DVD Savant Review: Sam Peckinpah's The Legendary Westerns Collection Sam Peckinpah Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Sam Peckinpah has remained a legendary name among western fans, and this Warners boxed set has been highly anticipated for over a year. Only one of the films here is a repeat release: The Wild Bunch came out in the very first batch of Warner Bros. DVDs back in 1997. It was a flipper that forced viewers to watch the movie in two halves, and it wasn't enhanced for 16:9. The other four titles are new to the format, with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid attracting the lion's share of attention by virtue of having two different versions of the movie, one of which represents a premiere of a new cut. The disc extras have an authoritative pedigree, as they've been compiled by a set of Peckinpah biographers. Some of them worked with Peckinpah and others are industry producers and editors: Nick Redman, Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle.

If there's a known fact about Peckinpah, chances are we first read about it in one of the fine books turned out by this "Peckinpah Posse." Viewers unfamiliar with 'bloody Sam' beyond his ultra-violent reputation will have a lot of information to absorb. Savant admires all of the titles in this box, which include every period Western picture Sam made except for his first and disastrous The Deadly Companions, and Major Dundee . A hot television writer and director, Peckinpah's flair with authentic-sounding frontier dialogue won him many a Hollywood admirer, and the sleeper success of Ride the High Country led to critical accolades and the beginnings of a high-profile career. I prefer to evaluate the movies as fine Westerns rather than examine them through their maker - Peckinpah was a talented writer-director with a self-destructive bent who alienated his producers and blamed others for his own problems. The stories of bad behavior on sets and in public are mostly unprintable, and he quickly drove a flourishing career straight into the proverbial ground.

Most of the second half of Peckinpah's too-short theatrical career is the work of a dissipated man who lost his grip on his profession - The Killer Elite, Convoy , The Osterman Weekend . Peckinpah was a great talent but he doesn't qualify as a Hollywood martyr. Sam Peckinpah's "The Legendary Westerns Collection" celebrates the cream of his work - his westerns are moving, amusing and occasionally profound. And his masterpiece The Wild Bunch stands up as one of the best movies ever made, by anybody. Ride the High Country Richard E. Lyons Pick that up! These mountains don't need your trash! Ride the High Country put Peckinpah on the map with critics and the foreign cinema literati. His first feature The Deadly Companions was an independent western that sprang from a television relationship with Brian Keith. It turned into a mess when its tyrannical star Maureen O'Hara and her producer brother didn't allow Peckinpah the leeway to alter an awkward script.

Peckinpah tried to swing the picture his way by purposely shooting a different (and better) ending, whereupon the producer did a sloppy recut and added insult to injury by slamming ninety minutes of mind-numbing guitar noodling onto the sound track. So far the Panavision Carousel production for Pathé-America has only appeared in cheap pan-scanned video versions, making it impossible to fairly evaluate. Producer Richard E. Lyons and Peckinpah had a good experience on Ride the High Country, following an original script that Peckinpah tweaked and improved with his excellent dialogue skills. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea meet a bible-thumping farmer and for several scenes thereafter put a Biblical lilt into their sly verbal exchanges.

When the greying lawmen share old times, they talk like codgers enjoying a dirty joke we can't share: "All night, Logan!" "Wa-ay up, Logan!" The dialogue reveals character even on the rebound, as when Ron Starr, staring at farm girl Mariette Hartley, is startled because he thinks he hears the word "Ass." Like all of Peckinpah's westerns Ride the High Country gathers up the ragged thematic ends of the genre's previous decade and weaves them into a perfect swansong for the weather-beaten likes of McCrea and Scott, each of whom was on the verge of retirement. This is a moral tug of war between integrity and crooked pragmatism. Synopsis: Aging lawman Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) takes a job transporting gold from the Sierra Nevada mining town of Coarsegold, and hires old pal Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) not knowing that Westrum and his callow sidekick Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) intend to abscond with the paydirt. On the way they pick up Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley) a runaway farm girl hoping to marry Billy Hammond (James Drury), a miner.

But she doesn't realize that Billy is only one of a bunch of uncouth Hammond boys, a near-feral group with no respect for the bonds of marriage. Ride the High Country has a leisurely pace that finds space for almost everything we enjoy in modest westerns. It defines the West in a different way, as Gil and Steve live not in some prairie or desert of the imagination but in a changing California with horseless carriages, Chinese restaurants and obnoxious bankers. Once top-gun town-tamers, Gil and Steve are now on the skids. Steve's coat is frayed and Gil survives by fleecing hicks with an "Oregon Kid" carnival act. Gil sees the possibility of lifting a hundred thousand in gold as a ticket out of old-age poverty, while Steve is content to stay honest and take whatever comes with grace and humility. 1 Gil and Steve are contrasted with the next generation as represented by young couple Elsa and Heck. She's too sheltered to make critical character judgments and he's too cocksure of himself to stay out of trouble. Without ever resorting to a lecture, Ride the High Country lauds the influence that an ethical man of experience can have on the young.

Steve Judd is a terrific role model. Elsa admires his gallantry and Heck is shocked to find out that a sixty-year old man can beat him in a fair fight. The film is a meditation on how to live, giving us examples of religious extremism (Joshua Knudsen), greedy license (the mining town) and hillbilly brutality (the Hammonds). Actually, Judd does bark one brief lecture at Heck that today elicits cheers of approval from Sierra Club types, and anybody who cares about the environment (the quote in blue above). Savant first saw Ride the High Country in Jim Kitses' class at UCLA. Kitses characterized the film as a 'temptation,' with Steve Judd's integrity holding firm against the corruption of the world. He straightens out a young hoodlum, delivers a maiden from a terrible fate, holds off a band of killers and refuses to let an old 'friend' rob him of his principles. Casting straight-arrow Randolph Scott against type as a grinning con-man is nothing less than brilliant. Gil has consciously chosen a crooked path and his cynical remarks serve to deny the knowledge that he's doing wrong. He's corrupt, but the virtuous Steve Judd will redeem him.

When I first rented Ride the High Country on 16mm from Films Incorporated I was told that it was frequently shown in California prisons. The film booker claimed that hardened criminals responded positively to the film's message. Ride the High Country was filmed by ace cameraman Lucien Ballard, a lighting artist whose contribution to Peckinpah's two best films is so great that I'm surprised he's not given more credit for them. This low budget film mixes High Sierra locations, Griffith Park faked locations, the MGM back lot and phony stage 'exteriors' beautifully. The lighting emphasizes the stars' age and often provides the 'sand' to back up their words. Joel McCrea barks out the command "Move!" in close-up, with lighting similar to the choker CU in The Wild Bunch where William Holden says "If they move, kill 'em!" It's unfair to judge Peckinpah's visual abilities by his later movies where he was reportedly often incapacitated on the set, but Ballard's work creates romantic visuals to match the director's lyrical themes. There's a heart to Ballard's camerawork that doesn't appear in Major Dundee.

