Producer
Roger Corman, Samuel Gelfman
Writer
Charles Willeford
Cast
Warren Oats, Richard B. Shull, Harry Dean Stanton, Laurie Bird, Ed Begley Jr., Troy Donahue
contact
Private
Special book launch event for Kier-La Janisse’s years-in-the-making COCKFIGHT: A FABLE OF FAILURE (Spectacular Optical Publications). Copies will be available for purchase and signing 30-min in advance of the screening. Click here for book details - https://www.spectacularoptical.ca/store/product/cockfight
“A very special film. A glorious and often forgotten gem of the Hollywood New Wave”
– JJ McDermott, MOMENTARY CINEMA
“Hellman embraces, with visual nuance, a world of back roads and forests, grim motels and ramshackle arenas, and he approaches the intricacies of the subculture... with a cool Hemingwayesque moralism”
– Richard Brody, THE NEW YORKER
Frank Mansfield (Warren Oates) has a singular obsession. He is a professional cockfighter, who breeds, conditions, and fights pedigreed roosters in service to an ancient underground bloodsport. But after shooting his mouth off, he loses his prize cock in a late-night drunken hack, immediately before he is poised to win a decisive tournament. As a result, he determines to take a vow of silence until he can win the Cockfighter of the Year Award. He teams up with former Madison Avenue ad man Omar Baradinsky (Richard B. Shull), and they make a partnership for the season, hustling their way through the cockfighting circuit alongside a colourful cast of characters who make their living like Frank does, all building up to the annual Milledgeville Southern Conference Tournament where Frank will get his long-awaited second chance at winning the medal.
Based on the 1962 book by Charles Willeford, who also wrote the screenplay (and would later be canonized in the world of crime fiction with the publication of MIAMI BLUES in 1984), COCKFIGHTER is infamous for purportedly being the only film Roger Corman ever lost money on—although its infamy may also have something to do with its protest-baiting subject matter. Still, many hold COCKFIGHTER up as Willeford’s masterpiece.
Monte Hellman was recovering from the unexpected flop of his own masterpiece, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) when Corman offered him the opportunity to direct. COCKFIGHTER’s silent, competitive protagonist working within the closed value system of a marginal subculture wasn’t so far off from TWO-LANE’s unnamed Driver—though admittedly Oates plays the hell outta this character, brilliantly mediating between Hellman’s version of Frank Mansfield and Willeford’s.
The film features an ace cast of secondary characters including Harry Dean Stanton, Laurie Bird, Robert Earl Jones, Ed Begley, Jr., Steve Railsback, Millie Perkins, Troy Donahue, Tom Spratley, Patricia Pearcy, and a whole host of real-life cockfighters whose chipboard coliseums are beautifully rendered by imported cinematographer Nestor Almendros. COCKFIGHTER is a film of multiple mythologies: mythology concerning the noble history of the violent sport at its heart; mythology about the ‘auteur’ and what constitutes authorship of a film; mythology around rising stars who disappeared from view too soon; and mythology about The South — what it means and who it belongs to.
Monte Hellman passed away in 2021, and Roger Corman—tireless titan of the B-picture and arguably the most important movie producer of the 20th century—passed away only this year as this screening was being planned for the film’s Anniversary: 50 years to the day from its world premiere in Roswell, Georgia on July 30, 1974. – Kier-La Janisse
Special Thanks to Julie Corman and Joe Dante
Showings
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