It would be foolish to look for coherence in a body of work whose overall shape has been determined by luck or chance, were it not for the fact that Hellman's films so often focus on lives dominated by the whims of a "fate" in which no evident pattern, either benevolent or malevolent, can be detected. It is impossible to say whether the vicissitudes of Hellman's career shaped or were shaped by the director's existential philosophy, but the fact that he has made not one film in the last decade while Steven Soderbergh has made at least ten tells us all we need to know about the kinds of art that are currently considered valuable. Whereas the relationship between form and content in Soderbergh roughly corresponds to that between icing and cake, Hellman fuses form ("how") and content ("what") to such a degree that they become inseparable. Even for theoretical purposes, Two-Lane Blacktop, for example, cannot be discussed as if it were "about" anything other than the precise attitude (embodied in such things as camera placement, camera movement, composition, etc.) adopted towards its material by the auteur. Hellman is among those filmmakers with the ability to think visually, an ability (which we might describe as the lost art of mise–en–scène) perhaps best seen in the way his camera is often positioned at a distance which implies a moral context without ever suggesting ironic detachment, mirroring his characters' attempts to place their actions in a larger perspective (as Oberlus says in Iguana, "I hate ships, but I love the sea. It makes everything else seem small") while subjecting those attempts to extensive criticism.
The situation of the typical Hellman protagonist is neatly summed up by the intertitle with which Buster Keaton began his first film, The "High Sign" (1920): "Our Hero came from Nowhere — he wasn't going Anywhere and got kicked off Somewhere." Like Keaton's hero, Hellman's characters are not defined in terms of where they come from, where they are going or where they happen to be. As with Beckett, all these things are abstractions, the author's real concern being with mental states which are far from abstract. Consider the kinds of location to which Hellman is attracted: harsh, barren landscapes (forests, frozen wastes, deserts, roads, rocky beaches) inhabited by small groups engaged in vaguely defined projects. Although these settings seem far removed from anything we might describe as "civilization," Hellman shows ideological assumptions emerging against the unlikeliest of backgrounds, even when their context renders them both useless and ridiculous, even when the individuals concerned believe themselves to have rejected all received values.
It is, then, my contention that Hellman's cinema is one in which everything — shots, scenes, films, even the director's career — eventually returns to a point of departure. If Hitchcock's characters used verbal sophistication to ward off the threat posed by a chaos world, Hellman presents communication as a slow, difficult and frustrating process. His characters inhabit a universe where the concepts of salvation and damnation do not exist. Explicitly rejecting the goal-centered protagonist, Hellman focuses on individuals whose activities are either undefined or of questionable value,2 and it is this emphasis that enables him to work, without any discernible sense of strain, as a "film doctor," shooting additional scenes for projects whose narratives have already achieved closure. Meaning must be found in the moment, and the tendency to play games and indulge trivial obsessions reinforces the fact that mortality renders all actions ultimately meaningless; against this threat, there can be no defense.
Yet the difference between Hitchcock and Hellman is not simply that between a Catholic and an atheist. If Hellman focuses on men unable to escape self-made traps, their behavior is consistently placed by the presence of intelligent, aware and independent women who demonstrate the capacity to formulate goals that are not self-serving, futile or competitive. That these characters occupy narrative positions which are, of necessity, marginal is not a flaw of the films. On the contrary, Hellman's emphasis on marginality reinforces the critique he wishes to make of a society dominated by, and arranged in accordance with, masculine interests. Closed circles, both perfect and deathly, are, by their very nature, male constructs, and, as I hope to demonstrate in the following pages, the most striking thing about Hellman's oeuvre is the frequency with which these circles come close to being broken by an intrusive feminine force.
Chapter 1
Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)
"Waiting for Godot was an enormous influence on me. I think there is a little of Beckett in everything I have done, including Beast from Haunted Cave."
— Monte Hellman, quoted in
Charles Tatum, Jr.'s Monte Hellman, page 19.
(Author's translation.)
Monte Hellman was born July 12, 1932. "Both my parents came from Missouri — my father from Kansas City, my mother from St. Louis (where my father had moved). My father had a grocery store when I was a little kid in Albany, New York (I wasn't born there — I was born in Greenpoint, which is part of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City). My whole family migrated from New York to California when I was six. In Los Angeles, my father also had a grocery store, then when I was a teenager, he switched to a gas station, and later a different gas station. After getting out of small business, he sold insurance for a time, then semi-retired to Palm Springs where he sold real estate. My mother also had experience in business, as a teenager taking over her parents' shoe store when they became ill. She was mostly a housewife while raising her two children (I have a younger brother, Herb), but also sold real estate in Palm Springs. My parents were both golfers, and both master contract bridge players. My mother also occasionally taught bridge."San
Hellman became interested in photography,2 film and theater at an early age: "It was inevitable that I should become a filmmaker, because as a child I was directing my life in a melodramatic way; I staged a jailbreak from the boarding school I was attending, and I always lied. So I think the combination of melodramatizing and lying led to only one possible career. I pretty much knew what I wanted then. And I fell in love with cinema when I was very young. I was a regular filmgoer every Saturday for as long as I can remember. I liked Tarzan always, and The Lone Ranger serial. I never saw a film I didn't like. And I loved magic. I went to every magic show when I was a kid. I saw all the great magicians: I saw Blackstone before I could even walk. I also had a complete collection of Superman comic books, which my mother threw away when I was at Stanford, thinking I was too old for comic books. That collection would probably be worth enough today to finance a low budget movie — at least a digital one. I never felt I had much chance of breaking into cinema because I thought you needed to have some member of your family already in the studios"3 Hellman directed his first theatrical performance (a short tragicomedy which he also wrote) in summer camp at the age of ten: "When I was going to school I had been an usher at a theater called the Las Palmas, just off Hollywood Boulevard, but actually only 50 yards from the Egyptian Theater, recently restored to its former glory, and now the home of the American Cinematheque. The group I ushered for was called the Actors' Lab, which was the West Coast incarnation of the Group Theater, and John Garfield was one of the members. I saw him do their revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing."4 Hellman studied for a degree in speech and drama (on an NBC radio scholarship) at Stanford University (where he directed radio plays—including The War of the Worlds—in his freshman year, and later acted in a production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard), then undertook a year-and-a-half of graduate work in film at UCLA, taking time out from the latter for a three month tour of Europe: "At UCLA I saw many classic films, and was also strongly influenced by Griffith (Broken Blossoms) and Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia). I was also influenced by Lewis Milestone (A Walk in the Sun), but I think the film that most made me want to direct was George Stevens' A Place in the Sun."5