Peckinpah reinvented the western from his own point of view but he definitely preferred older visual forms. One of Sergio Leone's biographers noted that Peckinpah had little understanding for the Italian's extreme close ups and long static takes. Peckinpah needed a strong cameraman tuned-in to his aesthetic wavelength, and Ballard was the man. Ride the High Country was an incredibly lucky film. When bad weather ruined the mountain location shoot producer Lyons had Bronson Caverns re-dressed to look like a Sierra-top mining camp, and got away with it. When the rough cut was complete, MGM editorial maven Margaret Booth wanted to 'adjust' the whole picture 'up to MGM standards,' eliminating eccentric moments like the little digression among Joshua Knudsen's chickens before the final showdown. But the studio production chief was so unimpressed by a screening that he ordered the picture locked 'as is' for final negative cutting to proceed. So studio indifference made this one of the few Peckinpah films to be finished as cut! Actually, Peckinpah was barred from the lot for the final mix, and producer Lyons graciously helped the director stay involved by playing mixes over the telephone.

Ride the High Country is vastly improved on DVD from the 1992 laserdisc, which had a big splice-jump right in the middle of the impressively profound final shot. The color is a huge improvement, coaxing hues out of film elements that can no longer make satisfactory theatrical screening prints. Some of the original dialogue recording and effects cutting are a little rocky, but George Bassman's masterful score fits the film well. It was partially re-used for Richard Lyons' follow-up picture Mail Order Bride, a movie similar in structure to this one. A Justified Life: Sam Peckinpah and the High Country is a featurette interview with Fern Lea Peter, Peckinpah's younger sister. She speaks of his family history on their ranch outside of Fresno and gives us a first-person account of Peckinpah's early life illustrated with many family photos. She identifies Sam's father as the source of the characterization of Steve Judd, offering the opinion that Peckinpah would never have behaved the way he did in later years if his father were around. And there really is a town called Coarsegold!

The Wild Bunch 1969 / 2:35 anamorphic 16:9 / 145 min. / Two-Disc Special Edition; The Original Director's Cut / available individually at 26.98 Starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Jaime Sanchez, Ben Johnson, Emilio Fernandez, Strother Martin, Albert Dekker, L.Q. Jones, Aurora Clavell Cinematography Roy N. Sickner, Walon Green, Sam Peckinpah Produced by Phil Feldman Would you give someone guns to kill your mother, or your brother? The Wild Bunch is the big one, and if one hasn't seen it yet, by all means stop reading this! Thirty-six years later, Peckinpah's best film is still the last truly original Western. Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves are great pictures, but they don't break new ground. Critics, film historians and western buffs have written up this masterpiece from every conceivable angle - its violence, its sexual politics and its position midway between the western, the gangster film and the historical epic.

One fine article analyzed the half-dozen musical rhythms coursing through the final sequence. Another proposed that Peckinpah's vision of the Death of the West was also a marker for the beginning decline of America, a country awash in corruption and violence. When Warners first released movies to VHS home video The Wild Bunch was one of the first titles out, albeit in the original (adjusted) theatrical length of about 135 minutes. Until a longer repertory print appeared around 1979, the only Americans to see Peckinpah's full cut (145 minutes) were those who attended the first week of its limited-run in big cities. In foreign markets -- the UK and Spain -- the film played in 70mm and stereophonic sound, but not in the states. Sam Peckinpah's personal print of the film played at a special Jerry Harvey Beverly Canon screening in 1974 and at Filmex in 1976, rare occasions indeed. Peckinpah's print included a very classy intermission.

A pan-scanned but full length laserdisc appeared in the late 1980s, and Warners undertook a major 70mm stereophonic restoration in 1992 that was stopped dead when the MPAA tried to re-rate the film as NC-17. Protests and negotiations followed for two years until a big re-premiere in 1995 at the Cinerama Dome. Warners' Two-Disc Special Edition of The Wild Bunch is indeed a Director's Cut. The quality is excellent and the extras only a little disappointing; more on that below. Synopsis: A band of brutal outlaws led by the bitter Pike Bishop (William Holden) is decimated when a railroad company ambush led by Pike's old pal Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) turns into a bloodbath. Barely escaping, the six survivors head to Mexico with Thornton's cutthroat bounty hunters in hot pursuit. They get on the good side of a Huerta warlord named Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) by taking his commission to steal U.S. Army guns in a daring raid on an armed train convoy. They manage to outrun Thornton, the bounty hunters and the pursuing U.S.

Cavalry, but completing their deal with the ruthless and bloodthirsty Federales is not going to be a piece of cake - Mapache needs those guns to hold off Pancho Villa's revolutionaries, and would just as soon kill Pike's gringos "as break wind." The Wild Bunch gathers up the western genre in one big eclectic mass and reinterprets it from a subversive perspective. The past is dead and the remnants of old banditry have become outcasts in a world transformed by technology and big money; the loyalties and words of honor so revered in Ride the High Country and Major Dundee have become a liability. Pike Bishop talks solidarity but cannot hold his bunch together; the reality consistently falls short of the dream. His big railroad robbery kills half his men and nets the Bunch only "a dollar's worth of steel holes." He more or less abandons the loose-cannon Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins) in Starbuck and then finds out that the boy was related to the Bunch's oldest member. Pike talks big words about sticking together but cannot summon a practical protest when one of his own is being tortured to death.

About all the Bunch can brag about it that they "don't hang nobody," when the truth is that they probably never had the opportunity. Thornton marvels that Pike "never got caught," even though that accomplishment is tempered by the knowledge that he left his best friend to suffer a long prison term. The Wild Bunch rests at the center of a dynamic group of films about armed Americans taking violent 'expeditions' across the border . Filmed in Mexico with the cream of the Mexican industry's action experts, it has several big directors (Emilio Fernandez, Chano Urueta, Alfonso Arau, Fernando Wagner) as actors. Peckinpah's script, direction and cutting (a marvelous, adventurous job by Louis Lombardo) are superb; the attention to detail and the layered texture of each scene is the equal or better than anything in Leone or Visconti. Some of Peckinpah's editing and film speed ideas are borrowed from Akira Kurosawa, who can still be listed as Peckinpah's superior -- in the long run Peckinpah's complicated plotting still leaves a few ragged ends.

Peckinpah salts the film with unusually powerful 'meaningful' dialogue, much of it highly quotable. The only really dated patch is during a 'sensitive' campfire scene where Ernest Borgnine's Dutch earnestly asks Pike if they can learn from their mistakes. Peckinpah wisely avoids shoving The Wild Bunch into the category of 'revolution-chic' pictures, then the rage in Europe. At the conclusion Deke Thornton and Freddie Sykes (Edmond O'Brien) are clearly running off to join Pancho Villa against the Federales. It would have been easy to give Thornton or Sykes some crazy pro- Ho Chi Minh dialogue line like, "If only our mercenary efforts had been for a worthwhile cause like la revolución! This powerful comeback film was a resurrection for Sam Peckinpah, who had been blackballed from studio work after Major Dundee and an ill-fated false start on The Cincinnati Kid. If producer Phil Feldman was responsible for Peckinpah's artistic freedom and excellent performance here he should have been given credit, for in The Wild Bunch all the virtues claimed for the director finally pay off.

