Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

It’s difficult to write about ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ without the retrospective fact that it was Sam Peckinpah’s last western throwing an almighty shadow over the proceedings. So much of it seems autumnal: Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens)’s slow, agonising, strangely poetic death scene, scored to Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’; Pat Garrett (James Coburn)’s foot-draggingly protracted odyssey in search of an outlaw he’d rather not apprehend, the already grizzled lawman seeming, in each successive scene, older and more weighed down not just with a sense of inevitability but a foreshadowing of how history will judge him; Billy (Kris Kristofferson)’s downward spiral from his myth-making act of showboating to an entire township during his escape from Lincoln County Jail to his dissipated solitary last bout of drinking as a dust storm swirls about him in the rundown enclave of Old Fort Sumner while Garrett’s odyssey draws inexorably towards its close.

So much of it seems tired: Garrett’s weary pauses between words (“the electorate … want you gone … out of the country”), each pause like a Harold Pinter play on Mogadon, entire worlds of reflection and self-accusation hanging on the ellipses; Baker reluctantly pinning his badge on as he goes to what will be his death; the sense of inevitability to the outcome of the duel between Alamosa Bill (Jack Elam) and Billy the Kid (both men cheat: the Kid cheats more effectively); the whiskery old forty-niner (Elisha Cook Jnr), whom Garrett’s de facto deputy John Poe (John Beck) mercilessly brutalises, reeling off a litany of things he’s tired of.

So much of it seems like a psychological self-portrait by its director: a meandering, woozy, often melancholy and sometimes frenziedly angry film that, in its most naked and agonising moments, turns against itself - pace Garrett catching himself in the mirror after shooting the Kid and turning his gun on his own reflection – in what almost seems like self-defeat.

And so much of it is pure Peckinpah. Sometimes organically so and in a good way: the children playing on a noose, much to the approbation of Bible-bashing deputy Bob Olinger (R.G. Armstrong), is reminiscent of the children giggling over the battalion of red ants that overrun the scorpion in the opening credits sequence of ‘The Wild Bunch’ (images of children bearing witness to the corruption of adulthood can be found in virtually every film Peckinpah directed). And sometimes in a forced, self-conscious manner: a minor character suddenly launching into ‘When the Roll is Called Up Yonder’ couldn’t telegraph the reference to ‘Ride the High Country’ more obviously if he’d worn a signboard; Garrett’s dalliance with a troupe of whores feels like it should occupy the same thematic territory as Pike Bishop (William Holden)’s moment of abject self-disgust towards the end of ‘The Wild Bunch’, but instead comes across as gratuitous and just plain absurd. 

Perhaps one of the reasons why ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ is both quintessentially a Peckinpah western and a sad (and slightly weird) leave-taking from the genre is the way it simultaneously corresponds to his grand overarching aesthetic (men outliving their times) and succumbs to pessimism in offering no magnificent rejection of, or rebellion against, it. In ‘Ride the High Country’, Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) are ageing men, one trying to remain honourable, the other living on his wits and trusting to a younger counterpart, both of them challenged by a new and viciously amoral breed of desperados (personified by the Hammond brothers). In ‘The Wild Bunch’, Pike Bishop’s group of outlaws are overtaken by history in the early years of the twentieth century, the First World War visible on the horizon while the bunch are still trying to make “one big score” as if it’s still 1880. The eponymous saddle tramp in ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ makes an unexpected grab at the brass ring with a roadhouse on a stagecoach route only for the internal combustion engine to show up and ruin everything for him on every conceivable level.

But whereas Hogue is offered a lyrical, even somewhat satirical, götterdammerung, and Bishop’s bunch – having weathered internal tensions that almost tear them apart – are finally reconciled and take their long walk to celluloid immortality functioning as a tight and cohesive unit, Pat and Billy are antagonists throughout, never mind what kinship they might have shared at some distant point in the past. Even Judd and Westrum – Pat and Billy’s closest analogue in Peckinpah’s filmography – present a startling contrast. Judd is upright and moral, wanting to “enter his house justified”; Garrett is an ill-tempered man of violence who screws around with hookers behind his wife’s back. Westrum’s villainy is rueful; the Kid’s cold-blooded. (Westrum would never dispatch a man with a bullet to the back as Billy does J.W. Bell.) And finally Judd and Westrum are reconciled – as purposefully as the bunch are reconciled – and when they stride out for the iconic finale they are undoubtedly heroic.

