SUMMER OF SATAN: Race with the Devil

Rounding out an unofficial “six Satanic degrees of Sam Peckinpah” trilogy, ‘Race with the Devil’ – starring Peckinpah alumni Warren Oates and R.G. Armstrong – is pretty much the ne plus ultra of backwoods 70s devil-worship movies … even if the devil-worship itself is restricted to one scene and what follows is more in the nature of a chase movie informed by a city-types/rednecks mutual antipathy dynamic.

In other words, it’s more like ‘Vanishing Point’ (only with an RV instead of a muscle car) meets ‘Deliverance’ (sans riverside sodomy) with just a soupcon of Satanism thrown in to get the narrative underway.

Said narrative is simplicity itself: bike shop owner Frank Stewart (Oates) and his best buddy, dirt-track racer Roger Marsh (Peter Fonda), head off on a cross-country trip with their respective womenfolk – Alice (Loretta Swit) and Kelly (Lara Parker) – but make the mistake of spending the first night out in the wilds instead of at an RV park. They witness a Satanic ritual in which a girl is sacrificed. The Satanists twigged on that they’ve been spotted. Roger and Kelly and Frank and Alice (which sounds like a movie in its own right!) hightail it out of their. The local sheriff (Armstrong) undertakes a cursory investigation but tries to convince Frank and Roger they were mistaken. Our heroes get back on the road, but it soon becomes apparent they’re being followed. Not only followed, but targeted.

Jack Starrett – an always dependable director of unpretentious low-budget fare (‘Cleopatra Jones’, ‘The Gravy Train’, ‘A Small Town in Texas’) – judges the material perfectly. He spends no more than fifteen minutes setting up the characters and their cross-country drive, then cuts to the chase. Quite literally. With only two stops – the first, ill-advisedly, to inform the law; the second, before they full realize the extent of the Satanists’ influence, at an RV park – Starrett keeps his protagonists in the RV and on the move for most of the running time.

He also ups the ante on their paranoia. After Frank and Roger have their story pooh-poohed by the sheriff, and Alice and Kelly find a rune that’s been left on the RV as a warning, a two-book heist from the ‘occult’ section of the nearest library gives them implications a-plenty to ponder. What started out as a spot of schoolboy voyeurism – Frank and Roger watching exchanging magnifying glasses as they watch the ceremony from the opposite bank of a river and whoop it up when the female participants cast their robes off – darkens as they realize what they’re dealing with.

What gives the movie its crawling, nasty tension is that they’re never quite sure who they’re dealing with. Kelly in particular gets a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, imagining the minions of Satan at every twist and turn. Hatchet-faced old librarian? Satanist. The overbearing couple next mobile home along at the RV park? Satanist. Bunch of weirdos around the swimming pool checking out Kelly and Alice in their cozzies? Satanists. The ornery fella at the gas station (played by Starrett himself)? Satanist. The drivers of the various cars and pick-up trucks who try to run the RV off the road in the smash-’em-up finale? Definitely Satanists!

The idea that so many people are involved (the revellers at the ceremony probably number a couple of dozen, tops) is almost a flaw. So is the fact that for all of their communing with the Bad Dude, these backwoods Luciferians seem to rely on entirely earthly means of stopping Frank and Rog and the gals.

Or do they? The final scene, often written off as way too coincidental, actually suggests a late in the day manipulation of the protagonists’ actions by occult means. There’s a revelation that legitimizes Kelly’s concerns, then Starrett wraps things up with an image that’s as bluntly and abruptly effective as that of ‘The Devil’s Rain’. And equally contentious.

‘Race with the Devil’ is a terrific little B-movie. Tense when it needs to be, nasty when it wants to be. Worth watching, and one to make up your own mind about. It is pure coincidence that they make a certain stop in the almost sigh-of-relief finale, or has a higher, darker and gleefully sadistic power guided them there?

Warren Oates

It would have been Warren Oates's 83rd birthday today.

If there is an afterlife, I'd like to think he's doing tequila shots with the ghost of Sam Peckinpah at the Alfredo Garcia Bar & Grill right now.

There's sure as hell a few glasses being raised at chez Agitation tonight!

PERSONAL FAVES: Badlands

Charles Starkweather was an eighteen year old high school drop-out with a nihilistic attitude towards life and a bum job collecting trash. Caril Ann Fugate was thirteen; she probably liked the fact that he looked like James Dean. After Starkweather killed her mother, step-father and step-sister, she joined him on what a tabloid hack would probably describe as an eight-day killing spree.

Apprehended, Starkweather got the death penalty. Fugate was sentenced to life, but paroled after 17 years. Starkweather died in the electric chair at the Nebraska State Penitentiary on 25 June 1959. Fifty years down the line, thanks to movies, books and a particularly haunting acoustic number by Bruce Springsteen, Starkweather and Fugate are still a part of the cultural consciousness – almost a subversion of it.

