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.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

It would have been James Coburn’s 85th birthday today. Accordingly, I’m reposting a lightly edited version of an article that originally appeared on Agitation in 2009 as part of a month-long Sam Peckinpah retrospective.

'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' opens in Las Cruces, New Mexico, 1909 as ageing Sheriff Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is in dispute with landowner John Poe (John Beck) over a lease agreement. Garrett and Beck's association goes back to 1881 when Garrett tracked down his former friend and partner in crime Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), but they've come to a parting of the ways. With Garrett old and embittered and publically critical of the Santa Fe Ring, Beck and his business partners consider him a liability - an embarrassing throwback to the old days - and are planning to assassinate him. In his last few moments alive, Garrett relives those infamous days and the terrible denouement that made him a sheriff and the Kid a legend.

It’s a simple story in the way that ‘The Wild Bunch’ is simple, ie. narratively (Peckinpah collaborator Gordon Carroll summarised the plot as "a man who doesn't want to run ... pursued by a man who doesn't want to catch him"); thematically, it’s dense and complicated.

There's probably an entire article that can be written about the opening credits sequence. Events in Las Cruces, 1909 (Poe's betrayal of Garrett) and Fort Sumner, 1881 (Garrett's reunion with the Kid a week before he takes the post of sheriff, ie. just prior to his betrayal of Billy) are intercut. When Garrett rides into Fort Sumner, he finds the Kid and his minions amusing themselves shooting the heads off a bunch of chickens buried up to their necks in the dirt. At Las Cruces, Poe's henchman mumbles something about checking a harness, instead pulling a rifle from a saddle roll; another gunman crawls through the sagebrush, ready to take up his position. The shots that follow cut between target practice and cold-blooded murder. Billy's men blast the heads of chickens; Poe's open fire on Garrett. Timeframes overlap. So does the soundtrack. "Damn near perfect," one of Billy's acolytes declares, apropos of a summarily despatched chicken ... but the words echo as Garrett takes a shot and slumps to the ground. Peckinpah's use of editing ramps up the emotional impact of the sequence: a potshot Billy takes at a chicken seems to travel through time and strike Garrett; purposefully aimed coups de grace by Poe's men result in the heads being blasted off helpless fowl.

Peckinpah's signature freeze frames are used as bluntly and brilliant as in 'The Wild Bunch'. As Garrett struggles to rise from the dusty ground only to sink back defeatedly, Peckinpah isolates the moment. He uses this image to accompany the film's title. He arrives at his "directed by" credit in equally iconoclastic fashion. The 1909 prologue documenting Garrett's death throes gives out the 1881 Fort Sumner sequence, and a very much alive - and younger (though still notably middle-aged) Garrett comes riding into town. Billy the gang don't notice him, so busy are they decimating the local feathered populace. Hopping off his horse, he hefts his rifle and, while Billy's still aiming, sights on a chicken and blows its head off. Billy's boys go diving for cover, panic written on their faces. Billy turns round, slowly and wryly, and greets his old friend with a grin. Some spiky banter ensues (it's clear some of the Kid's hangers-on aren't too happy to see Garrett), then the two of them head off to the bar for a couple of shots of whisky and the business at hand:

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.

Peckinpah's directed by credit appears at this point, in a freeze frame that enforces the pause between "I'm makin' you" and "when I take over as sheriff". It might not be as quotable as "if they move, kill 'em" in 'The Wild Bunch', but by God it gives the line some weight!

The dynamic has thus been established: Garrett and the Kid are equally protagonist and antagonist. Neither are exactly heroes, though Peckinpah both empathisizes with the weight of world-weary experience that seems to be etched into every line on Garrett's face, and appreciates the self-aggrandizing behaviour of Billy (particularly in his escape from the Lincoln County jail). Neither are entirely villains, either, even though Billy is a notorious outlaw who refuses to change his ways, and Garrett is a former outlaw who commits the greater sin (certainly in the grand scheme of Peckinpah's aesthetics) of not remaining true to himself and trying to change with the times.

Oh yes, Garrett is the first (and last) of Peckinpah's western protagonists to break with the tradition of Steve Judd, Pike Bishop and co. and Cable Hogue. This is perhaps the most significant element of the dynamic/antagonism between Garrett and Billy - it's summed up during their conversation just after the opening credits:

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.