The key to Feldman and Peckinpah's assemblage of top actors and top-flight production values is the dialogue line, "This time we do it right." Almost every role is a perfect casting fit. William Holden was wallowing in feeble action films (The Devil's Brigade) and limp cameos ( Casino Royale ) and puts in his best all-round performance since David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai . Ernest Borgnine is far better than usual, with Peckinpah's influence keeping him from going over the top, as he was wont to do on films for Robert Aldrich. Robert Ryan hadn't gotten a role this good since the 1950s; his characterization does the most with the least screen time. Peckinpah also skimmed the cream of his stock company, adding a few choice nuggets like Albert Dekker (he died before the film was released) and an almost unrecognizable Edmond O'Brien. The Wild Bunch surprised us with its portraits of hard men under pressure, going beyond Aldrich's good start in Flight of the Phoenix . Virtue is practically irrelevant, with men formed into various groups for survival.

All activity is in pursuit of money (the Bunch's unapologetic thievery), power (the brutal Mexican civil war) or both (Railroad agent Pat Harrigan is both greedy and a perverse authority figure). Yet the script celebrates the bonds among these civilized savages. The near-subhuman Gorches recognize no law except their relationship as brothers. Both Thornton and Dutch openly admire Pike Bishop and Angel respects him as a father figure. Even the reprehensible Mapache inspires worship, from a pint-sized telegraph messenger. Peckinpah's realignment of the John Ford universe is at its strongest in The Wild Bunch. References to Ford pictures run deeper than the appropriation of songs like Shall We Gather at the River? The Bunch hark back to Ford's villainous Clantons in My Darling Clementine : Walter Brennan's "When you pull a gun, SHOOT a man!" is definitely the kind of talk that inspires Pike Bishop's hard-bitten outbursts. Some Ford references are much more subtle, like the shawl that Henry Fonda takes from Cathy Downs' Clementine Carter on the way to a church dance. In Starbuck Pike extends his arm to help an elderly lady across the street, and Dutch carries her packages.

During the escape, Pike's horse tramples a younger woman into the dust; pausing at the edge of town, he frees her shawl from his spur, throws it down, and continues. Peckinpah was also fan enough of John Huston to liberally borrow from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , especially the brief respite in the Mexican village, with its grateful campesinos assembling to give the Bunch a fond farewell. Peckinpah embraces sentimentality in these scenes, with the irony that our bloody desperados are flattered and moved to be the recipients of such unquestioning love. Pike and his boys bask in the accolades withheld from Steve Judd's upstanding lawman at the beginning of Ride the High Country. The ending of The Wild Bunch is the most obvious Sierra Madre lift, with Thornton and Sykes laughing, much as had Tim Holt and Walter Houston. The moment isn't quite as rich as in the John Huston classic, but it will do. 3 What we don't get are the missing scenes implied on the package text.

Besides the apocryphal stories of even more outrageous gore (the demise of the clerks and the female customer in the telegraph office, for one), there's also the tantalizing moment retained in the trailer of Sykes' distress at learning that Mapache has seized Angel. Although these legendary remnants are probably just legends, I wouldn't be surprised if legal issues restrained the disc producers from including a lot of special material - note that that the recovered dailies avoid clear views of name actors. The only mementos Savant has of the film are some original transparencies and a 3/4" tape (somewhere) of the Network Television re-cut of the final gundown scene, artistically censored into a dreamlike and incomprehensible blur of violence-free violence. The Ballad of Cable Hogue 1970 / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 121 min. / available individually at 19.98 Starring Jason Robards Jr., Stella Stevens, David Warner, Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones, R.G.

Armstrong Cinematography John Crawford and Edmund Penney Produced by Sam Peckinpah and Phil Feldman The Ballad of Cable Hogue was a big departure for Peckinpah, who clearly wanted to use his new-found notoriety from The Wild Bunch to establish a wider reputation for himself. Most of Hollywood was still unaware of his Class-A status as an actor's director in Noon Wine, an acclaimed TV drama. Although Cable Hogue is another western, it is also a light comedy. There isn't another movie like it, which works in its favor. Synopsis: Penniless Arizona bum Cable Hogue (Jason Robards Jr.) is dry-gulched and left to die by false friends Bowen and Taggart (Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones). In a miraculous bit of luck he stumbles upon a water well located at the perfect midpoint between two stagecoach stops. Cable gets his paperwork in order and sets up a sharp little trimming station selling cheap meals and "watle": Cable can't spell. His only friend is the frontier con-man/preacher Joshua Douglas Sloan (David Warner), a man of the cloth who uses his Bible verse to seduce young women.

Lonely in his settled life at Cable Springs, the new man of property cultivates the acquaintance of a spirited prostitute named Hildy (Stella Stevens), introducing her to the pleasures of his idyllic shack far from the evils of town life. But Cable remains set on exacting vengeance from the Taggart and Bowen. Cable Hogue is a stack of ideas both good and bad. Jason Robards and Stella Stevens are excellent and Peckinpah is able to coax a pleasant warmth from their tawdry romance. Hogue first visits Hildy as a prostitute and then provides a home for her at Cable Springs, a relationship that ends abruptly when the penny-pinching man of property jokes that he's bartering meals for her services. Hildy never acknowledges the slight, which tells her that it's time to move on. This is one of the few Peckinpah films with a positive male-female relationship at its center, but from The Wild Bunch on he has a hard time conceiving of women as much more than prostitutes, she-cats or one-night lays. Even though Robards and Stevens sweeten the relationship, there's a lot lacking in Peckinpah's view of men and women together.

The film seeks its own pace and rhythm and succeeds whenever Peckinpah lets his character scenes dictate the flow. Robards interacts well with Warner's shady preacher, the various town businessmen and stagecoach driver Slim Pickens. Genre expectations are turned on their head more than once, as when Hogue's forgiveness toward the treacherous Bowen inspires the crook toward a complete reformation. Hogue's reconciliation with Hildy is effected with the gift of a flowered chamber pot, to replace the one she broke while trying to bash his head in. At 121 minutes The Ballad of Cable Hogue eventually comes off as too long and too slack. It opens with a badly dated split-screen title sequence, and returns at several junctures for grating musical interludes sung by Richard Gillis. "Butterfly Mornings" would have been okay once, but Robards' and Stevens' duet never quite gels. The feeling of being out at a desert rest stop is hurt by direction that sacrifices Peckinpah's formal touches for multi-camera coverage that merely records the performances. Peckinpah has a gift for verbal humor that doesn't translate well into slapstick.

Jokes fall flat - a tent collapsing over a temperance union meeting, or David Warner scuttling around in speeded-up motion. The humor jumps to life whenever the focus returns to the characters, as with Bowen and Taggart's frantic episode with a pit of rattlesnakes. Film critics in 1970 loved The Ballad of Cable Hogue but film distribution with smaller studio fare that year was hit-and-miss. That put its reputation squarely on the shoulders of film journals eager to laud it on an 'auteurist' basis. Since most everything that happens in the film is a restatement of familiar Peckinpah themes -- the End of the Frontier, the unwelcome encroachment of progress -- critics thought that events like the final automobile accident were inspired touches. The change in perceptions between The Wild Bunch and Cable Hogue is like day and night: The former seems naturally profound, an author's angry statement bursting to get out. The latter comes off as a catalogue of "director's themes." Still, the film's amiable attitude and endearing characters place it far in plus territory.