Fugate is the exemplar of every parent’s fear: the impressionable and, in the final analysis, disturbingly complicit girl next door whose inner Lolita is unlocked by the swaggering denim-clad bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Starkweather is the darkest character Jim Thompson never created: a scab on the values of small town America; a Brylcreemed and dead-eyed “fuck you” to the American dream.

Starkweather and Fugate have inspired at least half a dozen movies, the first – James Landis’s ‘The Sadist’ – released just four years after Starkweather’s execution; the most recent – Bryon Werner’s ‘Starkweather’ – in 2004. Perhaps their most unexpected reflection on the big screen has been in the performances of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek (both delivering career-making turns) in Terrence Malick’s extraordinarily poetic ‘Badlands’.

Malick’s film, as spelled out in a post-credits disclaimer, is ostensibly a work of fiction. Ergo his good-looking young sociopaths are called Kit and Holly. And while the order and dynamics of the murders – Holly’s father (Warren Oates) at their home; a friend of Kit’s at his out-of-the-way farmhouse; a couple of college kids in an underground bunker – are patterned on the actual events, other aspects diverge. The redacting of Holly’s family to just her father spares us the brutal killing of Fugate’s two-year-old step-sister. The rich man whose house Kit and Holly hide out at before their final, ill-fated dash for freedom is repaid for his courtesy by surviving their ministrations. Industrialist C. Lauer Ward – along with his wife and their maid – wasn’t so lucky.

Malick’s fictive revisions of the story find their fullest expression in Sheen’s performance as Kit. Laconic, loquacious, querulous and quasi-philosophical, Kit kicks his heels in a cinematic middle-ground between the sanguine and sanguinary. There is nothing here of Starkweather’s determinedly murderous outlook. Malick instead seems to have taken as his starting point Starkweather’s resemblance to James Dean. Notice how Kit, even under pressure, acts out the drawlingly cynical anti-hero part whenever the camera has him in close-up, or in a clinch with Holly, or exchanging shots with deputies during a dusty and high-speed chase. Even moments before his capture, he takes time to arrange a pile of rocks to mark the scene – an unprecedented example of a character organising his own set dressing.

However, the few occasions he seems lost, confused or unable to rationalise his actions with a lazy grin or a wink or a throwaway quip, he’s caught almost accidentally in long shot. Kit, in other words, is acting the lead role in a movie that will only ever be shown in the picture palace of his mind. His relationship with Holly is predicated on her similarly detached and delusive worldview. ‘Badlands’ is narrated by Holly. Not that she lends any context, insight or clarification to the events as they unfold (she even admits to not knowing why Kit commits a particular murder, taking it on trust when he claims that it would be bad luck to talk about it); rather, she talks us through the story via a litany of clichés straight out of the pages of romantic fiction. Or the pages of movie magazines. As Kit drives hell-for-leather for the border, Holly blandly reads the gossip column of one such publication. There are at least half a dozen corpses in their wake at this point, Kit is forcing a stolen car through rough terrain and the most important thing to Holly is whether there’s any truth in the rumours about Rita Hayworth’s love life.

For me, the key sequence is Kit and Holly’s forest idyll. This is where the disparity between Kit and Holly’s fantasy world and the bloody reality of Kit’s trigger-happy tendencies achieves a brief and spectacularly interrupted synthesis. Malick abandons his already slender concession to genre expectations and punctuates a montage of Kit and Holly’s sojourn among the trees with some exquisite and beautifully observational wildlife photography, “Gassenhauer” from Carl Orff’s ‘Musica Poetica’ filling the soundtrack. ‘Badlands’, already something considerably more than just a true crime flick, achieves transcendence at this point. Becomes art. I’ll go as far as saying that ‘Badlands’ gets as close as any American director has ever come to Werner Herzog’s principle of “ecstatic truth”.

Painterly, hypnotic and unforgettable, ‘Badlands’ is shot through with scene after scene demonstrating the relationship between character and landscape and exploring how the two influence and define each other. The result is some of the most striking, poignant and memorable images in the whole of American cinema. Indeed there are moments where Malick conjures visual poetry so profound in its unexpectedness that you could almost mistake ‘Badlands’ for a Werner Herzog movie. And I can’t think of any higher praise than that.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

"Nobody loses all the time."



Background
The basic idea for 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' was Frank Kowalski's: a crime boss puts a bounty one someone's head, but with the twist that said individual is already dead. Peckinpah worked with Gordon Dawson (who had done some uncredited script work on 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' and was associate producer of that film and 'The Getaway') on the screenplay. Producer Martin Baum was looking for a project for his newly formed company Optimus Productions. He had a deal with United Artists and, on the basis of a palimpsest of Peckinpah and Dawson's script (just 25 pages), he green-lighted the production. Peckinpah was hot from 'The Getaway' and 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' was about to go before the cameras.