Which makes it pretty clear that, since neither Garrett or the Kid are entirely good guy or bad guy, the real villain of the piece is the changing times. Or rather the men who are responsible for changing them. The men responsible for political corruption, financial chicanery, corporate conspiracy and the fencing off of frontier territory, the free and open spaces partitioned, owned, leased and jealously guarded. Men like high-living politico Governor Wallace (Jason Robards), eminence grices Holland and Norris (the power behind Wallace's throne), grasping landowner John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) and toadying parvenu on the make Poe. If 'The Wild Bunch' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue'depict technology as the instrument of change, then 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' looks back to 'Ride the High Country' ("the days of the forty-niners are past and the days of the steady businessman have arrived") - only here the steady businessman has been replaced by the rapacious businessman, the dollar-obsessed businessman, the businessman who rapes the land and values human life lower than his profit margin. Corruption and bribery are rife. At an interview with Wallace, the Governor offers Garrett an incentive towards Billy's expedited apprehension:

Wallace: We're offering a reward of one thousand dollars for the Kid's capture. You can have five hundred now.
Garrett: Well, I aim to bring the Kid in. But until I do, you'd better take your five hundred dollars and shove it up your ass and set fire to it.

One of the most curious aspects of 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' - and I'm damned if I can work out whether it's a flaw or a masterstroke - is how determinedly Peckinpah keeps the Chisum/Wallace/Poe conspiracy offscreen. True, all three of them get at least one significant scene (Garrett's encounter with Wallace is thorny; with Chisum, cautious), but they remain backgrounded, shadows that creep around the edges of Garrett's pursuit of Billy. The depiction of Chisum in particular is borderline bland. It's as if Peckinpah is saying "yup, these are the villains, these are the guys hellbent on destroying the old ways, these are guys without souls who answer only to money and power and influence, but by Christ they're nobodies - they ain't really men".

Peckinpah has more time for Deputies Bell (Matt Clark) and Ollinger (R.G. Armstrong), the latter completing the triumvirate of fanatical religious types the actor specialised in (following on from Knudsen in 'Ride the High Country' and Dahlstrom in 'Major Dundee'. Both are in the way when Billy liberates himself from Lincoln Country jail. Kristofferson's characterisation of Billy melds ruefulness and cold determination when he comes up against Bell. It's a different story with Ollinger. The two men have already entered into a spirited disagreement over spiritual matters, Ollinger committed to making sure Billy "gets with god" ("I'll take you for a walk across Hell on a spiderweb") and Billy responding to Ollinger's pious "On your knees" with a pithy "Kiss my ass". Billy's summary dispatching of Ollinger burns with the visceral and iconic intensity that fuelled Peckinpah's reputation as "Bloody Sam".

Peckinpah has more time for Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) and Black Harris (L.Q. Jones), whose exchange of fire after Garrett co-opts the former to help in smoking out the latter results in Baker's agonisingly slow passing, stumbling down to the river, gut-shot, and sitting by the slowly flowing waters, the silvery play of light on the surface, as his breathing grows shallower and the life ebbs out of him. At the same time terrible and utterly beautiful, it's one of the greatest scenes Peckinpah ever shot. Likewise the narratively pointless but poetically eloquent scene where Garrett, in a playful throwback to the outshooting-Billy-at-Fort-Sumner scene, accidentally provokes an exchange of fire with a passing raftsman, only for both men to pause, reflect and lower their guns at the critical moment. Both of these scenes are redolent of Peckinpah the humanitarian, Peckinpah the poet, Peckinpah the wounded romantic, desperately aching for a time that's changed and bitterly regretful of the forces that changed it. They give the lie to the cliche of Peckinpah as a purveyor of violence for its own sake.

 

'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' - given its troubled production, its director's tendency to drinking to insensation on set, the disservices done to it in editing, and its rejection of propulsive/exciting/urgent pacing typical of a chase narrative - ought to be a complete mess. And certainly there's a wonky, woozy, slightly off-kilter feel to the film. Watching it is like being punch-drunk. But it's also multi-layered, a film that repays repeated viewings. A film that worms its way under your skin and disseminates its genius slowly and subconsciously.

Peckinpah as Prospero

In a film defined by its protagonist confronting himself at every stage of the narrative - confronting his compromised morality; confronting the ramifications of the sell-out deal he has made with politicians and businessman, an uneasy alliance that will ultimately prove his destruction - two scenes in particular, scenes which are narratively and thematically "rhymed", put Pat Garrett (James Coburn) under the spotlight more nakedly than anywhere else.