Warner's DVD of The Ballad of Cable Hogue is presented enhanced at a widescreen 1:78 aspect ratio, optimizing its sometimes arbitrary compositions. The picture becomes grainy only during optical sections. Audio is clear. Jerry Goldsmith's score is no standout, and mainly seems to serve as extensions of the 'song interludes.' This disc has one welcome featurette, as the 1970 promotional piece listed on the box does not appear on the disc menus. A new interview with Stella Stevens lets her tell her Hollywood story starting with Li'l Abner . Her perspective demonstrates how actors saw the director completely differently from everyone else -- Peckinpah served his performers well and they loved him. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid 1973 / 2:35 anamorphic 16:9 / 106 122 115 min. (two versions) / Two-Disc Special Edition / Available separately at 26.98 Starring James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Jason Robards, Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, Chill Wills, R.G.

Armstrong, Luke Askew, John Beck, Richard Bright, Matt Clark, Rita Coolidge, Jack Elam, Emilio Fernández, Paul Fix, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Jorge Russek, Charles Martin Smith, Harry Dean Stanton, John Davis Chandler, Michael T. Mikler, Rutanya Alda, Walter Kelley, Gene Evans, Donnie Fritts, Aurora Clavel, Elisha Cook Jr., Barry Sullivan, Dub Taylor Cinematography Art Direction Ted Haworth Produced by Gordon Carroll Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a major Peckinpah picture dogged by production grief. This time his nemesis was a genuine studio joy-killer. MGM's James Aubrey routinely took pictures away from directors (Blake Edwards was one) for re-cutting, often just to prove who was in charge. Peckinpah may have thought he'd learned his Major Dundee lesson and could do things his own way by filming in Mexico, but MGM botched the film's release just the same. Savant remembers seeing it on opening day in Westwood with screenwriter Steve Sharon, and both of us thought it a complete failure.

For television showings several "R"-rated sequences were replaced with new material we hadn't seen in the theater, like the brief appearance of Barry Sullivan as John Chisum. In 1988 Jerry Harvey's Z Cable channel reignited interest in the film by airing Peckinpah's longer Preview cut. But, as reported by Paul Seydor in the featurette extras, the film had never gone through a fine-cut process. Scenes lack energy and the film sags badly in its middle section. This 2-Disc Special Edition addresses that problem with two separate versions of the film, the slightly slack 1988 Preview/Turner Cut, and a new 2005 fine cut that combines it with sections from the original theatrical cut. The 2005 combo cut is tightened up, with a few surprises added and subtracted along the way (see below). It adds yet another cut to the stack of versions in the vault, but it is the best so far. Synopsis: 1909. Bushwhackers from the politically corrupt Santa Fe Ring gun down New Mexico rancher Pat Garrett (James Coburn) on his own land. 1881.

Pat is a friend to and former lawbreaker with William Bonney (Kris Kristofferson). Seeing middle age and poverty on the horizon, Garrett sells out to the ambitious cohorts of governor Lew Wallace (Jason Robards Jr.), takes on a badge, and proceeds to hunt down and kill Bonney - better known as Billy the Kid. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is yet another elegiac and lyrical look at the death of the West seen through the soul-weary eyes of an outlaw turned lawman. Looking for a comfortable existence, Pat Garrett takes the bait offered by the "Santa Fe Ring," a cabal of territorial fat cats. The fix is in in New Mexico, and at its center is Governor Lew Wallace, a pious hypocrite who would eventually gain fame as the author of Ben-Hur. Grasping old-time land barons like John Chisum (played in stark contrast to John Wayne's heroic version) are being squeezed out by the Eastern politicos to whom Pat reluctantly sells his soul. His first job as part of a territorial image enhancement campaign is to eliminate the notorious William Bonney.

Peckinpah's most easily recognized filmic pattern is the use of a binary hero to provide character conflict, and every critic from Jim Kitses forward has ruminated on the polar tensions between Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, Amos Dundee and Ben Tyreen, Pike Bishop and Deke Thornton. In each case the bonds of loyalty go deep into the past, and the present conflict illuminates the pair's weaknesses and strengths. Without any malice toward Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, its character conflict lacks impetus. James Coburn's Garrett broods with regret and self-loathing in the very first scene and the rest of the movie is a slow reveal of a static situation. Despite a lot of comings and goings, neither Pat nor Billy engage in anything resembling a constructed plot; everything is left to interior states. The time is taken up with images of our two heroes deeply immersed in soul-searching (or, staring meaningfully), repetitive shoot-out scenes and a couple of key moments restaged from older Billy the Kid movies such as The Left-Handed Gun. Peckinpah helped write One Eyed Jacks and his staging of the jail breakout compares well with Marlon Brando's, mainly because R.G.

Armstrong's ferocity easily bests Slim Pickens in the original. Most of the action in the story is repetitive; too many scenes are structurally unnecessary. Billy and Pat arrive at various trail stops and either shoot people or beat them up. Characters are introduced and eliminated, adding more bloodshed but not advancing the story. Billy's big decision to not go to Mexico is fumbled in yet another gundown of Chisum cowboys, a brainless moment in which he tenderly says his farewells to his old buddy Paco (Emilio Fernández), and then leaves Paco's raped daughter to deal with the body and her ransacked wagon on her own. Much of the film's narrative tension is expended on random action scenes. What Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid has going for it in spades is atmosphere and peripheral characterization -- in the details, it's brilliant. We see both Billy's gang and Pat bedded down with prostitutes and completely believe scenes where they hang out in groups in corrals and barrooms.

A quick look at the cast list above will make any fan of American westerns think he's died and gone to heaven - just about every character actor capable of picking up a gun is represented, and more tiny but effective roles are filled by interesting casting choices. Hanging around in the background when Pat and Billy first talk are Jorge Russek (The Wild Bunch, Hour of the Gun ), Harry Dean Stanton ( Two Lane Blacktop ) and Charlie Martin Smith (American Graffiti). Bob Dylan's acting turn is something of a casting stunt, but he's not allowed to do much more than say some elliptical dialogue and be a fly on the wall. Among the good scenes is a shorter selection of priceless, classic moments. The most beautiful turn is by Katy Jurado and Slim Pickens; their poetic farewell by the river is in itself worth the price of admission. The framing story restored to the preview version, showing Pat Garrett's murder by the Santa Fe Ring in 1909, is equally effective and editorially brilliant. It's intercut with the chicken-shooting scene, so that Pat is first hit by a bullet fired 28 years earlier. But Peckinpah pays a high penalty for pretentious details.

Billy's surrender while assuming a Christ position isn't all that offensive, but having Pat shoot his own reflection in a mirror is the ultimate in trite Peckinpah lore. It worked the first time in The Wild Bunch because it was one detail in a flurry of action. The eye-rolling moment where Peckinpah appears as a coffin maker is the last straw. Garrett encounters him on the way to keep his appointment with destiny, and we're treated to the worst drivel ever spoken in a serious western: "So you finally figured it out, eh Pat?" This unexpected pomposity is the shape of things to come in Peckinpah; even the best of his later films (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Cross of Iron) labor mightily under the weight of an 'auteur' straining for significance. Warners' DVD of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid looks stunning in two new transfers. The enhanced transfer on the "1988 Preview/Turner Cut" is so good we can see evidence of film damage traceable to camera and lens problems that plagued the film on location - a handful of scenes still have emulsion scratches.

