The Sam Peckinpah Centennial

Born 100 years ago today, Hollywood’s original poet of violence, Sam Peckinpah (1922-1984). I reckon it was always forgone that Peckinpah would not live to see this day. The man consumed vast quantities of alcohol and cocaine even unto his late ’50s and died just a few months shy of his sixtieth birthday.

I am not ordinarily a fan of violence in films, in fact, I’m usually harshly critical of it, but I guess what I really can’t stand is mindless violence, where you get the sense that a director is merely feeding base appetites. Most directors of action pictures and westerns and the like seem like they’re delivering a drug. They’re pouring a shot, not mixing a cocktail. While Peckinpah was by many reports a monstrous person to be around, capable of behaving like the villains in his movies, his writing and direction were too thoughtful and ambiguous to dismiss, his work with actors too sensitive. Obviously he was a genius at shooting and cutting action sequences, but for me personally that by itself would never be satisfying enough. TBH, if I’m watching a movie by myself, I generally fast forward over chase scenes, fist-fights, and shoot-outs. Sorry! The scenes that are theoretically the “exciting” ones generally bore me to tears. But not only did Peckinpah make such scenes compelling, he was a gifted storyteller at the human level, and the stories were thought-provoking.

Interestingly, Peckinpah was bred in the bone for his work. Both sides of his family had come west in covered wagons. He grew up in Fresno, California, a descendant of pioneers, in a place where EVERYBODY was descended from pioneers. His grandfather Denver S. Church owned a large cattle ranch, went into politics, became a judge, and then a U.S. Congressman. As a kid, Peckinpah learned how to ride, rope, punch cows and brand ’em, and also to shoot, hunt, trap, and fish. He was both entitled and wild, and a bad character resulted. He spent his last year of high school at a military academy. He then served as a Marine in World War Two and the years directly thereafter. During his tour he did not participate in combat, but witnessed it, saw some horrific sights, and all of this influenced him.

Peckinpah went on to major in history at Cal State Fresno, and then got a masters in drama at USC. He worked in live theatre for a time, and then became a stage manager in the early days of live television. His entry into the movie business was as a dialogue coach on five Don Siegel films between 1954 and 1956. Around the same time he began writing for TV westerns. Right out of the gate we find it notable that he wrote twelve scripts for Gunsmoke, considered by many to be the most violent western series of its day. He also wrote forTales of Wells Fargo,Have Gun Will Travel, and several other shows. A script he wrote for Zane Grey Theatre became the basis of the series The Rifleman, also a legendarily violent show. An early screenplay he wrote eventually became the 1961 movie One Eyed Jacks.

In 1959 Peckinpah created the series The Westerner, starring Brian Keith. By then he had begun to direct. This led to his first film, the low-budget western The Deadly Companions (1961) with Keith, Steve Cochran, Chill Wills, and Maureen O’Hara. This is a modest and forgotten little movie. But his next one Ride the High Country (1962) is today regarded as something of a classic. While it does not yet incorporate Peckinpah’s trademark over-the-top violence, it does already invoke what would proved to be major theme of his work…a changing of the guard, the death of the old west while modernity begins to seep in. The movie is basically the swan song of its two stars, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, though McCrea would later make appearances in smaller roles. It would make a nice double feature with The Shootist. And both actors give deeper performances than they customarily gave in more routine oaters.

Peckinpah’s next film, Major Dundee (1965) proved to be something of a debacle. It stars Charlton Heston as a Union army officer during the Civil War, who forces a ragtime unit of misfits, including freed slaves and Confederate prisoners, on a mission into Mexico to catch some Apaches who have kidnapped some Anglo prisoners. He becomes obsessed, and has echoes of Moby Dick and The Searchers, though this film for some reason is sort of flaccid and less compelling. Both Peckinpaw and co-star Richard Harris drank heavily during the shoot, which went 15 days over schedule and $1.5 million dollars over budget, the first real iteration of problems that would plague the director throughout his career. After this he began directing The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen but was fired after a few days. He then took an assignment directing a telefilm called Noon Wine (1966) starring Jason Robards as a farmer who commits murder in order to retain his very valuable farmhand, who himself has committed a murder.

Then came the movie that remains his best known, a major turning point in his career, The Wild Bunch (1969), in which the director deftly combined elements of The Magnificent Seven (1960), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and (to my mind) Spaghetti Westerns, he set a new formal bar for how such movies could be shot, using lots of slow motion, quick cuts, multiple angles, and unprecedented amounts of fake blood. And a nihilistic, grim screenplay where few members of the all-star cast make it out alive. Peckinpah then confounded everyone by releasing the very strange dream-like comedy The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970 with Robards).

From here, to my mind, Peckinpah’s output was respectable until the mid ’70s. Straw Dogs (1971) was and is controversial. I found it thought provoking and satisfying when I last watched it about 40 years ago, but then I was only 19 at the find. Even then I understood it was problematic (there is a rape scene that is rather hard to watch), but I rather enjoyed Dustin Hoffman’s mousy mathematician snapping and snuffing the pack of ape-like Cornish bullies who have been torturing him throughout the film. It’s the ultimate nerd fantasy, I guess. But I guess, erm, two wrongs don’t make a right. Junior Bonner (1971) starring Steve McQueen was a wonderful intimate human story about a rodeo rider who us aging out of the professions. Audiences stayed away but it’s a fine movie, and would make a wonderful double feature with McQueen’s penultimate film Tom Horn (1980). Then the popular chase film The Getaway (1972) with McQueen and Ali McGraw, whom we married directly thereafter. This one was another major hit, though it’s not my bag. Then the legendary Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), cherished by Bob Dylan fans, followed by the darkly comic Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) starring Warren Oates and a human head in a big. Then the spy thriller The Killer Elite (1975) with James Caan and Robert Duvall, who were both big box office at the time.

Early Saturday Night Live loved him. John Belushi played him in a hilarious sketch; Jane Curtin mentioned Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia on “Weekend Update”.

Then Peckinpah made, erm, some confounding choices. He passed on both King Kong (1976) and Superman (1978) — which is somewhat understandable, for these were more popcorny than even his most commercially aimed picture. But the movies he chose to make instead were the war picture Cross of Iron (1977), in which all of the main characters were Nazis, and the really dumb trucker movieConvoy(1978), which I wrote about here. As it happens Convoy, which was harnessed to the national CB radio craze, turned out to be Peckinpah’s top earning film, but it did nothing to keep the man on the short list of prestige directors. Still, he went on to do The Osterman Weekend (1983), another thriller with all star cast. This was his last theatrical film, although he did direct the MTV music video of Julian Lennon’s “Much Too Late for Goodbyes” — a prescient song title, as it happens.

Where does machismo end and psychosis begin? To my mind, Peckinpah is sort of like John Huston or John Ford squared, injected with rocket fuel. Throughout the career outlined above, Peckinpah was generally smashed, completely drunk, paranoid from cocaine, abusive, violent, irrational. He did things like shoot out mirrors (with guns) when he was mad. Fought with people, missed work, or relied on assistant directors and others to get shots in the can while he hid out in his trailer. In some other universe, he had a glorious, spectacular death: drove his car over a cliff, or took a piece of shrapnel in an explosion scene, or tumbled off the roof of some hacienda. But nah. Good old-fashioned heart failure from too much drugs and alcohol. Hell, someone in the back office can do that!