1966 Classic, Originally a Massive Box Office Flop, Named Among Greatest Westerns of All Time
Jack Nicholson is one of the biggest names in Hollywood, but at one point in his career he was the top billing for a film that failed to get picked up for the big screen.
The Shooting was a 1966 Western often viewed as the companion piece to Ride in the Whirlwind and while it picked up stellar critical reviews, the movie failed to make an impact at the box office after it was never given an official theatrical release.
"The Shooting was shown at film festivals around the U.S., as well as out-of-competition at Cannes, but was never initially picked up by a U.S.-based distributor. Foreign film rights were sold to a company that subsequently went bankrupt, and due to various legal issues, the film risked never seeing the light of day," Collider wrote.
And yet, it remains one of the greatest Westerns of all time according to Timeout.
'The Shooting' Ranked Among Greatest Westerns
The Shooting came in at No. 13 in Timeout's list of the greatest Westerns of all time ahead of well-known films like Stagecoach and Shane.
"A few years before Alejandro Jodorowsky truly spiked the genre's water supply, Monte Hellman made this bad-trip western, regarded as a harbinger of the ‘acid' subgenre, where theme overrides plot and the sense of impending doom is nearly asphyxiating," Timeout wrote.
"Nothing is ever fully revealed, but for Hellman, best known for the existential road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, it's the journey, not the destination – and in this case, the journey is a death march across a barren stretch of the American frontier, a trail of expired horses left behind as milemarkers. Against the desolate Utah landscape, Hellman uses disorienting jump cuts and bits of absurd humor to achieve a hallucinatory tone unseen in westerns to that point, culminating in a super slo-mo shootout that's less of an exclamation point on the proceedings than an ellipsis."
The film has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics and can be seen for free on several streaming platforms like Tubi and The Roku Channel.
Related: 1954 Classic, Which Broke the Mold, Named 'Greatest Western Movie of All Time'
This story was originally published by Men's Journal on Jun 28, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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This story was originally published June 27, 2026 at 8:23 PM.