The Shooting is a 1966 American Western film edited and directed by Monte Hellman, with a screenplay by Carole Eastman (using the pseudonym Adrien Joyce).

The film was shot in 1965 in the Utah desert, back-to-back with Hellman's similar Western Ride in the Whirlwind, which also starred Nicholson and Perkins.

Willet Gashade, a former bounty hunter, returns to his small mining camp after a lengthy absence and finds his slow-witted friend Coley in a state of fear.

The killing was possibly committed in revenge for the accidental trampling death of "a little person" in town, which may have been caused by Gashade's brother, Coigne.

Gashade examines the dead horse and notes that it appeared to be perfectly healthy, though the woman had said its leg was broken.

At night, having mistaken random gunshots by Coley as a signal from the woman, Spear suddenly walks into their camp and joins them.

They fight, and after knocking Spear unconscious, Gashade grabs a large rock and crushes the killer's gun hand.

After completing the films, the director and actor wrote a screenplay called Epitaph and presented it to Roger Corman to produce.

They agreed, and while Nicholson started working on the script for Ride in the Whirlwind, Hellman asked their mutual friend Carole Eastman to write The Shooting.

Corman felt that if mention was made three times during the course of the film that Gashade had a brother, audiences would not be confused by the climactic sequence.

[4] After briefly considering Sterling Hayden for Gashade, Hellman was shopping in a Los Angeles bookstore when he suddenly and simultaneously thought of Perkins, Warren Oates, and Will Hutchins for the main roles.

[4] Hellman and Nicholson scouted locations for several weeks, and looked at such familiar locales as Monument Valley before deciding on Kanab, Utah.

[4] After The Shooting was completed, production immediately commenced on Hellman's Ride in the Whirlwind, a similarly mysterious Western that also featured Nicholson and Perkins in the cast.

Also in 1968, the U.S. rights for both were sold to the Walter Reade Organization, a New York-based theatre chain that occasionally distributed films (they also handled the initial release of Night of the Living Dead).

Critics who did manage to view the film were extremely enthusiastic, and generally found it superior to Hellman's companion Western, Ride in the Whirlwind.

Danny Peary in Cult Movies (1981), after admitting he had difficulties with the "puzzling" climax, noted, "But while the end may ask more questions than it answers, the exciting journey that brings us to this point is one of the most rewarding sequences in the history of Westerns.

"[10] Leonard Maltin said it was an "...ultimately powerful film with an offbeat performance by Nicholson as a hired gun... and an incredible, unexpected finale.

"[15] David Pirie in Time Out wrote:"Probably the first Western which really deserves to be called existential... Hellman builds remorselessly on the atmosphere and implications of the 'quest' until it assumes a terrifying importance in itself... What Hellman has done is to take the basic tools of the Western, and use them, without in anyway diluting or destroying their power, as the basis for a Kafkaesque drama.

"[16]Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: The Western notes that "Hellman's calculated style, replete with disorientating close-ups and strange moments... confirm the detached fatalism of his story.

"[17] James Monaco's The Movie Guide described the film as "[H]ighly effective, playing with various levels of character and ideas... it is a fine western stylization that should not be missed.

"[9] Jonathan Rosenbaum has referred to the film as the first acid Western, and cited it as an inspiration for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

[18] He would later write that "Brad Stevens' excellent Monte Hellman: His Life and Films links this odd movie, which he calls Hellman’s first masterpiece, to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but I'm more prone to view it as the best western Alain Resnais never made...If it weren’t so funny in its inimitable absurdist way, I suppose one could call it pretentious, but only at the risk of missing all the scary fun.