Steineded How sad is this?

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

zardoz-13 Violence escalated in Hollywood movies by the late 1960s with the shoot-out in "Bonnie & Clyde" and later the bloodbath that celebrated masculinity gone berserk in Sam Peckinpah's seminal masterpiece "The Wild Bunch." Presumably, this must have inspired Jules Levy and Arthur Gardner, well known for their family oriented television series "The Rifleman," to produce this riveting western shoot'em. When you consider the wealth of talent that went into this western lensed mainly on the plains of Spain, you have to wonder how such a project could have suffered so badly with critics and audiences alike. Scenarists William Norton of "Brannigan," Gilbert Ralston of "Willard," and Lou Morheim of "The Last Blitzkrieg" definitely put their best pens forward. No sooner has illiterate outlaw Frank Calder (Oliver Reed of "The Three Musketeers") kidnapped a gorgeous woman, Melissa Ruger (Candice Bergen of "Soldier Blue"), so she can teach him how to read than the woman's hypocritical husband (Gene Hackman) pursues them with a vengeance. The husband is no ordinary individual. He is cattle baron Brandt Ruger, and he has just bought some Sharps rifles that can blast a man from twice the distance of a Winchester repeating rifle. Brandt is basically a sadist with a trophy wife and possessive streak a mile wide. Once he learns that his wife has been abducted, Brandt fears the worst. He hates the idea that Melissa will be raped and impregnated with an illegitimate child. The suggestion that Brandt might be impotent aroused my suspicions. He doesn't want to get stuck with raising a bastard. All of this occurs after Ruger has launched a hunting party with several prominent friends and a train-load of prostitutes. He decides to chase Calder and company, but he isn't so much concerned with rescuing Melissa as he is with blasting all to kingdom come. That Brandt is a sadist is clear from the outset. Director Don Medford establishes this characteristic brilliantly in the first few minutes when he cross-cuts shots of Calder and his gang carving up one of Brandt's steers with Brandt reaming Melissa out in their bedroom. Ironically, Melissa finds more compassion in the veteran outlaw.Ingeniously, "The Hunting Party" scrutinizes masculinity under-fire in what initially struck me as a mindless massacre but is far more substantial than I imagined. Ruger relishes the chance to kill Calder and his cutthroats with extreme prejudice. Calder and his men are taken aback to begin with because they cannot see their adversaries sniping away at them. Not long afterward, the gang turns on each other. By this time, in a riff on The Stockholm Syndrone, Melissa and Calder develop a mutually supportive relationship, and Brandt is predictably infuriated when his worst fears are confirmed by dying outlaw Hog Warren (L.Q. Jones of "The Wild Bunch")who Brandt stabs to death in the throat. Medford doesn't rely on exploding blood squibs. They smear blood all over their victims. By the time that Ruger and his companions have begun to whittle down the outlaws, "The Hunting Party" generates far more depth than its deceptively gratuitous violence suggests. The ending is particularly audacious. Ruger is so consumed with hate that he consigns himself to death by traipsing into the desert to kill both Calder and Melissa. The performances are exception and the line-up of western character actors who play Calder's gang is second to none. Oliver Reed delivers another stunning performance; Reed was incapable of giving a bad performance. Sadly, this rugged British actor never received the recognition that his distinguished colleagues got in the form of knight-ships! Hackman rivaled him. After the first hour, you'll wonder why the outlaws neglect to lure the hunters into an ambush and kill them. Particularly incredible is the hero who disarms himself because he had to put his best friend out of his misery after having been shot by Ruger's men. When I first saw it I loved the violence, then I turned against it later because I treated it like a derivative western with little to set it apart from other gory oaters. Now, I consider it a maligned, misunderstood horse opera that defied narrative and genre expectations. Challenging and interesting, "The Hunting Party" had more on its plate than even Peckinpah's masterpiece.

