SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Stella Stevens in The Ballad of Cable Hogue

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.

"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.