Metrograph

Though it was Days of Heaven that won him plaudits, the first American film shot by Néstor Almendros was a rather lesser-known masterwork, Monte Hellman’s Roger Corman–produced adaptation of Charles Willeford’s 1962 novel of the same name, following Frank Mansfield (a superlative Warren Oates) on his odyssey to earn the Cockfighter of the Year award—and, as a reward, lift his self-imposed vow of silence. Of his first outing in the States, in sticky rural Georgia, Almendros would write: “Far away from the equilibrium of the French countryside I found myself facing the rather tacky but extraordinarily photogenic image of contemporary America: motels, billboards, gas stations, cafeterias, etc., to say nothing of those small Roman circuses, the cock pits.”