Paul Seydor and Katy Haber explain that retakes were able to fix most of the affected material. Bob Dylan's laid-back acoustic and electric music comes across well in both cuts, providing a laconic mood that blends nicely with Billy's song-singing during his laid-back jailbreak. In the original theatrical cut the perfectly pitched top-40 hit Knockin' on Heaven's Door had audible lyrics. When we saw the same scene without vocals in the Preview/Turner cut we assumed that Peckinpah preferred an instrumental-only version. Dylan's voice has been restored for the 2005 Recut, and unless one is dead set against hearing the folk singer in a Peckinpah picture, it adds greatly to the moment. Paul Seydor and the other value-added producers/contributors explain that their 2005 Special Edition Recut (disc one) carries out Peckinpah's cutting notes. These fellows knew the director well enough to suggest that their changes are less 'experimental' than the late 90s recut of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil.

The Recut version is an attempt at the fine cut that Peckinpah never got to make, combining sections of the tighter Theatrical Cut with the 1988 Preview cut, and adding some new editorial alterations. Some of the improvements are worthy of applause. A simple shuffle of shots in the opening editorial time-shift between 1909 and 1881 gives the scene more impact. Several meandering scenes perk right up by ending them earlier, rather than let them peter out. Some tangential dialogue lines are lost in the process -- Savant didn't miss them but some viewers might. The fine cut sections cleverly reorder some material. The interesting raft scene happens much earlier. A long patch of previously alternating Billy-Pat material is arranged to a more felicitous effect -- a montage shot of a rider at sunset now seques into a nighttime campfire scene, suggesting a more fluid continuity. Savant only noticed one scene missing entirely, the brief bit where John Beck bunks down with Elisha Cook Jr. and Dub Taylor (or maybe I blinked and it got by me). The new ending is a bit surprising - it reverts to a slightly altered version of the original theatrical finish. The additions are also interesting.

The still-based title sequence from the Theatrical Cut perks up the beginning. Garrett has a scene with prostitute Ruthie Lee (Rutanya Alda of The Deer Hunter ), forcing her to tell him where Billy has holed up. But best of all, the Recut restores the domestic scene between Garrett and his wife Ida, played by Aurora Clavell of The Wild Bunch, previously seen only in a television version. It's a great scene of a typically lousy Peckinpah male-female relationship, an addition that adds greatly to our understanding of Coburn's character. Between this movie and Major Dundee Ms.Clavell has had two major Peckinpah scenes restored in less than a year. This shorter 2005 Recut is also given a better digital brush-up. I didn't notice any scratches this time. John Coquillon's ruddy photographic style looks better than it did in original prints. The second disc also holds a pair of interesting taped interview featurettes done in jumpy multi-camera style, as was the Stella Stevens interview on Cable Hogue.

Peckinpah secretary, production associate and sometime girlfriend Katy Haber gives us an excellent run-down on Sam's state of mind while making the movie, putting several legendary tales about the director into proper context. Editor/author Seydor appears on camera to explain the crazy path Pat Garrett took on its way the screen. James Aubrey apparently had his own editing team assemble a version of the movie in parallel with Peckinpah's cutters, a blood-chilling abuse of executive power which amounts to creative terrorism. Kris Kristofferson's interview piece offers up an accounting of his career from the Army to Heaven's Gate, accompanied by country singer and actor Donnie Fritts. Kristofferson's testimonial is one of the few to fully understand Peckinpah's excesses, as he remembers holding the half-crazed director in line on more than one occasion, even taking a gun away from him once. He chalks up Peckinpah's erratic behavior to ordinary alcoholism -- in his drunken rage the director would become confused and lash out at completely innocent victims. As an added treat, Kristofferson and Fritts perform two songs about Peckinpah for Nick Redman's docu camera.

Kristofferson comes off as an impressive fellow indeed, amiable and firm-minded. We can indeed picture an Army general accepting Kristofferson's statement that he wants to quit teaching English Lit at West Point, to become a songwriter! Warner DVD's Sam Peckinpah's Classic Westerns Collection is a terrific boxed set that represents an enormous amount of work by both the Turner/Warner DVD department and the Peckinpah experts assembled by Nick Redman. Every transfer is a vast improvement. The Wild Bunch strikes one as a renewed experience. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid's two versions will give the Peckinpah adepts fresh fodder for contemplation and debate. The assembled authors provide full-length commentaries for all of the features. We get facts, opinions, analysis and personal perspectives from each of them, with the phrase most commonly heard being how Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch changed their lives. Their collective interpretation of the world of Sam Peckinpah is nigh-unimpeachable. The assembled extras will be too much of a good thing for many fans, especially because of understandable overlaps in coverage and other redundancies between commentaries and featurettes.

The collection comes to honor Peckinpah and not to criticize him, and some viewers are going to get the idea that he belongs in the company of other Hollywood casualties like Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim. His story is a lot more complicated than that. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Ride the High Country Sam Peckinpah - IMDb IMDb Writer | Director | Producer "If they move", commands stern-eyed William Holden , "kill 'em". So begins The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's bloody, high-body-count eulogy to the mythologized Old West. "Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle", observed critic Pauline Kael . That exploding bottle also christened the director with the ...

See full bio » Born: a list of 28 people created 17 Aug 2011 a list of 48 people created 01 Jul 2013 a list of 41 people created 31 Oct 2013 a list of 25 people created 03 Mar 2014 a list of 30 people created 01 Jun 2015 Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of Sam Peckinpah's work have you seen? User Polls Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 5 wins & 6 nominations. See more awards » Known For | Edit Filmography - Klondike Fever (1960) ... (story) / (teleplay) 1960 Pony Express (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode) - The Sharpshooter (1958) ...

(writer) The Rifleman (TV Series) (teleplay - 3 episodes, 1958 - 1959) (written by - 3 episodes, 1958 - 1959) (story - 2 episodes, 1958 - 1959) - The Kidder (1958) ... (written by) 1955-1958 Gunsmoke (TV Series) (screenplay by - 11 episodes) - Dirt (1958) ... (screenplay by - as David S. Peckinpah) - How to Kill a Woman (1957) ... (screenplay by - as David S. Peckinpah) - Jealousy (1957) ... (screenplay by) - The Singer (1958) ... (written by) 1957 Trackdown (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode) 1954 Riot in Cell Block 11 (production assistant - uncredited) Hide 1952 The Liberace Show (TV Series) (stagehand) Hide 1982 Jinxed!

(second unit director - uncredited) Hide 2009/I Little Red Riding Hood (Video short) (special thanks) 2008 Ten Dead Men (inspiration, thanks and love to the works of) 1986 Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown (Short) (dedicatee - as Sam 'The Man' Peckinpah) Hide 1971 On Location: Dustin Hoffman (TV Short documentary) Himself 1971 Cinema (TV Series documentary) Himself 2014 The Greatest Ever War Films (TV Movie documentary) Himself (1976) 2013 Special Collector's Edition (TV Series) Himself 2004 Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1993 Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1985 La nuit des Césars (TV Series documentary) In Memoriam Music video: Directed Julian Lennon video "Too Late for Goodbyes".

