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There are directors who are a brand unto themselves, possessed of such distinctive styles, personalities and thematic preoccupations that audiences know exactly what to expect of them and generally recognize their films at a single glance. Hitchcock is the most obvious example. Sam Peckinpah was that kind of director, too, an artist who not only defined himself indelibly on screen but also gave voice and shape to his era. Difficult, excessive in his behavior and appetites, Peckinpah created a personal off-screen legend fueled by controversy and a relentless drive toward self-destruction and in his films added as much to the form and substance of the Western genre as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann before him.
His overriding focus was the American West - or more specifically, the dying of the West and the attendant sense of loss, failure and betrayal that pervaded his stories on the subject. Out of this obsession, Peckinpah created mythic, universal tales of men out of place in a changing world, often seeking to redeem themselves at the end of their lives or the end of an era. He also created works that carried the weight and cultural resonance of their time, as critic Elvis Mitchell has said of what is Peckinpah's best known and arguably most fully realized film, The Wild Bunch (1969). In most minds, this director is primarily associated with violence, bringing it to the forefront as no one had before and changing forever the way it is portrayed on film. But while today we are inured to stylized, gratuitous blood and gore in movies, with Peckinpah it remains linked to an exact historical moment, the era of Vietnam, political assassinations, an age when the world seemed to be in constant chaos.
He was born in Fresno, California, in 1925 and grew up on a 35-acre ranch surrounded by horses. His highly religious mother sold the ranch, breaking the hearts of her sons Sam and Dennie and perhaps contributing to the future filmmaker's sense of loss and his focus on the disappearance of the American frontier. After a stint in the Marines, he attended theater school at the University of Southern California, followed by a series of jobs in the industry, including a stagehand on television's The Liberace Show. Director Don Siegel took a liking to the young man and gave him work on several of his productions, usually as dialogue director, and cast him in a small part in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Around this time, Peckinpah broke into television, writing and sometimes directing for the Western series Gunsmoke, Broken Arrow, Zane Grey Theater, and eventually creating the show The Westerner, a critical but not commercial success that lasted only a half season in 1960. (It was here that Peckinpah began his collaboration with master cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who would shoot five of his films.) He attracted sufficient attention from The Westerner to get his first big screen assignment, The Deadly Companions (1961), a Western featuring the star of Peckinpah's short-lived TV series, Brian Keith, and Maureen O'Hara.
His true breakthrough, however, came the following year with Ride the High Country (1962), a beautiful, elegiac Western starring two of the genre's icons, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in the twilight of their careers, as two old friends joining forces for a final job. Scott hopes it will earn him some quick, dishonest cash; McCrea only wants to perform his duty with dignity, to redeem himself , at the end of his life to, in his words, "enter my house justified," one of Peckinpah's most famous and personally revealing lines. Ride the High Country was the unexpected hit of the year, particularly in Europe, where it won festival awards over such established European film artists as Federico Fellini. Critic Pauline Kael called it "perhaps the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns."
Suddenly Peckinpah was a major force, deemed worthy by the studio system of big stars, big budgets and a longer shooting schedule. But his next film, Major Dundee (1965), turned out to be a legendary disaster. Tensions ran high on the set, owing greatly to the director's inexperience and his erratic and abusive behavior toward cast and crew, helping sabotage his own efforts to take advantage of this golden opportunity. At one point, Peckinpah yelled an epithet at star Charlton Heston, who spun around on his horse and charged the director, just barely missing skewering him on the camera crane where he sat. Still, Heston came to respect Peckinpah's talent, and when the studio, Columbia, threatened to replace the director, Heston insisted he would quit if they did and offered his salary to defray cost overruns. Nervous studio executives quickly accepted. Major Dundee, despite flashes of the film artist to come, was a box office failure, and Peckinpah's stock plummeted quickly.