dark_frances The movie contained an existential story, disguised as the story of a queen (Melissa) kidnapped by a charming thief (Frank, played by Oliver Reed), where the king (Brandt, played by Gene Hackman) following them to rescue the queen became a vile avenger, which in its turn was disguised as a story with guns and cowboy hats; but the chain of disguises became along the way somewhat sloppy. The fatalism underlying the whole construction seemed to be artificially created, it didn't follow from a narrative structure that couldn't have evolved differently. More precisely, Frank's unruly gang of gunfighters made every wrong choice possible. After realising that they were attacked, and by very long-range riffles, and by a relentless and merciless pursuer, the only thing they seemed to think of was to keep running forwards (and thus, to keep getting decimated). This attitude would have made sense had they all had Frank's audacity and slightly cynical stance; but they were just some robbers preparing for one last hit! Then, when they realist that the hunters were after Melissa, it was perfectly natural for the other robbers to try to get rid of her, and if Frank wanted to keep her at any cost, the natural course of action would have been for the others to leave Frank. This didn't happen either, everybody remained together, and they kept being decimated like dumb animals on a hunting ground. Sure that this was part of the point of interest – the special riffles made the hunters almost superhuman, and provided them with the impression of safety that surrounds the hunter in a normal hunting party; but like I said, this untouchability was created artificially, by having Frank's gang behave funny, culminating with the final idiotic decision for the gunless Frank and Melissa to go into the desert because Brandt would not follow them there. No, the man had the long-range riffle, and he had stuck with them all the way until then, chasing them into the ultimately open space which is the desert would certainly have been the last thing he would have done.This passivity of the gang of outlaws drove me mad – of course that the courses of action proposed by me could have resulted into an equal disaster, but they didn't even try! Not to mention that changing the way they tackled the problem may have made the story more interesting, like this it got a bit repetitive: slaughter, brief scene with Brandt grinding his teeth, Frank and Melissa in tears over dead friends (and outraged by the meanness of their pursuers, oh why didn't the bad guys just stop the chase already!), peaceful resumption of the journey, fun; slaughter, teeth grinding + tears, journey, fun...Like I said earlier, the story seemed to be an existential one, Brandt looked more like a Nemesis in charge of punishing those who dared to challenge the Order of Things (which was why he died in the end – after finishing the job, he had no more reason to exist), Frank and Melissa looked less like a fugitive couple and more like people touched by hubris, who thought they could take their destiny in their own hands (only to be proved wrong). But then what was the point of the stories about Frank's bad father and other such details? They should have been absent here, like they were absent in a movie like Walter Hill's "The Driver". If this was an archetypal story, then it should have stayed so from the beginning until the end (and it should have chosen a better environment for its tale, not an inexplicably resigned gang of brutish outlaws). However, now in retrospect I discover that various details that seemed pointless at first do make sense and reinforce the idea that Frank tried to mess with the Order of Things, like the very fact that Frank wanted to read – it was not his place to know how to read, like it had not been the place for humans to possess the fire given to them by Prometheus, these were devices of a higher order and those who dared to mess with them (both the wretched humans, and Prometheus respectively Melissa) had to pay dearly. Well, the more I think about the movie under this allegorical reading, the better it seems...Other things that bothered me about The Hunting Party were some random scenes of overacting (like the whole scene of Doc's death, where everybody seemed to have suddenly moved from the Western desert into a Shakespearean play on Broadway), mixed with moments of natural tenderness and human awkwardness (like the scene with the peaches, or like the love/rape scene between Melissa and Frank). The overacting felt out of place.So, read like an allegory, the movie seems to work much better than under a direct reading. This is still a sign of structural sloppiness, because with a different narrative underlayer the structure would have worked much better. I am also somewhat surprised that I appreciated the allegory, as I usually find them dull; I suppose that I am annoyed by transparent fables, those obviously meant to teach us something deep, while this was a very unexpected allegory, talking less about oughts and shouldn't-s and more about the local fate of some daredevil characters, who fitted surprisingly well over mythical figures and ancient plights.

virek213 When you go hunting with Brandt Ruger, you go first-class all the way. But when you steal his "property", you sign your own death warrant.That is something that a notorious outlaw (Oliver Reed) and his gang have to learn in the worst way possible in THE HUNTING PARTY, a 1971 British/American western that, even by 21st century standards, is still incredibly violent. Reed kidnaps a local schoolteacher (Candice Bergen) in the (now faint) hope that he'll be taught how to read. When Bergen warns him about her husband, he tells her "It don't matter whose wife you are." A fatal misjudgment on his part, for her husband Brandt Ruger (Gene Hackman) is not one to fool around with. While out on a hunting party with a few of his friends, the dictatorial and very abusive land baron learns of Bergen's kidnapping, and thus gets blood in his eyes. And rather than going after game, he and his boys instead go after Reed and his gang, picking them off one at a time with high-power rifles that can hit from a distance of 800 yards. The result is a sagebrush variation of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, done with some of the most brutally violent shootouts this side of THE WILD BUNCH and SOLDIER BLUE. And as he is a man driven by extreme jealousy (Bergen is his personal "property", whom he physically abuses on more than one occasion), the fact that Bergen is beginning to develop a rapport with Reed now gives him whatever license he feels he needs to kill her as well, though he drags it out for the sheer sadistic fun of it to a very cynical and blood-splattered conclusion.There