In the first, Garrett enlists the help of Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) in hunting down Black Harris (L.Q. Jones), a member of Billy the Kid's gang from whom Garrett hopes to extract the Kid's current whereabouts. Baker is Garrett a few years down the line: a sheriff in title only and so disconnected to the job that he no longer bothers with the trappings of authority. Before siding with Garrett to confront Harris, Baker has to ask his wife (Katy Jurado) where his badge is. (Bob Dylan's 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door', written for the scene that follows, opens with the lyric "mama, take this badge from me / I can't use it anymore.") When Garrett first approaches Baker, he's busy in his backyard with timber and tools, building a boat.

"I'm gonna drift out of this damn territory," he tells Garrett, adding (with the kind of ornery frontier poetry so redolent of Peckinpah), "this town ain't got no hat-size no how." This ambition, however, remains unrealised. Baker is shot during the exchange of fire with Harris. Gut shot, to be specific. He stumbles down to the banks of the Rio Grande and sits, eyes glazed and short of breath, watching the slow patterns of light on water as the instrumental version of Dylan's ballad plays softly on the soundtrack.

Baker's death re-emphasizes to Garrett what he already understands: that his tracking down of the Kid is an act of treachery. When Garrett retributively shoots Harris, there's a complete denial of catharsis. "Us old boys oughtn't be doing this to each other," the dying Harris tells him; "ain't that many of us left." Harris's words are both a benediction for his killing of Baker and an accusation against Garrett.

Later, towards the end of the film, Garrett arrives at Fort Sumner. In tow are John Poe and Sheriff McKinley, their souls in hock to Governor Wallace and John Chisum, their consciences assuaged by social pretensions and the dollar bottom line. It's an uneasy alliance that Garrett has with them. Entering Fort Sumner, they spread out and slowly, picking their way through the nocturnal streets like doomsayers, go in search of the Kid. Garrett comes upon Will, a coffin maker, still practising his trade even though the sun is down and the citizenry are abed. Garrett greets him and stops to pass the time. Garrett takes a bottle from his inside coat pocket and offers it to Will, who refuses with a flip of his hand.

Garrett knocks back a slug. He stares across towards Pete Maxwell's house, where the Kid is staying. He's reticent; a man putting off the inevitable.

"You've finally figured it out, huh?" Will says, shooting a sideways look at Garrett. "I thought you was pickin' shit with the chickens, cuttin' yourself a tin bill."

Garrett continues staring at the Maxwell residence, unresponsive.

"Go on, get it over with," Will urges. But Garrett hangs back. As if encouraging him a few moments' hesitation longer, Will continues, "You know what I'm gonna do? Put everything I own right here - " (indicating the coffin) " - I'm gonna bury it in this ground and leave the territory."

Garrett pulls himself together and takes his leave of Will without a word. He walks - hell, stalks - away, not responding, not looking back (although his face hardens with self-loathing) as Will calls after him, "When are you gonna learn that you can't trust anybody - not even yourself, Garrett? You chicken-shit, badge-wearing son of a bitch."

It's an electrifying scene, and would have carried all the weight it does if Will had been played by some whiskery character actor. Eli Wallach, say, or Edmond O'Brien. But Will is played by Sam Peckinpah himself. And 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' takes on a meta-textual element. Unlike that impresario of the cameo appearance Alfred Hitchcock, or his contemporary acolytes Quentin Tarantino or M Night Shyamalan, Peckinpah was not in the habit of appearing in his own movies. In fact, 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' is a one-off. Nine films into his career, five still to go, Peckinpah essayed his one and only acting role*. This alone imbues Will's (small) part with significance.

Narratively, Will exists to remind Garrett of Baker's death: Baker is building a boat when Garrett encounters him, Will a coffin; Baker talks about drifting out of the territory, Will about leaving it; Baker opines that "this town ain't got no hat-size", Will muses on burying everything he owns and leaving. Both men personify leavetakings. Baker dies because of Garrett's quest against the Kid; Will, leaning on a half-finished coffin throughout the scene, is a man who buries the dead.