Publicity Listings: 8 Biographical Movies | 20 Print Biographies | 1 Interview | 9 Articles | 2 Pictorials | 1 Magazine Cover Photo | See more » Alternate Names: Sam Peckimpah | David S. Peckinpah | David Peckinpah | Sam 'The Man' Peckinpah Height: Did You Know? Personal Quote: [on R.G. Armstrong ] R.G. Armstrong played righteous villainy better than anybody I've ever seen. See more » Trivia: In an interview with Jim Silke , Peckinpah listed the following as his favorite films: Rashomon (1950); The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which he called "possibly the finest motion picture ever made"; La Strada (1954), a film that he named as one he would have liked to have made; Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959); Billy Wilder 's Ace in the Hole (1951); Carol Reed 's Odd Man Out (1947); Laurence ... See more » Trademark: The films he directed were notorious for their extremely violent and bloody action sequences and climaxes.

See more » Nickname: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid ( 1973 ) R | An aging Pat Garrett is hired as a lawman on behalf of a group of wealthy New Mexico cattle barons--his sole purpose being to bring down his old friend Billy the Kid.

Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 46 titles created 07 Dec 2011 a list of 31 titles created 07 Nov 2013 a list of 35 titles created 07 Aug 2014 a list of 37 titles created 22 Mar 2015 a list of 30 titles created 05 Jan 2016 Title: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) 7.4/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 1 BAFTA Film Award. Another 3 nominations. See more awards » Videos An American bartender and his prostitute girlfriend go on a road trip through the Mexican underworld to collect a $1 million bounty on the head of a dead gigolo. Director: Sam Peckinpah A hobo accidentally stumbles onto a water spring, and creates a profitable way station in the middle of the desert.

Director: Sam Peckinpah An aging group of outlaws look for one last big score as the "traditional" American West is disappearing around them. Director: Sam Peckinpah A recently released ex-con and his loyal wife go on the run after a heist goes awry. Director: Sam Peckinpah Ace Bonner returns to Arizona several years after he abandoned his family, Junior Bonner is a wild young man. Against the typical rodeo championship, family drama erupts. Director: Sam Peckinpah An ex-union soldier is hired to transport gold from a mining community through dangerous territory. But what he doesn't realize is that his partner and old friend is plotting to double-cross him. Director: Sam Peckinpah Mike Locke, who works for a private security firm affiliated with the CIA, is betrayed by his partner and left apparently crippled for life. Director: Sam Peckinpah A German commander places a squad in extreme danger after its Sergeant refuses to lie for him.

Director: Sam Peckinpah In 1864, due to frequent Apache raids from Mexico into the US, a Union officer decides to illegally cross the border and destroy the Apache, using a mixed army of Union troops, Confederate POWs, civilian mercenaries and scouts. Director: Sam Peckinpah A young American and his English wife come to rural England and face increasingly vicious local harassment. Director: Sam Peckinpah The host of an investigative news show is convinced by the CIA that the friends he has invited to a weekend in the country are engaged in a conspiracy that threatens national security in ... See full summary » Director: Sam Peckinpah Truckers form a mile long "convoy" in support of a trucker's vendetta with an abusive sheriff...Based on the country song of same title by C.W. McCall. Director: Sam Peckinpah Edit Storyline It's 1881 in New Mexico, and the times they are a'changing. Pat Garrett, erstwhile travelling companion of the outlaw Billy the Kid has become a sheriff, tasked by cattle interests with ridding the territory of Billy.

After Billy escapes, Pat assembles a posse and chases him through the territory, culminating in a final confrontation at Fort Sumner, but is unaware of the full scope of the cattle interests' plans for the New West. Written by Ed Sutton <esutton@mindspring.com> Best of enemies. Deadliest of friends. Genres: Rated R for western violence and sexuality/nudity | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 31 August 1973 (Hong Kong) See more » Also Known As: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid See more » Filming Locations: Bo Hopkins was Sam Peckinpah 's first choice for the role of Billy. See more » Goofs When Cody is lying on a bed, his left arm is over the rifle, with his hand hanging from the bed, and his right hand is leaning on his left shoulder. In the next shot, when Poe touches him, his left hand is holding the rifle and his right hand leaning on the bed.

See more » Quotes (Mexico) – See all my reviews Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" is a rich, haunting, yet demanding work that, above everything else, sees Billy as a creature of his day and age He is by no means made a wholly sympathetic character, but who was sympathetic in the New Mexico of 1881? Peckinpah has most of his characters dyed with violence and sniffing the prevailing air of corruptionthe chief protagonists, their filthy henchmen, even the onlookers Where and what is the law? No one seems to know or care Garrett and Billy have seen both sides, like almost everyone else And among the confusion and violence that is the legacy of range war there is no gleam of purifying light in the efforts we see being made to clean up the territory The powers that be want Billy out of New Mexico, not for ethical reasons, but rather so that things can be neatly protected for the approaching business exploitation Garrett is the man made sheriff to hunt him down and thereby the man who compromises . . . 'This country's getting older and I aim to grow old with it ...

there's an age in a man's life when he has to consider what's going to happen next.' But Billy can't compromise It's not his way "Billy, they don't like you to be so free!" proclaims the Bob Dylan theme song, summing up why the power men find Billy so irritating Perhaps that's why Garrett who has sold out to power is in some ways a reluctant hunter He salutes Billy's spirithis very own personal declaration of independencebut he knows it's not the spirit of the new times It says much for Peckinpah's way with actors that he gets such admirable performances out of the comparatively inexperienced Kris Kristofferson, as Billy, and Bob Dylan, as Billy's mate It says just as much for his Westerns perceptiveness that he relies even more heavily on experience The well-tried James Coburn is both solid and hard to define as Garrett And then there are the others who know their way around Westerns so wellKaty Jurado, Slim Pickens, R. G.

Armstrong, Jason Robards, Jack Elam, Chill Wills There's not a single performance here that isn't a rounded-off portrait in its own right It all adds up to a richness in characterization that is matched by the richness of marvelously composed scenes in which interiors and exteriors alike have been put together with loving care and attention to detail, whether it's a big set-piece 'shoot-up' or a close-up of a can of preserveshow such a can looked in 1881 Garrett's hunt for Billy is told mainly in set-pieces and it has to be said that Peckinpah makes little narrative concession to an audience in the way they are strung together But for the out and out Western fan this is a most memorable movie 60 of 77 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes Great Director #76: Sam Peckinpah | News from the Boston Becks News from the Boston Becks The life and times of Erik, Veronica and Thomas 26 April, 2009 The Wild Bunch (1969) - Peckinpah's bloody masterpiece Born: 1925 Ride the High Country – 1962 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid – 1973 Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia – 1974 Straw Dogs – 1971 Top 10 Best Director Finishes (Nighthawk Awards): 1962 – 5th – Ride the High Country 1969 – 1st – The Wild Bunch 1970 – 7th – The Ballad of Cable Hogue 1971 – 10th – Straw Dogs 1973 – 7th – Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid 1974 – 10th – Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia 1977 – 10th – Cross of Iron In his Great Movies listing for The Wild Bunch , Roger Ebert says “the message here is not

 subtle but then Sam Peckinpah was not a subtle director.” This was true right from the start, even before he was a director.

