The Hunting Party (1971) – DVD

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Oliver Reed, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Simon Oakland
screenplay by William Norton and Gilbert Alexander & Lou Morheim
directed by Don Medford

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pity poor Candice Bergen. First, her rich and brutal husband (Gene Hackman) rapes her before heading off to work, then she's kidnapped by Oliver Reed's gang and nearly raped by L.Q. Jones. Later, Reed rapes her, though she's strangely not upset on her second go-round. Still, she has plenty of opportunity to get worked up when Jones tries to rape her again. Hackman is clearly annoyed–if anyone's going to be raping anyone, it ought to be him, and the gauche competition so challenges his manhood that he sets out to shoot the (ahem) nice-guy rapist and his would-be rapist gang. I sure hope Bergen was well-compensated for her time, though I can't imagine what could compensate for sitting through the result.

The Hunting Party is the post-Wild Bunch knockoff western, executed by dull minds with no idea of what they're trying to accomplish. Sam Peckinpah was no stranger to violence sexual and otherwise, but at least his apparent misogyny was tempered by ambiguity and a tortured conscience. Here, it's just part of the template, designed to cash in on a gory hit without a shred of intelligence or remorse. Hackman is of course the well-moneyed '70s stand-in for The Man, while Reed is his rebellious lower number; Bergen is given the hardly advantageous choice of the jerk who brutalizes her casually or the one who does it because he cares. Hell, Reed only hijacked her so she could teach him how to read, a skill Hackman presumably takes for granted. Do the math.

To be fair, the brutishness is offset by a complete lack of interest on the part of director Don Medford. Although he's clearly been instructed to ramp up the slo-mo violence (Hackman wields a high-powered rifle or two, the better to pick off the metaphorically helpless gang members), he lacks Peckinpah's flair for editing and flamboyance. At his most creative, The Hunting Party is marginally more interesting than a TV movie at best. Thus you can stand outside the icky goings-on and appreciate the ludicrousness of the whole macho trip–anyone rigging a movie between good rapist and bad rapist becomes the most pathetic sort of wishful thinker. Rather than take a subversive approach, Medford is happy to present the material straight-up and collect a paycheck.

The lone moment of self-awareness in The Hunting Party occurs following Reed's turn at the rape trough: once he's had his way with Bergen, he pensively remarks to her, "You either get bought, or get took. You just got took." A more astute film would have seized upon this blunt formulation of women's choices in the western genre and determined that this particular choice is no choice at all. Even a distracted Peckinpah might be up for that–Medford is anything but, instead repeating Pauline Kael's cutting formulation of pornography–"from degradation comes adoration"–with the caveat that for adoration you have to be a moustachioed British refugee from Ken Russell movies. Which means that as long as people pay to see this movie, Bergen won't be the only one to get took.

THE DVD
MGM's The Hunting Party comes to DVD in a flipper fullscreen/1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen edition. The image has its weak points, chiefly washed-out colours that look bland regardless of this film's sun-bleached palette, as well as minor blurriness in the centre of some shots we can perhaps attribute to a lens aberration. Fine detail is decent enough. The Dolby Digital 2.0 mono sound is good but not great, lacking brilliant fullness or razor-sharpness but offering enough of both to achieve inoffensiveness. The film's trailer caps off the DVD.

111 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; MGM