There is no heroism in ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’. None whatsoever.

The Kid outlives his time when Garrett becomes sheriff of Lincoln County. Garrett tries to change with the times but can’t reconcile himself to the choice he’s made. Unlike Peckinpah’s other western protagonists, neither of them take a stand against the changing times. The Kid seals his own fate in returning to Fort Sumner, a decision occasioned by a vengeful imperative that’s almost immediately abandoned; indeed, when Garrett catches up with him, the Kid has done nothing more than sit around and wait for his executioner. Garrett seals his when he summarily pisses off various authority/political figures – Holland (Jack Dodson) and Norris (John Davis Chandler), associates of Governor Wallace (Jason Robards); and cattle baron John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) – and inadvertently sows the seeds of his own destruction: a political conspiracy that will, two decades after the death of the Kid, result in Garrett’s own assassination.

The death of Sheriff Baker remains film’s most famous scene. It’s occasioned by a visit to Black Harris (L.Q. Jones), who greets Garrett and Baker with a fusillade of bullets and refuses to give up the Kid even when Garrett gets the drop on him. During the shoot-out, in a moment that’s damn near overshadowed by the poignancy of Baker’s demise, Harris tells Garret, “Us old boys oughtn’t be doing this to each other.” 

Hum ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ all you like, quote the “Times have changed”/”Times maybe, but no me” exchange till you’re blue in the face, but Black Harris’s jeering accusation summarises everything you need to know about ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’. Sam Peckinpah’s final western.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue

"In some ways he was your dim reflection, Lord."

Background
Opting for a complete change of pace after 'The Wild Bunch', Peckinpah threw himself enthusiastically into 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue'. It went overschedule and overbudget (which Peckinpah production didn't?) but on the whole the shoot progressed smoothly. The problems started when Peckinpah found out that producer Phil Feldman had acquiesced to the studio heads who wanted 'The Wild Bunch' cut down to a commercially preferably two hour running time. Peckinpah's reaction was one of vociferous outrage, even threatening legal action against Warner Brothers. The result was, in Stella Stevens's words, that the studio "didn't release 'Cable Hogue' - they flushed it."

Synopsis
Betrayed by his partners Bowen (Strother Martin) and Taggart (L.Q. Jones), disillusioned prospector Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) is left for dead in the desert. Miraculously, he finds water. Better still, he finds it slap bang on a stagecoach route between the towns of Gila and Dead Dog. Excavating a well, he sets up shop, charging 10 cents per drink of water. Along comes the Reverend Joshua Sloane (David Warner), Hogue's second customer. (Hogue shoots the first after he demonstrates a marked refusal to fork out the 10c.) The preacher reminds Hogue that there's such a thing as land rights. The determinedly anti-social Hogue "goes in among them" and heads into Dead Dog to register a claim. It's here he meets saloon girl Hildy (Stella Stevens), with whom he gradually forms a romantic relationship. Meanwhile, with a bank loan to fund the building of a way station around the watering hole (which Sloane has named Cable Springs) and a contract with the stagecoach line, he begins to develop a successful business. Although Hogue's feelings for Hildy are sincere (in stark contrast to Sloane's rampant lechery), ultimately he finds himself torn between Hildy's dreams of moving to San Francisco and his long-held grudge against Bowen and Taggart.

Analysis
The release of 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', unattended by any whisper of publicity, can be interpreted in one of two ways: (a) the studio were taking their revenge on an outspoken and troublesome director; (b) the studio didn't know what the fuck they had on their hands and had even less idea of how to market it. For my money, it's a little bit of Column A and a little bit of Column B. Whether I'm right or wrong, it's easy to see how studio incomprehension contributed to its demise at the box office.

Thematically, it's a natural and organic follow-up to 'The Wild Bunch'. Its hero is a man who has outlived his times; a man at odds with his former partners in crime. Its dominant theme is the encroachment of technology/modernity into the Old West. Subplots effect a comparison of the ties of loyalty and friendship between men with the transience of romantic relationships between men and women. To further 'The Wild Bunch' comparison, Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones play Bowen and Taggart as a reprisal of Coffer and T.C., the bickering bounty hunters from the previous film. Rounding out the Peckinpah Irregulars, Slim Pickens and R.G. Armstrong return from 'Major Dundee'. Yes, sir, 'Cable Hogue' has all the markings of Peckinpah's cumulative aesthetic as a filmmaker thus far.