Peckinpah was a drunk, a prideful, boastful man and it’s hard to tell fact from fiction. He claimed to be far more involved with the direction of Invasion of the Body Snatchers than anybody remembers (he was an actor in the film). He made one early movie (The Deadly Companions) before coming on like a force with Ride the High Country, the movie that should have started to prepare everybody for the amazing new vision that was about to come upon the Western as anyone knew it. Peckinpah made six Westerns in all. They are all good films and in fact the only good films he made that can’t be classified as Westerns are Straw Dogs and Cross of Iron. Peckinpah was a man made to bring a stark new vision to the old American West. His films were existential, bleak and above all, violent. It takes a certain bent brain to truly enjoy watching Peckinpah’s films (except for Ride the High Country which is more accessible) but it is hard to argue against the artistic merits and influence. The Wild Bunch #1 film of 1969 – #1 Western of All-Time John Wayne supposedly complained that this film ruined the romantic notion of the Old West.

Ironically, it was released in the same year (along with two other Westerns which surely contributed to that idea – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Once Upon a Time in the West) that John Wayne won his Oscar (one of the worst choices ever). John Wayne gave two really good performances in his career – both as flawed men out for revenge (in Red River and The Searchers). His best work was more in line with this film, a film anchored by the performance that should have won the Oscar that year: William Holden’s. Holden, like Wayne, was a big star for many years. But Holden was also an actor, one who gave some of the finest performances in film history (Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Network). The cynicism from his early Billy Wilder films combined with his hard living made him the perfect person to play Pike, the violent outlaw who has reached the end of his line (could anyone else have so perfectly uttered the now immortal line “If they move, kill ’em.”). For the opposite number, the former partner abandoned by Pike and now forced to hunt him down, Peckinpah cast Robert Ryan.

Ryan became one of the best character actors in Hollywood by constantly playing incredible scumbags and doing it better than anyone. The Wild Bunch gave him an interesting position – the person on the side of the law who we must root against. Are people today better prepared for the kind of violence on display in The Wild Bunch? They certainly weren’t ready for it in 1969, not even after Bonnie and Clyde. Yet, when cuts were made to make the film fit a better running time, it was back story and narrative that was cut (at the cost of the story) rather than the violence itself. Even then they knew the violence was going to be a selling point. And over the years we have seen worse and worse. But this wasn’t mindless violence. There is a point a person reaches and that point is reached and Pike mutters “let’s go,” and no one questions him. They all know that moment has come, when they can no longer live by their guns. And the American West was over. And it was time for film to embrace that. For if this is the greatest Western ever made (and it is), then Unforgiven is the second and without this film there never would have been Unforgiven.

And Eastwood should be grateful to Peckinpah for his Oscar. Because Peckinpah never got one. Share this: The Wild Bunch is not better than the classic romantic westerns such as…..the Last Wagon or Rio Bravo… Michele Castorina Where can i buy this poster. mike Best western ever made…Shane, Wild Bunch, Searchers, Dances With Wolves, Little Big Man, Once Upon A Time In The West…Off the top of my head anyways…I find Unforgiven overrated… mike Add How The West Was Won to my above list… Anonymous Sam Peckinpah | Biography and Filmography | 1925 Biography A paradox who both cultivated and disdained his own legend as one of Hollywood's most notoriously difficult directors, Sam Peckinpah evoked varied responses to his often violent films that typically existed on a skewed moral plane between eras and cultures, with ambiguous quests for identity and redemption undertaken by hopelessly lost outcasts and enemies.

Sometimes Peckinpah's search for meaning in film was a reflection of his own tattered life, which was cut short after years of serious alcohol and later drug abuse, leading to numerous quarrels with stars and studio executives that left him ostracized from the industry more than once. After receiving his start on television, Peckinpah made a powerful statement with only his second film, "Ride the High Country" (1962), a revisionist Western that presaged the greatness that came later in the decade. But he had a disaster on his hands with his next film, "Major Dundee" (1965), which was plagued by his increased onset drinking and a penchant for verbally abusing his cast. Practically banished from Hollywood, Peckinpah emerged triumphant with "The Wild Bunch" (1969), a classic revisionist Western that marked the true high point of his creative powers.

From there, the director seemed to court controversy with every move, whether it was from the gruesome violence of "Straw Dogs" (1971) to the onset fights with Steve McQueen on "The Getaway" (1972) to the abstract minimalism of the confusing "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973). All throughout the decade, Peckinpah's health rapidly deteriorated brought on by serious alcohol abuse and later a cocaine addiction that flared up with "The Killer Elite" (1975). His final movies, "Cross of Iron" (1976), "Convoy" (1978) and "The Osterman Weekend" (1983) showed few flashes of the genius on display in the 1960s. Still, Peckinpah had already established his reputation as a great filmmaker able to elicit strong emotional responses with his kinetic and often operatic imagery, no matter how hard he tried to destroy it behind the scenes.

1000+ images about Sam Peckinpah on Pinterest | The wild bunch, The high and Robert ryan Forward Cross of Iron is a 1977 war film directed by Sam Peckinpah, featuring James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason,Senta Berger and David Warner. The film is set on the Eastern Front in World War II during the Soviet's Caucasus operations that forced the Wehrmacht to retreat from the Taman Peninsula on the Black Sea in late 1943.Directed by Sam Peckinpah See More 'Bloody' Sam Peckinpah: wasted, insane and indestructibly pure | Film | The Guardian Movies 'Bloody' Sam Peckinpah: wasted, insane and indestructibly pure The first major retrospective of his work in 20 years is coming to New York, but is Bloody Sam’s reputation for blood and guts well-earned or slightly skewed?

Sam Peckinpah: ‘He would over-research and over-write, then find his story by cutting back.’ Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock Wednesday 30 March 2016 11.15 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 30 March 2016 14.44 EDT Share on Messenger Close “Only a madman would call this creation! It’s not art! It’s not cinema! It’s pure wasted insanity!” That reaction-card from the Kansas City sneak preview of The Wild Bunch on May Day 1969 offered a foretaste of the controversy that would engulf Sam Peckinpah’s unprecedentedly bloody and bleak, revolutionary western on its release six weeks later. It was a film that would saddle its director forever with the moniker “Bloody Sam”. The Wild Bunch was a hand grenade throw under the tent-flap of America’s assumptions about violence and our culpability in it. It tore the increasingly bloody and reprehensible Vietnam war off the nightly news and hurled it like a scarlet paint-pot all over the silver screen. The western was never the same again, nor was American cinema, and nor was Sam Peckinpah.

Inside the head of Sam Peckinpah Read more Peckinpah was the last great director of westerns to flourish while the genre was still taken seriously by the Hollywood studios. His first notable movie, Ride The High Country, starring aged western icons Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, appeared two months after John Ford’s last great western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. There was even then the sense that the baton was being passed from one generation to the next. Peckinpah in his youth had seen that old world slowly vanish over the horizon. Although he grew up the son of a prosperous lawyer in Fresno, California, his ancestors had fought their way across the harsh prairie and the Rockies to California in the mid-19th century. One grandfather took a mountain and logged the trees off it into a lumber fortune, while another constructed the first canals that irrigated the state’s vast Central Valley, turning it into a hub of American agriculture.