He spent the next three years scrambling for directing jobs while making do with screenwriting assignments and work on TV, including directing an acclaimed version of the play Noon Wine (1966). His success with that production brought him an offer from Warner Brothers to film a new Western. Peckinpah assembled a sterling cast - William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson - took them to Mexico, and came away with the startling, bloody The Wild Bunch (1969). The film caused an instant sensation - and instant controversy for its balletic, graphic, unrelenting violence. At a press junket attended by 450 journalists, opinion was divided over whether they had just witnessed a masterpiece (a minority opinion) or a gratuitous bloodbath. Those who were put off by the picture saw only the violence and missed the tremendous depth of character Peckinpah brought to this group of aging men. They were fading remnants of the breed that made the West, taking one last chance and for the first time in their lives acting in the service of others. What Peckinpah had done with these savage killers was reveal their unexpected humanity. Critics were divided, but the public made it a hit, likely because rather than in spite of the excessive violence. Peckinpah had created a masterpiece, but it forever branded him in the public mind as a director of brutal action pictures.
"I'm always being criticized for putting violence in my films, but when I leave it out nobody bothers to see the film," Peckinpah would later complain. His next release, The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), certainly proved that point. An intimate and, at times, whimsical love story set in the middle of the desert, the picture received no studio support and garnered no interest from an audience looking for more of The Wild Bunch's slow-motion carnage. It died quickly, but Peckinpah often called it his favorite film, and on the college circuit later in his career, it was Cable Hogue and not the more-often requested Wild Bunch that he wanted to screen and discuss.
Peckinpah returned to his trademark violence in two more releases, Straw Dogs (1971), a contemporary drama set in England, far from his usual landscape, and The Getaway (1972), another contemporary story, starring Steve McQueen. But in between he made the warm and intimate Junior Bonner (1972), also starring McQueen, as well as Robert Preston and Ida Lupino. It was a quiet and moving portrait of a broken family trying to put itself back together, another contemporary story but very clearly a Western (with a rodeo setting) and one that reflected the concerns of his period-set pictures. In this story, Peckinpah made it clear how much he despised the modern world, evident in the film's tagline: "He has only one problem - the 20th century." Everything he felt about the destruction of the West was summed up in a scene in which Preston's house is bulldozed. Like The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Junior Bonner was not what audiences expected or wanted from Peckinpah and quickly disappeared from movie screens.
The director's next two pictures after The Getaway were steeped in the expected violence but nonetheless highly personal, idiosyncratic works that many rank among his very best. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) brought together perhaps the most amazing collection of Western character actors ever assembled, among them Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, L.Q. Jones and Paul Fix. The fatalistic story of one man stalking another, a youthful version of himself, reflected the same basic theme of Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, that of two friends locked by time and circumstance in a dance of betrayal and death. With the casting of young musicians Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan and the addition of evocative, contemporary songs on the soundtrack (most notably Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"), Peckinpah created what many said was a film as much about the 1970s as the 1870s.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) was shot in Mexico and gave a much deserved starring role to the often underrated Warren Oates. Another contemporary story, it is still very much a Western. (Critic David Thomson has even speculated it was probably the end of the Western as a genre.) In the lead character's unyielding drive to complete a gruesome job in the face of overwhelming anguish, many saw the film as Peckinpah's most confessional work. Screenwriter Gordon Dawson said that when Peckinpah sent him a ten-page outline and told him he wanted a script in ten days for ten grand, "I stuck my tongue in my cheek and wrote a caricature of Peckinpah." The film's editor, Garth Craven, has said that well into shooting, Peckinpah - probably the last person on the set to realize it - finally recognized that Oates was playing him. But for all he poured into it, the picture was neither a critical nor commercial success.
Well before Alfredo Garcia, Peckinpah had begun his unstoppable personal slide. Always a heavy drinker, he became more addicted to alcohol and drugs with each passing year and each project, exhibiting cruel and unpredictable behavior on the set and off. His relationships with family, friends, and colleagues were irreparably damaged and his reputation for difficulty made it more and more impossible to get personal projects off the ground. He never made another great picture after Alfredo Garcia and none of his final four films, with the exception perhaps of Convoy (1978), another Kris Kristofferson vehicle, had much relation to the Western settings and themes he so memorably explored. His last feature was an adaptation of author Robert Ludlum's best-selling thriller The Osterman Weekend (1983). Sam Peckinpah died in December 1984, two months short of his sixtieth birthday.
