The Shooting

Warren Oates stars as Willett Gashade, a former bounty hunter, while Jack Nicholson plays the hostile hired gun Billy Spear. Millie Perkins appears as the enigmatic woman who hires Gashade, and Will Hutchins plays Coley, Gashade's naive traveling companion. Nicholson also served as co-producer on the film.

Yes, both films were shot back-to-back in 1965 in Utah by director Monte Hellman, with Jack Nicholson producing and starring in both. They are frequently discussed as a pair of existential, revisionist Westerns that subverted genre conventions. Roger Corman provided backing for the two films.

The screenplay was written by Carole Eastman, who later received an Oscar nomination for her script for Five Easy Pieces (1970), also starring Jack Nicholson. Eastman's script for The Shooting is deliberately spare and ambiguous, contributing to the film's enigmatic, existential tone.

Unlike conventional Westerns with clear heroes and straightforward shootouts, The Shooting features an ambiguous plot with unanswered questions, minimal dialogue, and a descent into paranoia and violence. The stark desert setting and dreamlike final chase sequence give it a surreal quality. It is often categorized alongside other late-1960s anti-Westerns that questioned the genre's mythologizing.