But there's also a subtext, one made all the more explicit for Peckinpah playing Will. The reference to everything he owns can easily be taken to mean his body of work as a director. The burial of it can be read as a metaphor for the ravages done to everything he'd made thus far, either during filming or in post-production, by the producers/studios/money men who compromised and made cuts to his films. Essentially, this is Peckinpah as Prospero, drowning his book in the last act of 'The Tempest'.

Prospero drowns his book; Peckinpah leaves the territory. 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' was his last western.

But the scene is even more meta than that. When Will tells Garrett to "get it over with", the director has emerged from behind the camera where he was directing the actor (James Coburn) and - now a part of the fabric of his own film - explicitly directs the character. Garrett, walking grim-faced towards Pete Maxwell's place as Will's litany of abuse hangs in the air behind him, has been sent on his way to commit the act that history will judge him for.

*Excepting a non-speaking role as a cameraman in 'Convoy'.

PERSONAL FAVES: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

"It feels like times have changed."

Background
Everything augered well: a director coming fresh from his biggest commercial success to date, returning to the western genre of his first five movies; a script by a young but brilliant writer (Rudy Wurlitzer) seemingly attuned to the zeitgeist; a story based around one of the best known and most mythical histories of the Old West; a cast of genre stalwarts including Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong and Jason Robards, headed up by screen legend James Coburn and folk hero Kris Kristofferson; and a soundtrack by heir apparent to Kristofferson Bob Dylan, the singer-songwriter debuting in a supporting role. What could go wrong?

James Aubrey, that's what. Aubrey was the president of MGM and a hatchet man. He culled, curtailed and compromised MGM's film production, slashing budgets and fucking over filmmakers, and funnelled the money into the corporation's hotel/casino interests. Of all the producers Peckinpah battled with over the years, it is Aubrey who can properly be reckoned his nemesis. Their antagony was evident from the outset. Budget and shooting schedule were set way under what Peckinpah deemed necessary. The services of an engineer Peckinpah wanted on location (to ensure the cameras didn't suffer from the inclement weather conditions in Mexico) was denied. Consquently a damaged flange went undetected, rendering a week's worth of footage out of focus. Aubrey forbade reshoots. Peckinpah re-shot every bit of compromised footage on the QT.

Essentially, 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' played out the way 'Major Dundee' had: Peckinpah rebelled against the studio while on location, going overbudget (by more than $1.5 million) and overschedule, only for the suits to take their revenge when he returned from location shooting. Every one of Peckinpah's films (except for 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia') suffered from post-production interference, but this usually happened once he'd turned in his preferred cut. 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' arguably has the distinction of being the one Peckinpah film for which a director's cut never really existed in the first place. With Aubrey dead set on muscling Peckinpah out and stripping 'Pat Garrett' down to an hour and a half of shoot outs and fuck anything resembling character development or narrative coherence, Peckinpah found himself bartering scenes while editing was still in progress, offering to make cuts here and there in order to safeguard, for example, the raft sequence.

A fine cut was produced for which two preview screenings were permitted. Since Peckinpah was not present at its erstwhile screening for the suits, and since so many compromises had been made already, it's dubious as to whether this can be considered Peckinpah's final cut. Aubrey wanted the length reducing and shanghaied the editing team into working to this end behind Peckinpah's back, threatening that non-compliance would result in his turning it over to less experienced editors whose only remit would be to hack it down to 90 minutes. What happened next is the stuff of legend. Remembering that a work print had been left in a screening room, Garth Craven and Sergio Ortega, assisted by Peckinpah's driver Chalo Gonzalez, gained entrance to said location under the cover of night, Mysteriously, the print wasn't there next morning. It was soon realised the print didn't have any sound. Funnily enough, another disappearance occurred.

The Aubrey-approved cut-to-ribbons 96 minute cut of 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' was released in July 1973 to muted reviews and average box office. In October of the same year, MGM ceased film distribution and sold its entire back catalogue to United Artists, an event which precipitated Aubrey's resignation. "Mr Aubrey is no longer employed," Peckinpah mused shortly afterwards; "so maybe I have done something good for the world." A pyrrhic victory, maybe, but the fact still remains: James Aubrey was unemployed and Sam Peckinpah went on to make another five films.

