The Hunting Party stands out as an atypical artifact among early 70s New Hollywood revisionist Westerns due to its unique blend of sniping, guerilla warfare, and the incorporation of the then (i.e., at the time that the film is set) newfangled Sharps-Borchardt Model 1878 (“Fires a center-fire cartridge with the new DuPont gunpowder. Accurate up to 800 yards… Jesus Christ himself couldn’t get any more range out of it”).
Moreover, the absence of traditional hero-villain dynamics and the depiction of characters as either hunters or prey in The Hunting Party contribute to its somewhat noirish atmosphere, setting it apart from conventional Western narratives.
The crucial issue lies not in whether you like the characters but in whether you can truly connect with them; unfortunately, in this movie, every character fails to evoke genuine empathy.
Outlaw Frank Calder (Oliver Reed) and his band of rustlers kidnap Melissa (Candice Bergen), wife of cattle baron Brandt Ruger (Gene Hackman; the character may or may not be named after firearms designer Bill Ruger).
Ruger and four of his rich friends trail Calder’s gang, picking the outlaws off from a safe distance. Meanwhile, Ruger dismisses Melissa callously, viewing her as a commodity to be traded and degraded, showcasing the rancher’s sadistic tendencies in a new light:
“[Calder]’s gonna pass her around. After he’s through with that, maybe 15 or 20 of them, he’ll accept $40,000 or $50,000 of my money. Thank you very much … My Virginia-educated, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth wife used like a whore! Then I have to take her back pregnant with a bastard! And pay him $50,000 of my goddamn money?”
All of this is right up Hackman’s alley, though perhaps somewhat lacking in the psychopathic charm of future evil cowboy roles (The Quick and the Dead, Unforgiven).
Bergen is also a perfect fit for the would-be schoolmarm, and I say ‘would-be’ because that’s what Calder thinks she is; he kidnaps her, and I’m not making this up, because he wants her to teach him to read. Really.
Make no mistake, though; he still wants to and does rape her — he just doesn’t pass her around; in fact, he protects her virtue, or whatever’s left of it, from the rest of the gang.
This is beyond misguided, but the film justifies it by tacitly invoking the man-made myth of the rape fantasy, according to which all women, deep down, want to be raped; it’s an acquired taste, but sooner rather than later, they learn to like it (it happens to the best of them; only two years later, Clint Eastwood himself would be guilty of the same thing in High Plains Drifter).
In a nutshell, we have a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk, a deceptive Jerk with a Heart of Gold who’s actually a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, and a broad who is dumb enough to have married one and fallen in love with the other. See what I mean about every tree being the wrong one to bark up?
All things considered, if we had to choose, Hackman’s character would be the lesser evil (though not by much). He is despicable but believable; as bad as he is (and the movie desperately wants us to believe he’s way worse than Reed), at least hypocrisy is not among his many flaws.
90% of Everything is Crap 