In his youth Peckinpah rode (indifferently), tracked and hunted (expertly) all over Peckinpah Mountain, the High Sierras and his other grandfather’s ranch holdings, spending summers and weekends among the ranch-hands and cowboys who worked their land, absorbing their unlettered speech, their indomitability and stoicism. All of it would enrich and deepen the screenplays and movies he would later create. The sense of a world cruelly torn out from under one’s feet was intensified when his mother sold the ranch Sam and his siblings had expected to inherit. He never forgave her, and some have speculated that this betrayal underpins the harsh view his movies take of women in general. After a stint in the marines in post-war China, where he acquired his lifelong taste for alcohol and whorehouses, Peckinpah flouted his father’s wishes for a career in the law and signed up for drama school, first at Fresno State and then USC, and spent most of the 1950s honing his (mainly adaptive) writing skills and directorial chops in local theatre and then television.

He learned about directing and editing film from a lengthy stint as assistant director to montage-master and B-movie giant Don Siegel. In 1960, after working on a succession of TV westerns of indifferent quality, he was given the chance to produce his own creation, The Westerner. It only lasted 13 episodes (five directed by Peckinpah, though he was involved in writing all of them), but it enabled Peckinpah to sculpt his characteristic western world of violence, cynicism and fatalism. It was anything but glamorous – no fancy hats or pearl-handled six-shooters, no dead-eyed gunslingers, just one lonely cowhand (Brian Keith) and the relentless grind of the never-ending trail. Here he would also assemble the posse of beaten-down character actors who would later populate his movies: Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Warren Oates, LQ Jones, Strother Martin et al. Between Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch came the magnificent debacle of Major Dundee, for which Peckinpah drove his cast to the brink of exhaustion and psychosis in deepest Mexico as the bosses back at MGM grew daily more horrified at his excesses.

Peckinpah’s methods were infuriating to them. He would over-research and over-write, then find his story by cutting back. He would overshoot for weeks on end, then extrude his movie in the editing room from the Sargasso of footage he’d accumulated. Commissioned to make an epic – “Captain Ahab Out West” – his budget was slashed at the last minute, then he was fired on return before he could edit a frame. The resulting misfire – filled with intimations of brilliance and several remarkable sequences – earned him a reputation that kept him mostly out of work for the next three years. The Wild Bunch changed all that forever. On one level, it is the last, perhaps the greatest, of a two-decade succession of epic, big-budget westerns set and, more importantly, shot in Mexico: Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Aldrich’s Vera Cruz, Richard Brooks’s The Professionals. More importantly, it is a movie without identifiable heroes.

The men who rob the bank in the opening scenes are self-evidently bad men (“If they move, kill ’em!” barks William Holden exactly as Peckinpah’s directorial credit explodes onscreen), but so are the posse of men lying in wait for them. They are men out of time, all of them, cast adrift in middle age into a hostile new world of automobiles and Maxim guns, and they are all inwardly sprinting towards death, heads flung back, arms wide open. But these killers and criminals have a clear code of honor, even if it only makes sense to them. The Wild Bunch made Peckinpah’s name forever, and perhaps ruined him. He was already a serious alcoholic and workaholic. In the 70s he would try curbing his drinking with cocaine, and ended up addicted to both. He would mark almost every producer as his infernal enemy (whether they were or not) and kick up a storm at every juncture. Violence was not his only theme.

Amid the blood-soaked epics of Bunch, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid there are also his quiet, thoughtful pieces: Noon Wine, the one-hour teleplay from 1966 that is one of his masterpieces, the elegiac modern-day rodeo-drama Junior Bonner and the comic western The Ballad of Cable Hogue (the latter pair both G-rated). But then there is Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, made entirely on his own terms, and a Peckinpah mission statement if ever there was one: a lone hero in a world of absolute corruption and violence, driving around Mexico with a severed head in a fly-covered sack, at one point mowing down his enemies with a machine gun and screaming “because it feels so goddamned GOOD!” It feels like the most nihilistic American movie ever made, and like a magnificent insane, almost orgasmic release of purgative violence. Pure Bloody Sam, uncut. In the end, all too soon, Peckinpah too became obsolete.

He was thrown out with the bathwater alongside all the other babies of the Hollywood Renaissance of the 1970s, Scorsese, Coppola, Altman and all the directors who would sit out the 1980s in a kind of internal exile from the Spielberg-Lucas ascendency. He didn’t make it to 60 years old. Taken as a whole, his work is like a monolithic artifact that film-makers must still deal with today. He revolutionized violence in movies, but also revolutionized shooting and editing, running five or six cameras, all at different frame-rates, to capture his lavishly kinetic spectacles, and editing the results together explosively, sometimes in cuts less than a quarter of a second in length. Only John Woo has managed it since. That reaction card in Kansas City had all the right words, just in the wrong order. Sam Peckinpah was creation, he was art and he was cinema personified. Wasted? Insane? Of course – but also absolutely, indestructibly pure. What I once wrote about Alfredo Garcia applies equally to Sam Peckinpah himself: they don’t make ’em like this any more. Truth is, they never did.

There was only ever one. Bloody Sam Pinterest Bloody good: William Holden in the Wild Bunch. Photograph: Cine Text/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar His name is associated with violence for a reason: nobody did it better. He portrayed its dreadful effects not only on the body but on the mind. The blood-packs of The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Cross of Iron aren’t nearly as terrifying as what happens to wimpy Dustin Hoffman’s head as he learns of his own capacity for violence in Straw Dogs, still a harrowing experience 45 years after it was made. Sam’s violence is cruel, sudden, arbitrary and meaningless. After him, the deluge. Quiet Sam Pinterest Ida Lupino. Photograph: Ronald Grant The Ballad of Cable Hogue, made between The Wild Bunch and the no less sanguinary Straw Dogs, is a surprisingly chaste, thoughtful and antic comedy out west.

Junior Bonner, which fell between Straw Dogs and The Getaway, is a serene lament for the passing of an old way of western life, the professional rodeo circuit, and draws beautifully modulated performances from Steve McQueen and his parents, Robert Preston and a still-luminous Ida Lupino (and it makes for a great double bill with Nick Ray’s The Lusty Men). Noon Wine, the least-seen of Peckinpah’s great works, ponders the results of violence without showing much of violence itself. Broken Sam Pinterest Peckinpah and Bob Dylan on the set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Photograph: Snap/Rex Features Major Dundee, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are two of cinema’s greatest ruined cathedrals, fit to stand alongside The Magnificent Ambersons and Greed in the Grand Pantheon of What-If? Dundee was hobbled by the studio mostly but also by an insufficiently experienced Peckinpah himself.

The restoration of a few years back gives a good, albeit frustrating sense of how great it might have been – and surely it hovers over Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, published a year after Peckinpah’s death, and the most Peckinpah-esque novel ever written. Elegiac Sam Pinterest Randolph Scott in Ride The High Country Photograph: Allstar/MGM/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Ride the High Country is a threnody for an obsolete kind of heroism and the code of honor underpinning it. It is also a paean to the landscape of Peckinpah’s youth – it was shot in the same High Sierras he had hunted and fished as a youth. These themes grounded his later works as well, Wild Bunch, Junior Bonner and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: they might collectively be called How the West Was Lost. Bring Me the Head of Sam Peckinpah starts on 31 March and runs until 7 April at the Film Society of Lincoln Center

Question: Who directed "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid", "Convoy", "The Wild Bunch" and "Cross of Iron"?
Answer: Sam Peckinpah