Synopsis
Las Cruces, New Mexico, 1909. Ageing Sheriff Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is in dispute with landowner John Poe (John Beck) over a lease agreement. Garrett and Beck's association goes back to 1881 when Garrett tracked down his former friend and partner in crime Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), but they've come to a parting of the ways. With Garrett old and embittered and publically critical of the Santa Fe Ring, Beck and his business partners consider him a liability - an embarrassing throwback to the old days - and are planning to assassinate him. In his last few moments alive, Garrett relives those infamous days and the terrible denouement that made him a sheriff and the Kid a legend.

Analysis
I've kept the synopsis short for two reasons: (i) 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' is a simple story in the way that 'The Wild Bunch' is simple, ie. narratively (Peckinpah collaborator Gordon Carroll summarised the plot as "a man who doesn't want to run ... pursued by a man who doesn't want to catch him"); and (ii) this article's waltzing towards the 1,000 word mark and I haven't even started analysing the film yet.

There's probably another 1,000 words that can be written about the opening credits sequence. Events in Las Cruces, 1909 (Poe's betrayal of Garrett) and Fort Sumner, 1881 (Garrett's reunion with the Kid a week before he takes the post of sheriff, ie. just prior to his betrayal of Billy) are intercut. When Garrett rides into Fort Sumner, he finds the Kid and his minions amusing themselves shooting the heads off a bunch of chickens buried up to their necks in the dirt. At Las Cruces, Poe's henchman mumbles something about checking a harness, instead pulling a rifle from a saddle roll; another gunman crawls through the sagebrush, ready to take up his position. The shots that follow cut between target practice and cold-blooded murder. Billy's men blast the heads of chickens; Poe's open fire on Garrett. Timeframes overlap. So does the soundtrack. "Damn near perfect," one of Billy's acolytes declares, apropos of a summarily despatched chicken ... but the words echo as Garrett takes a shot and slumps to the ground. Peckinpah's use of editing ramps up the emotional impact of the sequence: a potshot Billy takes at a chicken seems to travel through time and strike Garrett; purposefully aimed coups de grace by Poe's men result in the heads being blasted off helpless fowl.

Peckinpah's signature freeze frames are used as bluntly and brilliant as in 'The Wild Bunch'. As Garrett struggles to rise from the dusty ground only to sink back defeatedly, Peckinpah isolates the moment. He uses this image to accompany the film's title. He arrives at his "directed by" credit in equally iconoclastic fashion. The 1909 prologue documenting Garrett's death throes gives out the 1881 Fort Sumner sequence, and a very much alive - and younger (though still notably middle-aged) Garrett comes riding into town. Billy the gang don't notice him, so busy are they decimating the local feathered populace. Hopping off his horse, he hefts his rifle and, while Billy's still aiming, sights on a chicken and blows its head off. Billy's boys go diving for cover, panic written on their faces. Billy turns round, slowly and wryly, and greets his old friend with a grin. Some spiky banter ensues (it's clear some of the Kid's hangers-on aren't too happy to see Garrett), then the two of them head off to the bar for a couple of shots of whisky and the business at hand:

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.

Peckinpah's directed by credit appears at this point, in a freeze frame that enforces the pause between "I'm makin' you" and "when I take over as sheriff". It might not be as quotable as "if they move, kill 'em" in 'The Wild Bunch', but by God it gives the line some weight!

The dynamic has thus been established: Garrett and the Kid are equally protagonist and antagonist. Neither are exactly heroes, though Peckinpah both empathisizes with the weight of world-weary experience that seems to be etched into every line on Garrett's face, and appreciates the self-aggrandizing behaviour of Billy (particularly in his escape from the Lincoln County jail). Neither are entirely villains, either, even though Billy is a notorious outlaw who refuses to change his ways, and Garrett is a former outlaw who commits the greater sin (certainly in the grand scheme of Peckinpah's aesthetics) of not remaining true to himself and trying to change with the times.

Oh yes, Garrett is the first (and last) of Peckinpah's western protagonists to break with the tradition of Steve Judd, Pike Bishop and co. and Cable Hogue. This is perhaps the most significant element of the dynamic/antagonism between Garrett and Billy - it's summed up during their conversation just after the opening credits:

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.

