red, white, and blue (and long ago globalized) full-bore, full-throttle, metal-flaked or primer-coated, fuel-injected fuckup.
Hellman’s Two-Lane remains, above all other road movies, the perfect 24fps/400cc reflection of the doomy, dusty fadeout of 20th-century reality, and it continues to make perfect, terrible sense thirty-seven years after its debut.
As Warren Oates GTO says, “What are you trying to do, blow my mind?” <a href="
Driver and mechanic and car: they’re nothing without intake, fuel, spark. So…
Over lunch at El Sol y La Luna the next day, Hellman dropped both insight and relative bombshells: “Pauline Kael hated me,” the director said after the conversation veered into Terrence Malick territory. “She would take every opportunity to take a potshot at me. In her review of Badlands she called it ‘Almost as bad as a Monte Hellman movie.”
And the reason why?
“I replaced her one week on her public radio show. I reviewed Shoot the Piano Player. During the course of the review I expressed my disdain for critics in general and she didn’t like that. In the theater that I came from, the worst sin you could commit was acknowledging the critics. If a producer took out an ad saying ‘We thank the critics… ‘, then everybody in town would ostracize him. Because you never gave them the benefit of any credibility —
Ouch!
“– And because they didn’t have access to the stage door! I didn’t call her by name, but, really, there are critics who don’t know what it is that people do. And Pauline Kael would talk about the ‘Director of Photography’ and the camera moves and so on, but the camera moves are not the prerogative of the Director of Photography — that’s the Director’s job. And it was just proving that she didn’t know what she was talking about.”
Which begs the question: What does Monte Hellman watch, and dig, in the current cinematic landscape?
“I’m really kind of lost in the world of reissues. I just rediscovered The Gunfighter. I was talking [at the Alamo] about the film producer who became more of a director in the sense that he really put his stamp on it and that was [Daryl F.] Zanuck. The other day I was watching The Razor’s Edge, with Tyrone Power, directed by Edmund Goulding, who is not a great director; he’s a very stage-type director, with a very stationery camera.
“And yet it’s a completely a Zanuck movie. Every scene has dialogue, but [Zanuck] made sure that you would see beyond that, you’d see, if there was for instance a window behind the characters, all the cars going by, all the people going by, and it would go off into infinity. You would see the entire world through the window. Every shot.”
So what’s Two-Lane Blacktop but the dying American dream seen through the ratatat rainblast of dueling windshields, wipers squawking to-and-fro but still and always framing the infinite road ahead, the future, the gearhead zeitgeist, with plugs fouled, plates and identities swapped, dreams deferred?
Like Oates/GTO says: “Color me gone.”
This article appears in July 25 • 2008.