And yet it's sooooo different. For a start it's a comedy. Granted, most of Peckinpah's films are imbued with a degree of humour (sometimes of the gallows variety: cf 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia') but entire set pieces are played as broad comedy: Hogue's first encounter with Hildy (a scene defined by laddish close-ups of her decolletage and bug-eyed double-takes on Hogue's part), Hogue visiting Hildy as a paying customer and suffering the detumescent effects of a gospel meeting outside ("lost it," he opines ruefully), Sloane taking a pratfall down the stairs in the saloon, Hogue and Sloane's comic banter as they build the way station, Sloane lecherously pursuing a young "widow" only for her husband to prove inconveniently alive and well ... Apart from the opening scene after Bowen and Taggart double-cross him, and the last quarter of the film which details Hogue's settling of the score with them and Hildy's return from San Francisco, virtually every scene is played for laughs.

The dialogue sparkles. Take Slim Pickens' stagecoach driver, urged by one of his passengers not to tarry because "it's getting dark". "Surely does about this time," he observes; "damnedest thing I ever saw." Or the exchange between Hogue and Cushing (Peter Whitney), the banker he approaches for the loan:

Cushing: Are you trying to tell me you've found water?
Hogue: There's a preacher out in my diggings. He'll tell you. You wouldn't doubt a man of the gospel, would you?
Cushing: Of course. That's the first man I'd doubt.
Hogue: Well, I'll be damned. Looks like I came to the right place after all.

Or there's Sloane, warning Hogue against his obsession with avenging himself on Bowen and Taggart, quotes scripture: "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and I shall repay." "Well, that's fair enough by me," Hogue muses, "just as long as He don't take too long and I can watch." Earlier, when Sloane first stumbles upon Hogue's watering hole, he pleads "Cast thy bread upon the water and let this man of God have his just needs." Hogue's reply: "Ten cents, you pious bastard, or I'll bury you."

Which brings us to the subject of religion, and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' makes another divergence from Peckinpah's other works. R.G. Armstrong was in four of Peckinpah's six westerns; in three of them - 'Ride the High Country', 'Major Dundee', 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' - he plays, respectively, a lay preacher, an ordained preacher and a deputy who comes on like a preacher with a badge and a gun. All of these characters are God-fearing and convinced that everyone else should be fearing Him as well. In 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', Armstrong plays the gruff stagecoach boss who never once pulls out a Bible, quotes chapter and verse or pistol-whips someone in the name of the Lord. No, sir, it's David Warner who's wearing the collar and preaching the word here, and that's because the Reverend Joshua Sloane is a preacher of a very different ilk from the standard issue R.G. Armstrong characterisation.

For most of the film, Sloane's biblical reveries have about them the ring of an actor revelling a great Shakespearean solliloquy, savouring the words, indulging in the performance of them. But it's clear from very early on that he's interested less in salvation than fornication. He carries pictures of his "congregation" ("Why, that one's as naked as a jaybird's ass," Hogue observes when Sloane shows him the snaps). He rides into Dead Dog with Hogue declaring "If I cannot rouse heaven, then I intend to raise hell". He almost gets his wicked way with an emotionally vulnerable woman, only to be interrupted by her husband. Put simply, Sloane is the kind of person Knudsen, Dahlstrom or Ollinger would take outside and forcibly secure the most heartfelt repentance from. And yet, in the bittersweet final scene, it's Sloane who delivers a heartfelt eulogy and truly expresses something that is profound and poignant.

Maybe it's because Hogue has rubbed off on him. For all Sloane's priapic obsessions - and despite the fire and brimstone preacher at Dead Dog whose gospel meeting is interrupted and inadvertently made a mockery of by Hogue; and whose self-righteous congregation run Hildy out of town - it's Cable Hogue who communes with God. Left in the desert by Bowen and Taggart, Hogue begins his long trek out of the wilderness. Peckinpah plays this against the opening credits sequence, employing arguably the most effective use of split screen that any filmmaker has ever achieved from that ordinarily rather hokey and gimmicky technique. Richard Gillis's almost impudently optimistic song 'Tomorrow is the Song I Sing' unspools for a couple of verses, split screen returns to full screen and Hogue tilts his eyes grouchily towards the heavens and offers up a succinct conflation of prayer, observation and request: "Ain't had no water since yesterday, Lord. Gettin' a little thirsty. Just thought I'd mention it. Amen."