Which makes it pretty clear that, since neither Garrett or the Kid are entirely good guy or bad guy, the real villain of the piece is the changing times. Or rather the men who are responsible for changing them. The men responsible for political corruption, financial chicanery, corporate conspiracy and the fencing off of frontier territory, the free and open spaces partitioned, owned, leased and jealously guarded. Men like high-living politico Governor Wallace (Jason Robards), eminence grices Holland and Norris (the power behind Wallace's throne), grasping landowner John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) and toadying parvenu on the make Poe. If 'The Wild Bunch' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' depict technology as the instrument of change, then 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' looks back to 'Ride the High Country' ("the days of the forty-niners are past and the days of the steady businessman have arrived") - only here the steady businessman has been replaced by the rapacious businessman, the dollar-obsessed businessman, the businessman who rapes the land and values human life lower than his profit margin. Corruption and bribery are rife. At an interview with Wallace, the Governor offers Garrett an incentive towards Billy's expedited apprehension:

Wallace: We're offering a reward of one thousand dollars for the Kid's capture. You can have five hundred now.
Garrett: Well, I aim to bring the Kid in. But until I do, you'd better take your five hundred dollars and shove it up your ass and set fire to it.

One of the most curious aspects of 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' - and I'm damned if I can work out whether it's a flaw or a masterstroke - is how determinedly Peckinpah keeps the Chisum/Wallace/Poe conspiracy offscreen. True, all three of them get at least one significant scene (Garrett's encounter with Wallace is thorny; with Chisum, cautious), but they remain backgrounded, shadows that creep around the edges of Garrett's pursuit of Billy. The depiction of Chisum in particular is borderline bland. It's as if Peckinpah is saying "yup, these are the villains, these are the guys hellbent on destroying the old ways, these are guys without souls who answer only to money and power and influence, but by Christ they're nobodies - they ain't really men".

Peckinpah has more time for Deputies Bell (Matt Clark) and Ollinger (R.G. Armstrong), the latter completing the triumvirate of fanatical religious types the actor specialised in (following on from Knudsen in 'Ride the High Country' and Dahlstrom in 'Major Dundee'. Both are in the way when Billy liberates himself from Lincoln Country jail. Kristofferson's characterisation of Billy melds ruefulness and cold determination when he comes up against Bell. It's a different story with Ollinger. The two men have already entered into a spirited disagreement over spiritual matters, Ollinger committed to making sure Billy "gets with god" ("I'll take you for a walk across Hell on a spiderweb") and Billy responding to Ollinger's pious "On your knees" with a pithy "Kiss my ass". Billy's summary dispatching of Ollinger burns with the visceral and iconic intensity that fuelled Peckinpah's reputation as "Bloody Sam".

Peckinpah has more time for Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) and Black Harris (L.Q. Jones), whose exchange of fire after Garrett co-opts the former to help in smoking out the latter results in Baker's agonisingly slow passing, stumbling down to the river, gut-shot, and sitting by the slowly flowing waters, the silvery play of light on the surface, as his breathing grows shallower and the life ebbs out of him. At the same time terrible and utterly beautiful, it's one of the greatest scenes Peckinpah ever shot. Likewise the narratively pointless but poetically eloquent scene where Garrett, in a playful throwback to the outshooting-Billy-at-Fort-Sumner scene, accidentally provokes an exchange of fire with a passing raftsman, only for both men to pause, reflect and lower their guns at the critical moment. Both of these scenes are redolent of Peckinpah the humanitarian, Peckinpah the poet, Peckinpah the wounded romantic, desperately aching for a time that's changed and bitterly regretful of the forces that changed it. They give the lie to the cliche of Peckinpah as a purveyor of violence for its own sake.

Peckinpah has more time for a coffin-maker named Will ... of whom more tomorrow. I've expended about 2,500 words already and I think that one short scene between Garrett and Will (who serves, variously, as conscience, ghost and alter ego) deserves an article of its own. For now, I'll just say that 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' - given its troubled production, its director's tendency to drinking to insensation on set, the disservices done to it in editing, and its rejection of propulsive/exciting/urgent pacing typical of a chase narrative - ought to be a complete mess. And certainly there's a wonky, woozy, slightly off-kilter feel to the film. Watching it is like being punch-drunk. But it's also multi-layered, a film that repays repeated viewings. A film that worms its way under your skin and disseminates its genius slowly and subconsciously.

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.

Major Dundee

"You were whipped, major. Burying your dead isn't going to change that."