By Rob Nixon
His overriding focus was the American West - or more specifically, the dying of the West and the attendant sense of loss, failure and betrayal that pervaded his stories on the subject. Out of this obsession, Peckinpah created mythic, universal tales of men out of place in a changing world, often seeking to redeem themselves at the end of their lives or the end of an era. He also created works that carried the weight and cultural resonance of their time, as critic Elvis Mitchell has said of what is Peckinpah's best known and arguably most fully realized film, The Wild Bunch (1969). In most minds, this director is primarily associated with violence, bringing it to the forefront as no one had before and changing forever the way it is portrayed on film. But while today we are inured to stylized, gratuitous blood and gore in movies, with Peckinpah it remains linked to an exact historical moment, the era of Vietnam, political assassinations, an age when the world seemed to be in constant chaos.
He was born in Fresno, California, in 1925 and grew up on a 35-acre ranch surrounded by horses. His highly religious mother sold the ranch, breaking the hearts of her sons Sam and Dennie and perhaps contributing to the future filmmaker's sense of loss and his focus on the disappearance of the American frontier. After a stint in the Marines, he attended theater school at the University of Southern California, followed by a series of jobs in the industry, including a stagehand on television's The Liberace Show. Director Don Siegel took a liking to the young man and gave him work on several of his productions, usually as dialogue director, and cast him in a small part in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Around this time, Peckinpah broke into television, writing and sometimes directing for the Western series Gunsmoke, Broken Arrow, Zane Grey Theater, and eventually creating the show The Westerner, a critical but not commercial success that lasted only a half season in 1960. (It was here that Peckinpah began his collaboration with master cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who would shoot five of his films.) He attracted sufficient attention from The Westerner to get his first big screen assignment, The Deadly Companions (1961), a Western featuring the star of Peckinpah's short-lived TV series, Brian Keith, and Maureen O'Hara.
His true breakthrough, however, came the following year with Ride the High Country (1962), a beautiful, elegiac Western starring two of the genre's icons, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in the twilight of their careers, as two old friends joining forces for a final job. Scott hopes it will earn him some quick, dishonest cash; McCrea only wants to perform his duty with dignity, to redeem himself , at the end of his life to, in his words, "enter my house justified," one of Peckinpah's most famous and personally revealing lines. Ride the High Country was the unexpected hit of the year, particularly in Europe, where it won festival awards over such established European film artists as Federico Fellini. Critic Pauline Kael called it "perhaps the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns."
Suddenly Peckinpah was a major force, deemed worthy by the studio system of big stars, big budgets and a longer shooting schedule. But his next film, Major Dundee (1965), turned out to be a legendary disaster. Tensions ran high on the set, owing greatly to the director's inexperience and his erratic and abusive behavior toward cast and crew, helping sabotage his own efforts to take advantage of this golden opportunity. At one point, Peckinpah yelled an epithet at star Charlton Heston, who spun around on his horse and charged the director, just barely missing skewering him on the camera crane where he sat. Still, Heston came to respect Peckinpah's talent, and when the studio, Columbia, threatened to replace the director, Heston insisted he would quit if they did and offered his salary to defray cost overruns. Nervous studio executives quickly accepted. Major Dundee, despite flashes of the film artist to come, was a box office failure, and Peckinpah's stock plummeted quickly.