A few more credits, another verse or two, more split screen images depicting the continuing plight of our hero (the sun seems higher and brighter; his face is burned, his lips cracked), then he communes with the Almighty again: "Yesterday I told you I was thirsty and I thought you might turn up some water! Now if I've sinned, you just send me a drop or two and I won't do it no more. Whatever in the hell it was I did." A pause then, with a little more humility: "I mean that, Lord."

But Hogue has to reach a point of acceptance, a point where he's practically at death's door, before the miracle is delivered. Collapsed, his eyes barely open, a sandstorm howling around him, he is at first embittered and defiant - "If you don't think I put in my suffering time, you ought to try going dry for a spell ... Careful now, you're about to get my dander up" - then finally resigned: "Lord, you call it, I'm just plain done in. Amen." And here, at his lowest ebb, having laid himself down as if to die, Hogue finds water. And this during the opening credits! Even as his director's credit appears, Peckinpah has established 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' as something of a parable. The desert setting and Sloane's christening of the way station Cable Springs reinforce the parallels. Hogue and Hildy's romantic idyll points up the Garden of Eden metaphor.

Of course, in any Garden of Eden there is always a serpent. There are several snakes in 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' - he uses them as a key ingredient for the 'desert stew' he serves to stagecoach passengers, as well as employing those not yet consigned to the pot against Bowen and Taggart when he eventually comes face to face with his old enemies again - but this being a Sam Peckinpah film, the real serpent is modernity, personified here (pace 'Ride the High Country' and 'The Wild Bunch') in the form of the automobile. "Ugly lookin' damn thing, ain't it?" Slim Pickens' stagecoach driver says, both acting as a mouthpiece for Peckinpah (using the exact same turn of phrase levied at Mapache's car in 'The Wild Bunch') and subtly implying that the effect of motorised transport will be as detrimental to Hogue's business as to the stagecoach.

No more can be said here without compromising the ending. Let's just say that there's a reason that it's Hogue who truly finds God. Cable Hogue exemplifies - perhaps more fully than any other character in Peckinpah's filmography - one of the director's most enduring thematic concerns: that a world defined by machines is a godless place.

Peckinpah on the small screen

The Rifleman

'The Rifleman' ran from 1958 to 1963 and chronicled the adventures of Lucas McCain (Chuck Connors). Although a spin-off from "The Sharpshooter", a one-off episode of 'Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre' written by Sam Peckinpah, and although Peckinpah was the creative driving force behind the first season, the producers only retained him as a story consultant and there was soon a parting of ways. This owed to a (predictable) difference of opinion between Peckinpah and the producers as to the direction they envisaged the show taking. Peckinpah wanted to develop the character of Lucas's son Mark (Johnny Crawford), subsequent seasons charting his growth towards manhood, the series gradually edging into darker, grittier territory as Mark matures and the scales fall from his eyes and he witnesses the realities of life.

If Peckinpah had had his way, the five-year run of 'The Rifleman' might have played out as a cohesive rites-of-passage story plotted against a profound and emotionally honest character arc. The producers, concerned with ratings and sponsorship and advertising, wanted something more suited to family viewing.

A total of 168 'Rifleman' episodes were produced, with a staggering 40 comprising the first season alone. A complete and comprehensive episode guide can be found here. The episodes Peckinpah was directly involved in are as follows (first appearances of actors later cast in the films noted where appropriate):

"The Sharpshooter" (writer) - a slightly re-edited version of the earlier 'Zane Grey Theatre' episode.

"Home Ranch" (writer).

"The Marshal" (writer/director) - featuring Warren Oates, R.G. Armstrong and James Drury.

"The Boarding House" (writer/director) - featuring Katy Jurado.

"The Money Gun" (co-writer/director).

"The Baby Sitter" (co-writer/director) - Peckinpah's only season two contribution.

Other series writers included N.B. Stone (whose screenplay 'Guns in the Afternoon' Peckinpah would significantly overhaul for 'Ride the High Country') and Harry Julian Fink (whose 'And Then Came the Tiger' was the genesis for 'Major Dundee'). Appearing in non-Peckinpah episodes, but destined to work with the director a little further down the line, were Dennis Hopper, Edgar Buchanan, James Coburn (in an episode entitled "The High Country"), L.Q. Jones and John Davis Chandler. Other directors who worked on the show included Arthur Hiller, Richard Donner, James Clavell and Ted Post; season three episode "The Assault" was directed by Ida Lupino, who Peckinpah later cast in 'Junior Bonner'.

