Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★ 4

  In a paranoid law and order society, you are the role you are assigned to play. Very slippery and sorrowful with such a perfect control of landscape and drama. It looks back to Boetticher's spare desperation, but gives it a cynical 60s upgrade which makes it even more than the more obvious modernist The Shooting, its position of an object d'art of its time and also complete out of any time. It is often treated as a footnote for its more famous companion piece, but because its surface feels closer to a standard western, I'd argue it is also the more radical one: from its steadfast refusal to payoff genre pleasures, to the sensibility of its ensemble acting, disposition to…

• Review by Blake Bergman "Various Spaghetti" ★★★★

  "Ride in the Whirlwind" is mid 60's independent western directed by Monte Hellman. Looking back at the time of its releasement, it is one of the founding western films with the wave of New American Cinema that predominately made its impact known throughout the 1970's. Uniquely enough, in probably what was a budgetary effort at the time, Monte Hellman shot this film piggybacking of another one of his efforts "The Shooting" (1966). They are both different within the narrative context, both now they are considered companion pieces of each other in addition to the application of being able to be viewed on separate terms.

  The story within the film, in Hellman fashion, is more of the journey-based blend of moment…

• Review by matt lynch ★★½

  there's something here about short-term thinking (look at the way they idly play checkers, a game of strategy, while complaining about how futile of a game it is), and then something else that suggests these characters are trapped in a behavioral loop (endless pursuit, capture, and escape), and it seems to be pointing at something spare and existential. but deliberate inertia is still inertia, and even at 80 minutes i couldn't wait for this to either get moving or wrap up.

• Review by Jake Cole ★★★★

  Ostensibly more straightforward than The Shooting, though Hellman's idiosyncratic use of close-ups and the suffocating use of interiors hints that this is every bit its companion's equal as an unnerving formal experience. If the other film was a John Cheever-esque exercise in quiet surrealism wherein the taciturn western hero ultimately confronts only himself, here the contents are more explicitly political in their deconstruction, noting that in a time where the only evidence was circumstantial evidence, being in the wrong place at the wrong time is tantamount to guilt. In a brutal yet oddly subtle and understated way, the film shreds the genre's morality plays by illustrating how posses of outlaws and of their victims ultimately look the same to an…

• Review by BeardofTsu ★★★★

  'He could negotiate a movie deal on a payphone, shoot it in the booth, and finance it with the money in the change slot'

  RIP Roger Corman. A true one-of-a-kind that helped nurture and launch so many careers. Loved by everyone but Paul Schrader LOL! There will never be another like him again. Rest in peace, King.

• Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★★

  Sobre os dois faroestes do Hellman com o Nicholson:

  The Shooting é sobre um grupo que se forma num Oeste tornado labirinto, o Oeste recomposto à luz dos filmes do Antonioni e do Resnais;

  Ride in the Whirlwind é sobre um grupo que se desfaz num Oeste tornado entropia, o Oeste dos filmes de Mann e Boetticher esgarçado aos confins do absurdo da injustiça.

  
  Sobre Ride in the Whirlwind: isto.

• Review by Will Sloan ★★★★ 2

  Watched on TV with my dad.

  Monte Hellman looking to become my most-watched director for 2021. Gonna have to finally spin Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! to solidify this.

• Review by Jordan James Brooks ★★★★ 3

  “What do ya want with us?!”

  Ride in the Whirlwind is the other Monte Hellman Western shot in the Utah desert along with The Shooting, back in 1965. Similar to that film, this one alsostars Millie Perkins and Jack Nicholson, who also wrote this and co-produced both features.

  The premise follows three cowboys, Wes (Nicholson), Vern (Cameron Mitchell) and Otis (Tom Filer) who take up refuge at a cabin. Before long, they discover that their hosts are outlaws that robbed a stagecoach and killed the guard. On top of all of this, a posse made up of vigilantes is on the hunt and soon mistake the trio for being apart of the same gang.

  There’s some great early performances from…

• Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★

  A perfect companion to/inversion of The Shooting. Instead of wandering through wide open spaces, the heroes are trapped in increasingly confined ones. Instead of chasing something they don't know for reasons they don't understand, they're being chased by perfectly logical (if extra-legal) pursuers for perfectly logical (though mistaken) reasons. In The Shooting, it's Warren Oates's fate to chase himself through an endless wilderness. In Ride in the Whirlwind, it's mere chance that ensnares Jack Nicholson and it is luck, the randomness of bullets fired into the brush or a pretty girl catching the eye of a lonely man, that allows him to escape.

• Review by RanchoTuVu ★★★★½ 2

  Ride in the Whirlwind is super subdued given the plot in which innocent men are assumed to be part of an outlaw gang and will either be shot or hanged if they're caught by an unduly authorized posse of vigilantes who are not worried about searching for any details that might clear them of guilt. They're a 60s revisionist western remake of the posse from The Ox-Bow Incident. But the film's focus is on three "drovers" who spend the night with a band of outlaws lead by Harry Dean Stanton and then a long escape and pursuit follows leading to a dirt farm where Millie Perkins lives with her Ma and Pa. She's pretty cool, too. Jack Nicholson and Cameron…

• Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★ 3

  Minimalist low-budget western directed by Monte Hellman and written by a seemingly twelve-year-old Jack Nicholson (he was 28–29, but still, this is years before Easy Rider). Three fellas are riding through the wild frontier looking for a place to rest when they come across the hideout of a notorious gang of outlaws. They're suspicious, but they need somewhere to stay, and the bandits seem nice enough (sure! why not?), so they sleep the night. Big mistake. The Law comes looking for the outlaws the next day, and they assume that these three innocent guys are part of the gang. With the cops on one side and the robbers on the other, these men must find a way to get back…

• Review by Matt J. 🇺🇦 ★★★ 1

  Jack Nicholson does a pretty good Christian Slater impersonation.