Background
Among the many admirers of 'Ride the High Country' was Charlton Heston. He and producer Jerry Bresler were developing a property provisionally entitled 'Then Came the Tiger' - a synopsis by Harry Julian Fink that had all the makings of a full-blooded cavalry epic - for Columbia. Heston and Bresler's previous collaboration, 'Diamond Head', had done solid business at the box office. Peckinpah didn't need asking twice when he was offered directing duties. Fink got the nod to write the script proper, Bresler talked up the production as a big-budget roadshow release, and Peckinpah headed to Mexio to scout locations. The first problem was the script: Fink's first draft was unfocussed and - crucially - unfinished. Oscar Saul and Peckinpah himself worked on it, but essentially the now retitled 'Major Dundee' started shooting without a finalised screenplay - never a good indicator for a film.

Then, with principal photography well underway and half of Peckinpah's cast and crew stricken with illness, the money men at Columbia decided to slash budget and schedule. The epic destined for a roadshow release was now downgraded to a two-hour western. Peckinpah, unimpressed by Bresler's subservience to the studio, completely ignored his paymasters' edict to cut scenes, use fewer set-ups and expose less film. He continued to shoot every bit of footage he needed to make the film as he envisaged it. 'Major Dundee' went massively overbudget and behind schedule. In post-production, the studio took Peckinpah's two hour fifty minute original cut out of his hands, hacked it down by a third, had actor Michael J Anderson record a truly horrible narration which sloppily papers over plot holes and gaps in the chronology, and saddled it with an equally appalling score.

Between his very public criticism of Bresler and Columbia and his removal from his next project, 'The Cincinnati Kid', Peckinpah became a pariah within the industy. Four years in the wilderness followed, before he came storming back, all blood and thunder and very much unbowed, with his masterpiece 'The Wild Bunch'.

Synopsis
Transferred to the command of a prison garrison as part of a disciplinary measure, Major Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston) arrives at his new post to witness the aftermath of a raid on nearby homesteaders by marauding Apache warrior Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate). Already balking at a posting that takes him out of the theatre of conflict, Dundee goes renegade: he puts together a makeshift army of volunteers and prisoners. (Technically, many of the prisoners are volunteers given a choice of volunteer or be hanged.) He appoints his one-time friend and now sworn enemy Captain Benjamin Tyreen (Richard Harris) as his number two, and they set out to hunt Charriba down. An ambush during a river crossing costs lives and the loss of supplies. Dundee leads his men to a small Mexican town where the soldiers of a French garrison hold sway. Effectively liberating the villagers, Dundee is moved enough by their destitution to share with them the supplies looted from the garrison. He meets Teresa (Senta Berger), the Austrian widow of the town's doctor, and they begin a brief romantic relationship. The idyll is interrupted when Charriba's men stage another attack, and Dundee is forced into battle not only with the Apaches but a battalion of vengeful French troops.

Analysis
The Sony Home Entertainment DVD I'm basing this review on bills itself as "a restored masterpiece". The back cover blurb continues: "over 40 years after Sam Peckinpah's classic western was released, missing footage has been located and restored. The new scenes complete the electrifying depiction of an obsessive Union officer ..." etc, etc. Now, while there are many reasons to be thankful for this version - a much improved transfer; correct ratio; the removal of the fucking awful opening credits music by Mitch Miller's Sing-a-long Gang - claiming that an extra ten minutes or so "completes" the film when well over half an hour is still missing is stretching it a bit.

'Major Dundee' will forever remain a frustrating viewing experience, for two reasons. Number one: Richard Harris declared the original cut to be the best film he'd ever appeared in (this from a man who already had indisputable classics 'This Sporting Life' and 'Red Desert' under his belt!). Number two: Peckinpah had the opportunity to restore it to his original vision ... and declined!! Five years on from the debacle, with 'The Wild Bunch' in the can and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' in production, Peckinpah was still publically berating Columbia for their desecration of 'Major Dundee' and describing the original cut as still his best film. Columbia called his bluff and offered him the chance to re-edit and re-release it. Citing his involvement with other projects, Peckinpah replied that he didn't have the time. David Weddle, in his indispensible biography, postulates that the film was "more useful as a lost masterpiece than a rediscovered failure".