The Westerner

'The Westerner' ran for only one season, comprising 13 episodes, between September and December 1960. Again, it developed from a one-off 'Zane Grey Theatre' episode, "Trouble at Tres Cruces". The, ahem, "hero" Dave Blassingame (Brian Keith) was a world-weary saddletramp, a man with a marked predisposition to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Peckinpah went for a more authentic aesthetic than he had been permitted on 'The Rifleman', incorporating story elements such as mob violence, prostitution, attempted rape, alcoholism and anti-heroism. Blassingame makes mistakes, hesitates at the crucial moment. Kind of like a frontier version of 'The Sweeney', full of moral ambiguity and endings that weren't afraid to be untidy and challenging to the audience, 'The Westerner' was something audiences hadn't seen before - and probably weren't prepared for, hence the non-appearance of subsequent seasons. Peckinpah's contributions:

"Jeff" (co-writer/director) - featuring Warren Oates and marking Peckinpah's first collaboration with director of photography Lucien Ballard.

"School Day" (co-writer) - featuring R.G. Armstrong and Dub Taylor.

"Brown" (director).

"Mrs Kennedy" (co-writer).

"The Courting of Libby" (director).

"The Old Man" (writer).

"Hand on the Gun" (director).

"The Painting" (director).

Peckinpah Irregulars Katy Jurado and Slim Pickens make appearances in non-Peckinpah episodes. Other directors included Andre de Toth, Elliot Silverstein and Ted Post.

Noon Wine

Peckinpah was rescued from his spell in the wilderness, following the box office failure of 'Major Dundee' and his firing from 'The Cincinnati Kid', by producer Daniel Melnick. Melnick approached him to adapt and direct Katherine Anne Porter's short novel 'Noon Wine' for the 'ABC Stage 67' drama series. Its critical success, earning Peckinpah Writers' and Directors' Guild nominations, set him on the path back to film directing - and 'The Wild Bunch'.

'Noon Wine' is the only one of Peckinpah's features I haven't seen, by dint of it being basically unavailable. In his biography of Peckinpah, published in 1994, David Weddle highlighted the problem: "By the mid-1970s ABC had destroyed all the master tapes for the 'Stage 67' series to make room for storage space in its vaults ... Today it's possible to see mint-condition copies of the show, in colour, in only three places: the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City, and Jason Robards' house in Connecticut." (Since Robards' death in 2000, I wonder what's happened to that third copy.)

Robards starred alongside OIivia de Havilland, Per Oscarsson, Ben Johnson and L.Q. Jones. Evocative analyses of the production are offered in Weddle and Seydor's books, neither of which I can read without gnashing my teeth that 'Noon Wine' isn't available on video or DVD. There's also a lovely piece on Moon in the Gutter, Jeremy describing 'Noon Wine' as "Peckinpah's forgotten masterpiece".

Conquest of the Useless

Can we agree that 'Fitzcarraldo' is Herzog's magnum opus, the most perfectly Herzogian thing in his filmography, and all the proof that one needs regarding the lengths the man is prepared to go in order to realise his vision?

We can? Thank you.

'Conquest of the Useless' (subtitled Reflections from the making of 'Fitzcarraldo') comprises Herzog's diaries, spanning June 1979 to December 1981, and documents the trials, tribulations and tendencies of its director to go native. Early entries see Herzog as Francis Ford Coppola's guest ("Coppola ... is displaying a strange combination of self-pity, neediness, professional work ethic, and sentimentality") while he labours on the script and deals with the moneymen:

"The unquestioned assumption is that a plastic model ship will be pulled over a ridge in a studio, or possibly in a botanical garden ... I told them the unquestioned assumption had to be a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera. The pleasantries we exchanged from then on wore a thin coating of frost."

This is on page five. By page six (24 June 1979) we're in the jungle. It's not until page 117 (6 January 1981) that Herzog gets the first shot of 'Fitzcarraldo' in the can. 'Conquest of the Useless' is a very different beast to the usual "making of" text. Herzog's extended pre-production and location scouting in the jungle occupies nearly the first half of the book. He dwells less on the film project, writing instead of what he sees around him, of the indigenious population he meets, of lives the way they are lived in the most primitive of surroundings. When he writes of these things he is equal parts documentarist, participant and poet. In his prose as in the images of his films, Herzog brings to life landscapes and people most of us will never encounter, never see with our own eyes; but his account never feels as if it is being written on our behalf (Paul Theroux, great writer though he is, typifies this tendency), nor that he is playing up local colour for its own sake. Herzog is a poet of the extreme because, for him, the extreme is ordinary. Put him in a normal, ostensibly civilised scenario and he codifies it as something alien - evidenced by his slightly surreal depiction of San Francisco in the early entries.

