Intellectual lost in the merciless twists and turns of Hollywood studios, American director with European sensitivity, one of the few to have cultivated the hypothesis of modern cinema on the other side of the Atlantic, disciple of Samuel Beckett and producer Roger Corman, Monte Hellman died on April 20, in Palm Desert, California, at the age of 91.
If his career resembles a field left fallow, it is because none of his films met with success, not even the unforgettable one. Two-way macadam (1971), a staggering opposite to the fashion of the road movie, which has become cult over time. Monte Hellman, however, is not a cursed artist and has never remained inactive, intervening in the shadows on the films of others in different positions, as second-team director, screenwriter, doctor script, editor, producer, assistant or advisor, before teaching cinema at the end of his life at the California Institute of the Arts.
Although sparse and dotted, his work as a filmmaker brings together a handful of astounding films, low-budget works populated by outsiders, which debunk American mythologies by putting them to the test of a reality that is both banal and obtuse. , against which they come crashing down.
“’Waiting for Godot’ has had a profound influence on my whole existence. I think there is a bit of Beckett in everything I did afterwards ”
Born in New York on July 12, 1932, Monte Hellman moved with his parents to California. At Stanford University, he obtained a diploma in theater and made his debut in radio, staging radio plays, such as War of the Worlds, according to HG Wells. Between 1952 and 1955, he joined the Stumptown Players theater group in San Francisco and directed several of his plays. He was then hired by the ABC television channel, where he languished for a time in thankless jobs as an apprentice editor.
He returned to the boards, founded his own company and, in 1957, started Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, premiered on the West Coast of the United States. The play and its existential chasms mark the young Hellman with a hot iron, to the point that he will later declare: ” Somehow, Waiting for Godot has had a profound influence on my entire existence. I think there’s a bit of Beckett in everything I’ve done since. “
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At the end of the 1950s, Hellman joined the stable of Roger Corman, an atypical producer of the Hollywood landscape, known for his inventiveness and his sense of economy, who quickly manufactured, and for modest budgets, a plethora of small series B genre aimed at adolescent audiences. Corman, reputed to have sniffed out young talents like Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese, launches Hellman on a first feature film, Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), horror tape with starving special effects, then uses it for a curious task: to lengthen the duration of the films in its catalog by shooting additional scenes, so that they can be bought by television.
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