The Hunting Party (1971)

••Moderate spoilers ahead••

I'm sure you're all aware of the recent tragic news, but for those who aren't... Gene Hackman's dog died. I don't know anything about Gene Hackman's dog. How old it was. What breed it was. But that doesn't make it any less of a tragedy. So, as a tribute to Gene Hackman's dog, I thought I'd review a movie starring Gene Hackman's dog's owner, Gene Hackman. It's the least I can do.

Gene Hackman didn't buy into the chameleonic tendencies of his contemporaries, like De Niro or Pacino or Hoffman. Aside from a comedic caricature in Young Frankenstein, Gene avoided broad characterisation and focussed on making each role intensely natural and human. With just a facial expression or a look in his eye, whether it be of steely determination or crippling self-doubt, he infused every role with an inherent depth and turned simple words in a script into believable, 3-dimensional people. Regardless of whether the character was good or bad - from Popeye Doyle to Bill Daggett to fuckin' Lex Luthor — Gene made them real.

Which makes The Hunting Party all the more unnerving, because Gene plays a bonafide piece of fucking shit. He's a rich motherfucker who owns a lot of property, with one of those pieces of property being his wife. We're introduced to his character while he's raping her. In fairness, marital rape didn't exist in 1971 when the movie was made, and certainly didn't exist in the late 1800s when the movie is set. So, from a legal standpoint, he was having marital relations with her. He's still a piece of shit.

Gene and his pals go off on a hunting expedition to test out their new rifles, which can hit a target from 800 yards away. Being a piece of shit, he gets in the killing mood by pooning and torturing some Asian whores first. While this is going on, his wife is kidnapped by a gang of thugs, led by Oliver Reed. Olly is the '˜good guy' in this scenario, although that's relative here. He saves her from being raped by one of his flunkies, before beating her into obedience and raping her himself; a rape that becomes kinda sorta maybe consensual halfway through. The '˜70s were a very different time.

Gene is not at all happy about his wife's kidnapping. As he sensitively states, she'll probably get passed around to 15 or 20 different guys and end up pregnant. He's supposed to take back a turned-out whore and look after a bastard kid? Hell no. Instead, he takes his new state-of-the-art rifles and aims them at a new prey: Humans.

In case you haven't gathered, this is a supremely nasty piece of work. Despite being directed by a dude who mostly worked in TV, it embraces (ie. rips off) the savagery of Sam Peckinpah, and not just in the aforementioned lax attitude toward the boundaries of sexual consent. Gunfights are brutal, bloody and merciless. Death does not come briskly in this film's cruel universe. Pain and degradation are celebrated by the grand tunes of Riz Ortolani, of Cannibal Holocaust fame. There's an almost exploitation-like harshness to the bloodshed. It's easy to forget that mainstream '˜70s audiences had no care for trigger warnings and appreciated a certain level of confrontation from cinema.

It is, however, far from perfect. A random scene of comedic peach-eating is bizarrely out of place. Oliver Reed is fine playing a grizzled badass, but far less convincing when his badass is revealed to be a softy with a heart of teddy bears and flowers. In fairness, the problem lies with an under-developed script, rather than with Reed's performance. Gene, on the other hand, is just excellent all round. We've all seen him play a detestable baddie in his entirely deserved Oscar-winning performance in Unforgiven. Here, he's an even more vicious piece of shit and he commits himself fully, as he always did.

If Gene's dog liked watching horses as much as mine does, I think it would have had a ball watching this. RIP, little guy. As for you humans, if you like westerns or like exploitation or, hell, just like '˜70s cinema, this is a damn good flick, well worth checking out.