Oh, did I say somewhere in that last paragraph that Herzog shot the first frame of 'Fitzcarraldo' in January 1981? Let me rephrase that. He shot the first frame of 'Fitzcarraldo' Version 1.0. Several weeks' worth of footage were shot with the original cast - Jason Robards as the eponymous would-be rubber baron, and Mick Jagger as his demented henchman - some of which remains, such as Fitzcarraldo's belltower declaration that he will build his opera house, and is featured in the documentary 'My Best Fiend'. It is interesting to speculate how 'Fitzcarraldo' starring Robards and Jagger would have turned out (the belltower scene suggests it could have been inspired and cringeingly embarrassing in roughly equal parts), but it wasn't to be.

Robards emerges as almost terrified by the jungle and appalled at the lack of creature comforts (though we have to remember that these are the perceptions of a man for whom the extreme is second nature; I'd probably have shared some of Robards' opinions). It's clear Herzog had no liking for him, even before Robards absconds, citing medical concerns, and damn near scuppers the production. Herzog's take on Jagger is undecided, admiring him for mucking in and driving fellow cast and crew members to their accommodation, then despairing of him for gloating over how much money he can get for some photos of a bikini'd Jerry Hall taken on set. Herzog sees this as the commercialisation of his vision and isn't happy about it.

After Robards departs, Herzog and co. resolutely remain in the jungle, clinging to what is left of the production. Two months later, Klaus Kinski takes on the role and filming resumes. Anyone who has seen 'My Best Fiend' will know that Kinski was Herzog's muse, nemesis and alter ego all rolled into one. They were bound together by a creative imperative, the fruitfulness of which was only equalled by its antagony. Their previous tropical collaboration, 'Aguirre, Wrath of God', culminated in Herzog forestalling Kinski's announced departure mid-shoot by threatening to empty a rifle into him. Both men must have known 'Fitzcarraldo' would be round two.

Put it this way: the fucking steamship enjoyed plainer sailing!

And yet Herzog is remarkably fair when he writes about Kinski. Sure, there are the expected tantrums, arguments and bouts of egomania, but equally Herzog writes of Kinski like a brother. This aspect of the latter half of 'Conquest of the Useless' proves as affecting as it is compelling. But what really makes the book such a wonderful and unmissable read is that the film, the ship, the crazed actor, the lunatic logistics or the director himself never force their way to the front of the narrative; the real star of Herzog's memoir is the jungle.

"Ain't like it used to be" - the cinema of Sam Peckinpah

(Written for Film at 11’s American cinema blog-a-thon)


"I wasn't trying to make an epic. I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times."

That's how Sam Peckinpah described 'The Wild Bunch' (1969), his fourth film and arguably the fullest synthesis of his trademark themes and concerns. It begins with the titular outlaw gang, led by Pike Bishop (William Holden), executing a bank robbery disguised as soldiers. Bounty hunters, including Pike's former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) are lying in wait for them. Ryan has bargained his way out of jail and put his soul in hock to a railroad boss out to get the bunch.

Already the film is rich in compromised morality. The bunch shoot their way out, losing one of their members, and head for safety. When they come to divide their loot, they find that far from escaping with a hefty payroll they have risked their lives for a few sacks of washers.

Crossing the border into Mexico, they form an uneasy alliance with debauched revolutionary General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), agreeing to rob an army train and deliver to him a cache of guns and ammunition. Things are complicated by the presence of Commander Frederick Muhr ("of the Imperial German Army"); the year is 1913, Europe on the brink of war and the shadow creeping across America. A way of life - the freedom of the frontiers - is already beginning to disappear. Mapache tootles around the hacienda courtyard that constitutes his personal fiefdom in a motor car. "Damned ugly thing," one of the bunch mutters, the very concept of a horseless carriage an affront to him. And here we have the key themes of Peckinpah's work:

*Times change, yet Peckinpah's heroes - men of a certain era, men of a certain mindset - would rather die than change with them.

*Technology encroaches, its results only ever destructive.

