No director made movies more passionately than Sam Peckinpah, and aside from Orson Welles, no great filmmaker suffered more at the hands of the studios for whom he plied his trade. Between 1961 and 1983 he made 14 feature films, many of which didn’t make it intact to their first release. He’s usually thought of as a ‘lost’ artist; robbed of half his career by alcohol, personal demons and studio hacks. Yet as Cinematheque Ontario’s retrospective Bring me the Films of Sam Peckinpah makes clear, he gave us everything he had, and everything he had was enough.
The zeitgeist has been much kinder to Peckinpah recently than he ever was to himself: In the last few years, the studios have re-released virtually all of his movies to the DVD catalog; more importantly, they’ve repaired most of the damage they’d done to them as well. With the upcoming release of a restored Cross of Iron, every one of Peckinpah’s most important movies will be available to the viewing public, more or less the way he’d intended us to see them.
At his peak, he was generous with his genius: Between 1969 and 1973 Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner, The Getaway, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Let’s put that in perspective: in the same amount of time it will have taken the producers of the James Bond franchise to bring Casino Royale to market this fall, Sam Peckinpah made six extraordinary films. How could we have been that lucky without noticing it at the time?
Watching them as a group today is an overwhelmingly nostalgic experience: The passion Peckinpah had for both the western and the idea of the west leaps through the screen from his heart directly to yours. You’re emotionally held hostage with no hope of being ransomed, because you’re being kidnapped by a kind of filmmaking that’s gone forever. So it’s very easy to develop a tendency to look back at Peckinpah’s westerns the way Peckinpah looked back at the fin-de-siecle west. When you contemplate the Jerry Bruckheimers and the Michael Bays currently cranking out films in the action-adventure genre, you may find yourself suddenly identifying with Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch: Surveying the motley posse he’s been saddled with to bring the Bunch in, he spits out: “We’re after men—and by God, I wish I was with them!”
For better or (occasionally) worse, seeking out some men is Peckinpah’s blood-and-butter. And unlike, say, Howard Hawks, he’s not concerned so much with what a man does when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, but rather where a man can go if he simply wants to be a man. For Peckinpah, manliness is more of a place on a map than a state of mind. If, like Joel McCrae in Ride the High Country, all you want is to enter your house justified, where do you build your home?
The answer to most Peckinpah men is somewhere within hailing distance of Mexico: All of Peckinpah’s most effective films feature Mexico as a background motif; a source of inspiration and moral compass. Peckinpah’s men are outsiders; refugees from authority and compromise; gun-toting Holden Caulfields laid low by middle age; and they’re people for whom Mexico represents the only remaining frontier worthy of the name; the only place that’s both untrammeled and has in it the kind of people with whom you’d want to share a bottle of whiskey. It’s where the Wild Bunch finds both paradise and death, and it’s where Billy the Kid refuses to run and is killed for it. Major Dundee’s Major Dundee goes there and nearly becomes Heart of Darkness’s Colonel Kurtz; and it’s the place Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw are getting away to in The Getaway. (Virtually every movie of Peckinpah’s could probably be called The Getaway.)
When escape to Mexico is not an option, you get something like Straw Dogs. Infamously described by The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as “the first American film that’s a fascist work of art,” 35 years later Straw Dogs looks more like the Paul Verhoeven version of Home Alone—a potentially defensible thesis about a reasonable man’s capacity for violence, done in by screenwriting straight out of Basic Instinct.
In the context of the films he surrounded it with (the gentle Ballad of Cable Hogue on one side; the genial Junior Bonner on the other), Straw Dogs is a bizarre artifact; Peckinpah besieged by his own demons with no frontier to escape to. It also marked an intrusion of the modern into his work—as if he’d finally looked around and noticed Nixon and Vietnam—and he was never entirely able to shake it off.
Thus, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is as much about America in 1973 as it is about New Mexico in 1881. Mutilated beyond credibility in its first release, the 2005 restoration allows it re-entry into the pantheon of Peckinpah’s’s greatest achievements; as the valedictory to the western he was never allowed to deliver in person. An even better and less sentimental distillation of all of Peckinpah’s themes than The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett is a melancholy farewell to the west and the western, both for the director and for cinema itself. Nobody makes westerns any more at least partly because in 1973 Peckinpah saw to it that there’d be nothing left for them to say.
But where is a director to build his home when he’s just made the last western that would ever need to be made? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is the sight of a filmmaker tearing his guts out coming to grips with the answer. Apocalyptic, obnoxious, and sometimes downright campy, Alfredo Garcia is the great Peckinpah Burnout Movie. In it he pushes every cinematic thesis he’s ever developed past the point of credulity—seemingly over the edge of the earth. Goddard tacked the words “Fin du Film; Fin du Cinema” to the end of his Weekend in 1967, and they’re words that surely could have closed Alfredo Garcia as well—in blood-red letters.
No other substantial filmmaker—except perhaps fellow cinematic wild-man Samuel Fuller—ever wore his guts so unashamedly on his sleeve or made so career-destroying a movie. It’s hard to tell at that stage whether it was a matter of spiritual authenticity or temporary insanity. One thing is certain: For Peckinpah, getting his vision onscreen didn’t just matter, it was a matter of life and death. And ultimately, with a few more indifferent movies—and a lot of help from whiskey—the struggle killed him.
But we should resist the urge to see Sam Peckinpah as a martyr. Film critic David Thompson saw Peckinpah’s screen work as a metaphor for its author’s sufferings in Hollywood, but the truth is exactly the other way around: The studios did him in just as surely as the ranchers did in Pat Garrett, but Peckinpah used his suffering at their hands to perfect the myth he put on screen.
He wouldn’t have had it any other way: For us his life represents the last of a line of men stretching from Ride the High Country’s Steve Judd through Pat Garrett to The Wild Bunch’s Deke Thornton. Sam Peckinpah was our last Western hero.
-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2005
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