Review of Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) by Nate C — 31 Mar 2016

I watched this again in class today and I must say it gets better on repeat viewings and may be better than The Shooting. It's a grim and eclectic revisionist Western from Monte Hellman. Actually, revisionist may not even be the correct term since unlike, for example, later revisionist Westerns by Peckinpah or Eastwood, there isn't any nostalgia at all for the West and its macho ethics.

Here the West comes across as a place where senseless hangings, shootouts, and jagged landscapes dominate. There is no mythology of freedom to be either celebrated or inverted; all that is left is a desolate and hopeless Beckett-like world.

Even when a character escapes at the end, it's doesn't feel like a triumph.