During the opening sequence of 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' (1973), newly elected Sheriff Pat Garrett (James Coburn) rides into Old Fort Sumner and, pardon the pun, lays down the law to his former partner William H Bonney, aka Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson):

Garrett: Times are changin', Billy. You want it straight?
Billy: If that's what you're here for.
Garrett: The electorate want you gone. Out of the country.
Billy: Well, are they tellin' me or are they askin' me?
Garrett: I'm askin' you. But in five days I'm makin' you, when I take over as sheriff of the county.
Billy: Sheriff Pat Garrett! Sold out to the Santa Fe Ring. How does it feel?
Garrett: It feels like times have changed.
Billy: Times, maybe, but not me.

A scant four years separate 'The Wild Bunch' and 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'. In many ways they tread the same path: both are elegiac despite their moments of violence; both mourn the passing of the Old West. The tone is different, though. There is a defiance to 'The Wild Bunch', never mind the almost nihilistic futility of the bunch's final stand. Early in the film, Pike dismisses the inevitability of the bunch being pitted against superior numbers: "I wouldn't have it any other way." The way he says it, you know he means it. By the end, he proves it. The bunch are finally outnumbered not just by Mapache's private army but, in a thematic sense, by history itself. Their world changes - globally.

In 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid', social and political upheavals are more localised - the former outlaw Garrett earns his appointment as sheriff by hunting down Billy the Kid; lawyers and landowners pull the strings behind the scenes - and the effect is, if anything, even more devastating. There is a weariness, almost a sense of defeat, in every frame. The closest Garrett comes to an act of defiance is to reject an offer of $500 for an outright assassination of the Kid, snarling, "You can take that five hundred dollars and shove it up your ass and set fire to it."

'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' isn't as redolent as other Peckinpah films in images of modernity creeping into the milieu of the western - unlike 'Ride the High Country' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', both of which, like 'The Wild Bunch', feature cars: one almost runs down Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) in the former, the other proves a lot more damaging to Cable Hogue (Sam Robards) in the latter - but it spells out the death of the west just as poignantly, most notably in the slow, painful death of Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens), gut shot and stumbling down to the river as the acoustic version of Bob Dylan's 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' plays on the soundtrack.

In 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' (1970), the eponymous prospector, betrayed by his partners and left to die in the desert (chalk up another recurring theme: the amount of characters who end up pitted against men they used to ride with, a bitter contravention of Pike's code of honour that "when you side with a man you stay with him and if you can't do that you're like some animal - you're finished"), finds water as if by a miracle and not only survives but, having negotiated the bureaucratic necessities of filing a claim on the land and acquiring financial backing, opens a way station between two towns on a main stagecoach route. His dreams of romance with local good-time girl Hildy (Stella Stevens) are ruined by his obsession with revenge; his prosperity is threatened by - yes! - the arrival of the horseless carriage.

A decade beforehand, Peckinpah's second film (and his first bona fide masterpiece) 'Ride the High Country' (1961) provided a virtual blueprint for the rest of his career. His weather-beaten protagonists Steve Judd and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) are men in their twilight years, suspicious of bankers and businessmen and not at all impressed by the callous live-fast-die-young ethos of the younger generation ('Ride the High Country' was made in 1961, remember: the youth-of-today analogy is pretty clear). For all that Westrum, trying to lure his upright friend into a robbey, is a study in compromised morality, Judd strives always to do the right thing, to remain true to a rigid code of honour.

Westrum: Partner, you know what's on the back of a poor man when he dies? The clothes of pride. And they're not a bit warmer to him dead than they were when he was alive. Is that all you want, Steve?
Judd: All I want is to enter my house justified.

All I want is to enter my house justified. What a line! See the film just once and that line will haunt you years later. With Peckinpah, who (mostly uncredited) rewrote whole tranches of the screenplays he optioned, the dialogue is just as incisive as the images. There's a beautifully resonant line in 'The Wild Bunch', spoken by one of the elders at gang member Angel's village, the bunch hiding out there after the robbery-gone-wrong. Observing two of Bishop's most hard-bitten heavies innocently larking around with a couple of the village girls, he comments, "In our hearts we all want to be children again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all."

Or how about the line that old man Sykes (Edmond O'Brien) comes out with at the end? Reflecting on an uncertain future, the times having changed beyond anything he can hold out against, he says wearily, "It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do."

An epitaph for changing times, the old ways betrayed and shot down by modernity. A ten-word summation of Peckinpah's over-riding theme as an artist, as a film-maker and as a man.