He spent the next three years scrambling for directing jobs while making do with screenwriting assignments and work on TV, including directing an acclaimed version of the play Noon Wine (1966). His success with that production brought him an offer from Warner Brothers to film a new Western. Peckinpah assembled a sterling cast - William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson - took them to Mexico, and came away with the startling, bloody The Wild Bunch (1969). The film caused an instant sensation - and instant controversy for its balletic, graphic, unrelenting violence. At a press junket attended by 450 journalists, opinion was divided over whether they had just witnessed a masterpiece (a minority opinion) or a gratuitous bloodbath. Those who were put off by the picture saw only the violence and missed the tremendous depth of character Peckinpah brought to this group of aging men. They were fading remnants of the breed that made the West, taking one last chance and for the first time in their lives acting in the service of others. What Peckinpah had done with these savage killers was reveal their unexpected humanity. Critics were divided, but the public made it a hit, likely because rather than in spite of the excessive violence. Peckinpah had created a masterpiece, but it forever branded him in the public mind as a director of brutal action pictures.
"I'm always being criticized for putting violence in my films, but when I leave it out nobody bothers to see the film," Peckinpah would later complain. His next release, The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), certainly proved that point. An intimate and, at times, whimsical love story set in the middle of the desert, the picture received no studio support and garnered no interest from an audience looking for more of The Wild Bunch's slow-motion carnage. It died quickly, but Peckinpah often called it his favorite film, and on the college circuit later in his career, it was Cable Hogue and not the more-often requested Wild Bunch that he wanted to screen and discuss.
Peckinpah returned to his trademark violence in two more releases, Straw Dogs (1971), a contemporary drama set in England, far from his usual landscape, and The Getaway (1972), another contemporary story, starring Steve McQueen. But in between he made the warm and intimate Junior Bonner (1972), also starring McQueen, as well as Robert Preston and Ida Lupino. It was a quiet and moving portrait of a broken family trying to put itself back together, another contemporary story but very clearly a Western (with a rodeo setting) and one that reflected the concerns of his period-set pictures. In this story, Peckinpah made it clear how much he despised the modern world, evident in the film's tagline: "He has only one problem - the 20th century." Everything he felt about the destruction of the West was summed up in a scene in which Preston's house is bulldozed. Like The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Junior Bonner was not what audiences expected or wanted from Peckinpah and quickly disappeared from movie screens.
The director's next two pictures after The Getaway were steeped in the expected violence but nonetheless highly personal, idiosyncratic works that many rank among his very best. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) brought together perhaps the most amazing collection of Western character actors ever assembled, among them Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, L.Q. Jones and Paul Fix. The fatalistic story of one man stalking another, a youthful version of himself, reflected the same basic theme of Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, that of two friends locked by time and circumstance in a dance of betrayal and death. With the casting of young musicians Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan and the addition of evocative, contemporary songs on the soundtrack (most notably Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"), Peckinpah created what many said was a film as much about the 1970s as the 1870s.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) was shot in Mexico and gave a much deserved starring role to the often underrated Warren Oates. Another contemporary story, it is still very much a Western. (Critic David Thomson has even speculated it was probably the end of the Western as a genre.) In the lead character's unyielding drive to complete a gruesome job in the face of overwhelming anguish, many saw the film as Peckinpah's most confessional work. Screenwriter Gordon Dawson said that when Peckinpah sent him a ten-page outline and told him he wanted a script in ten days for ten grand, "I stuck my tongue in my cheek and wrote a caricature of Peckinpah." The film's editor, Garth Craven, has said that well into shooting, Peckinpah - probably the last person on the set to realize it - finally recognized that Oates was playing him. But for all he poured into it, the picture was neither a critical nor commercial success.
Well before Alfredo Garcia, Peckinpah had begun his unstoppable personal slide. Always a heavy drinker, he became more addicted to alcohol and drugs with each passing year and each project, exhibiting cruel and unpredictable behavior on the set and off. His relationships with family, friends, and colleagues were irreparably damaged and his reputation for difficulty made it more and more impossible to get personal projects off the ground. He never made another great picture after Alfredo Garcia and none of his final four films, with the exception perhaps of Convoy (1978), another Kris Kristofferson vehicle, had much relation to the Western settings and themes he so memorably explored. His last feature was an adaptation of author Robert Ludlum's best-selling thriller The Osterman Weekend (1983). Sam Peckinpah died in December 1984, two months short of his sixtieth birthday.
By Rob Nixon