isn't too much doubt that THE HUNTING PARTY was made to take advantage of the "market" opened up by THE WILD BUNCH and its director Sam Peckinpah's choreography of violent action, as well the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. The shootouts are extremely bloody, and they clearly mirror those of THE WILD BUNCH in the use of slow motion and quick cutting. Where THE HUNTING PARTY falls short, however, is in a crucial area that Peckinpah knew was vital to his film being successful: the action and plot must be character-driven and made to feel real to an audience. Veteran TV director Don Medford (who, among other things, directed the classic 1961 Twilight Zone episode "Death's Head Revisited) and screenwriters Gilbert Ralston, William Norton, and Lou Morheim know how to do the Peckinpah-inspired gunfights, but they don't seem to have taken too much time to really delineate any complexities in the three main characters. Bergen is merely a damsel in distress, caught between two men who are basically bastards, one merely semi-controlling (Reed), the other a sadistic control freak of the highest order (Hackman). Absent the complex psychological and character-driven narrative that propelled THE WILD BUNCH to a controversial but well-deserved glory, THE HUNTING PARTY can so easily be tagged, as more than a few critics have done (albeit perhaps too zealously), as an extremely bloody sagebrush shooting gallery in which violence is staged for the sake of violence.The film does succeed in giving us good performances from the three leads (notably Hackman, whose role is credibly sadistic to the highest degree); good cinematography done on location in Spain (as a stand-in for Texas); and supporting roles for L.Q. Jones (a member of Peckinpah's stock company); Simon Oakland; Mitchell Ryan; and William C. Watson. And one can't fault the long-distance shooting that occurs, or the way it so ingeniously borrows a great old-world story (THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME) and puts it into a WILD BUNCH-type western format. Had the filmmakers only paid a bit more attention to complex characters and motives here as Peckinpah had in his epic film, however, THE HUNTING PARTY might have been a bit more than a good, if incredibly and graphically violent, post-Peckinpah/Leone addition to a Western genre that was rapidly changing during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Robert J. Maxwell I wonder if this film doesn't have pretensions to art. Maybe not, but it's evident that someone went to the trouble of thinking up some novel variations on the usual conventions.We've seen a number of movies before -- the posse or the revenge party pursuing somebody across harsh terrain -- "Tell Them Willie Boy is Here," "Three Godfathers", "Chato's Land," and so on -- but this is the only one I can think of offhand in which each party -- pursued and pursuer -- changes its attitude towards the other.About two dozen cowboy roughnecks led by Oliver Reed and including the bad L. Q. Jones and the good Mitchell Ryan kidnap the bride of the wealthy Western entrepreneur and big game hunter, Gene Hackman. Hackman hears about this while on a train, after banging a Chinese hooker, and, man, is he mad. He fantasizes the gang will rape Bergan repeatedly, impregnate her, and then sell her back as damaged goods. So he forms a posse of half a dozen friends, arms them with telescopic rifles that will outshoot any existing rifle by twice the range.Nothing much new there, except that instead of an outraged groom, Hackman has revealed himself as a stark materialist and a rather rough lover. But then Hackman's group gradually find themselves within range of the kidnappers after a long chase through some extremely picturesque mountains, badlands, and desert scrub. The kidnappers have no idea anything is up until a couple of them get shot by rifles too far away to see.Here's where somebody put some thought into the script. Ordinarily, in an ordinary Western, the convention is that when you are shot, you die. They may shoot your horse instead, but then the horse gets up with an irritated look and trots off unharmed. If you are only wounded, you get away and, if you're a good guy, you recover the use of your gun hand.Not here. A wound is intensely painful and your buddy can't always pluck out the offending bullet, no matter how much mescal you drink or how hard the praying Padre holds your arms down. If they're mortally wounded the victims just don't flop down and lie there. They twitch a little before they kick off. The horses don't get up if they're hit, although they're definitely horse de combat. (Apologies. The voices make me do it.) They jerk their heads and legs and whinny. The first kidnapper to get shot has his head blown off while taking a dump.Hackman treats all this as a hunting party. And one or two of his posse smile as they take pot shots, especially G. D. Spradlin. What they don't know is that Bergman has been scared out of her wits after the kidnapping but when she seeks comfort in the arms of the stolid Oliver Reed, he roughly rapes her. Then she falls in love with him. (I said it was artistically ambitious, not that it was politically correct.) The others in Hackman's party realize what's happening and leave. "It's not worth it," shouts Simon Oakland, the least likely cowboy you're ever likely to see, but he's right. Nevertheless, all the gang die except Reed who, along with Bergman, is reduced to trekking through the vastness of the desert, horseless, until they collapse. Their hopes in ruins, they murmur about plum trees and grapes in California, until the shimmering image of an equally horseless Hackman appears. He shoots both of them dead and collapses to wait for death.Hackman is always fine, either as bad guy or good guy. Oliver Reed, with his hoarse mutter and eternal scowl, is hard to place. Candace Bergen isn't given much opportunity to act. She looks (1) wary, (2) distressed, or under stress, as when being raped, (3) shocked and surprised. You can tell because her mouth opens and she screams, "Oh, oh, oh!" She's so staggeringly beautiful that it hardly matters. Her long loose blond hair is always immaculately brushed and lustrous. What would happen to your hair and mine under those circumstances does not happen to hers. As an actress, she labors under the same disadvantage as some other actresses -- like Kathleen Ross and Jane Fonda. She sounds like she just graduated from some classy school like Sarah Lawrence.There's a misplaced semi-comic incident involving canned peaches that the musical score, a sprightly banjo, tells us is supposed to be funny, but it's not.There may be an occasional wince while watching this but it's not a bad film. It's at least interesting all the way through.