So what of the two hours and ten minutes that remain? The first half, certainly, is taut and compelling filmmaking. Dundee's hell-raising address to the prisoners; the countdown to Tyreen's hanging, curtailed only when he volunteers; the departure from the garrison, tensions already rising; the attack on the French fort; the execution of a deserter on the trail - memorable scenes, all. Two in particular are worthy of comparison to anything on Peckinpah's CV. The first has the Confederates launch into a lusty rendition of 'Dixie' as the rag-tag ad hoc battalion rides out from the garrison. Affronted, the Confederates strike up with 'The Battle Hymn of the American Republic'. As the two groups try to drown each other out, the small (and evidently politically unaffiliated) cluster of men bringing up the rear shrug their shoulders and start belting out 'Clementine'. It's one of Peckinpah's occasional, brilliantly observed comedic moments (like the passing of the whisky bottle, Warren Oates finally getting a go at it only when it's empty, in 'The Wild Bunch' or the supposedly under-attack stagecoach later revealed as a playful re-enacted by an Apache raiding party in 'The Deadly Companions').

The second - and the best scene in the film - has one of Tyreen's men, O.W. Hadley (Oates), summarily tried after going AWOL. He pleads that he only went back to the Mexican village to see one of the women. Quizzed on the details (Dundee is cognizant, by this point, that the French have sacked the village in retribution), Hadley reveals himself as a liar. Dundee stands as judge, jury and if not executioner then certainly all too eager to give the command to the firing squad. Not that it gets to that point. Hadley pleads with Tyreen, asking if he's really going to stand by and let Dundee have him killed. "I'm obliged to, lad," Tyreen replies; "you should have remembered you belong to the major and not to me." Hadley, blinking with the realisation that he's reached the end of the line, faces up to it, addressing Dundee: "Hell, major, you're just doing what you've got to do. But damn your soul to hell for it, and God bless Robert E. Lee!" Even as he speaks Lee's name, Tyreen's pistol roars and Hadley pitches forward dead. In killing Hadley himself, Tyreen cheats Dundee of the satisfaction. He then swears to kill Dundee once Charriba "has been caught or destroyed".

Sadly, things go south after this. Dundee's liaison with Teresa slows the film down. Gaps in the narrative become more prominent and the voiceover more tenuous. 'Major Dundee' becomes, in its last hour, episodic, fragmented, unfocused. A sequence that was presumably longer (and more coherent) in Peckinpah's original cut has Dundee, recovering from wounds sustained during a surprise attack, debase himself with a whore (at the cost of his relationship with Teresa) in a fly-blown Mexican town. Coming on like a dry run for Pike, Dutch and the Gorch brothers' collective moment of self-loathing in 'The Wild Bunch', what works as visceral psychological portraiture in 'The Wild Bunch' just seems out of place in 'Major Dundee'. Dundee's debasement is apropos of nothing, nor does it prefigure the cathartic self-destruction of Pike and co.; Dundee simply rejoins the battalion and snaps back into grizzled, macho leader of men mode.

The denouement is unsatisfying, too. The long-awaited showdown with Charriba is unengaging and over quickly. The subsequent battle with the French troops is a hell of a lot more exciting, but it's still just the resolution of a subplot. The whole film builds towards the destruction of Charriba, and - whether this is due to the script never fully cohering, Peckinpah muffing the sequence (hardly likely given his facility for extended, actionful set pieces) or clumsy fingers in the editing room when the only criteria was reduction of the running time to two hours - it's a case of not with a bang but a whimper.

Elsewhere, however, Peckinpah proves himself as an actor's director. Charlton Heston, as can be expected, plays Charlton Heston, but everyone else is superb. Harris, working with Peckinpah for the first and only time, has a field day with Tyreen. The supporting cast solidifies the Peckinpah Irregulars: Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong and John Davis Chandler return from 'Ride the High Country', while James Coburn, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor and Aurora Clavel fill out the ranks. Even the much put-upon Senta Berger (her performance critically mauled, even though she does a decent salvage job from very thin material) would reappear, twelve years later, in 'Cross of Iron'. Armstrong kicks ass in the name of the Lord (doling out a retributive beating to one of Tyreen's men guilty of racially harrassing one of the battalion's black contingent) and Pickens, cruelly underused, gets an iconic moment when he reels into Dundee's office, drunk as a lord, and announces "If you want an injun-fightin', mule-packin', whisky-drinkin' volunteer, sir, well by God you've got one." It's tempting to imagine that the full version of 'Major Dundee' brings these colourful secondary characters out of the background and gives them life - a damn sight more life than Heston's misery-guts protagonist.

"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.