'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' turned into a war between Peckinpah and MGM head honcho James Aubrey. David Weddle, in his biography, portrays a weary and defeated Peckinpah at the helm of 'Alfredo Garcia': "the production proceeded smoothly, but a blanket of melancholy settled over the company. It wasn't like the old days. Something had happened to Sam; the flame in those hazel eyes had flickered out." Maybe, maybe not. I find it difficult to watch 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' and entertain the notion of a lifeless and unmotivated Peckinpah calling the shots. An exhausted Peckinpah, yes; a Peckinpah retreating to Mexico like Pike Bishop or Doc McCoy; a Peckinpah going a little crazy, losing it a bit. But not a defeated Peckinpah. Peckinpah was a true maverick and 'Alfredo Garcia' is the single most maverick film on his CV. It's also unique in being the only thing he made that wasn't fucked with at some stage of production. "I did 'Alfredo Garcia'," he said later, "and I did exactly what I wanted to, good or bad, like it or not. That was my film."


Amen to that.








Synopsis
Mexican crimelord El Jefe (Emilio Fernandez) has his daughter tortured until she gives up the name of the non-Jefe-approved individual who made her pregnant. His name? Well, the clue's in the title. Jefe's heavies start combing Mexico, among their number Sappensly (Robert Webber) and Quill (Gig Young). Flashing around Alfredo's photograph in a seedy bar, they come across Bennie (Warren Oates), a down-at-heel American making a meagre living pounding out 'Guantanamera' for the tourists on a tinny old piano. Bennie says he'll ask around. Bennie has an inkling that his on-off girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega) - a sometime hooker, sometime lounge singer - might know Alfredo's whereabouts, having recently had a fling with him. Bennie discovers where Alfredo is and that he's not going anywhere. A car accident has rendered him recently deceased. Bennie and Elita take off for Alfredo's final resting place, with Sappensley and Quill making it clear they'll come looking for him in four days. A couple of bounty hunters tail them. En route, a couple of bikers harrass them. Then they arrive at the graveyard and things just get worse ...






Analysis
There are two common misconceptions about 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia':


1) It's about a man who commits grave robbery and becomes a killer for a million dollar bounty. (Actually, it's not until the last scene at El Jefe's hacienda that Bennie realises the true value of Alfredo's head; up till then he's done what he's done for a mere couple of thousand.)


2) It's a nihilistic film.


'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' is many things, including bleak and cynical, but it's certainly not nihilistic. And for every bleak or cynical aspect of the film, there are plenty of moments that are tender, romantic, poetic and surprisingly funny. The first time I saw 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' was at Nottingham's Broadway Cinema as part of their now sadly defunct Shots in the Dark Festival back in the early '90s. It was a straight-down-the-middle divisive viewing experience. Half the audience found it uproariously funny, the other half sat there in stony silence. I loved it immediately and knew that I'd just seen something unique; a true one-off.


One of the most gratifying discoveries I've made in scouring the internet for information and resources on Peckinpah as part of this project is just how much love there is for 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia'. I've long been of the opinion that it's a film more heard of than seen. And not always appreciated by those who have seen it. Paul Seydor, quoted in Weddle's biography, remarks "Fifty or a hundred years from now people will be looking back on that film the way we look back on Faulkner today. Professors used to get fired or denied tenure for arguing that Faulkner was a great writer; today he's recognised as one of the greatest American writers. People will look back on us and wonder why we failed to understand 'Alfredo Garcia'."


From what I've come across on the net, I'd hazard a guess that, thirty five years down the line, the rennaissance Seydor anticipated is already under way.

I've linked to all of these posts previously, but it's worth doing so again. An article at Technicolor Dreams identifies the film as "Peckinpah's crippled swan song to Hollywood". JD at Radiator Heaven delves behind the scenes and finds how attuned Peckinpah was to the "dirt-poor parts of Mexico that you will not find in a tourist brochure any time soon". For JB at The Phantom Country it's a study of male virility, while Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun tunes into the film's romanticism. All of these writers love 'Alfredo Garcia' wholeheartedly and all of them find something specific to love about it, something personal to them. Between their various posts, they find so many facets that there's probably no need for me to write any of this. But in the spirit of flying the flag for Peckinpah's most misunderstood film, here's my 1,500 words anyway.

'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' unfolds like a waking dream equally suffused with melancholy and inspired gallows humour. It establishes narrative perameters and motivations coterminous to plot-driven crime cinema, then disinterestedly shucks off all narrative considerations and meanders off into the realms of ... well, pick your own description: mood piece, tone poem, art film, head fuck, all of the above. It's a film so rich in ambiguity and so entirely its own that it defies conventional analysis. Which is why I'm going to abandon the approach I've taken in the previous articles in this month's blog-a-thon; why, instead, I'm just going to list, at random, a handful of the reasons 'Alfredo Garcia' occupies the place it does in my cinematic affections.

I love how tenderly, grubbily and believably the relationship between Bennie and Elita is brought to life. How Elita's previous life still riles him ("You're a lyin', cheatin', no-good, two-bit bitch," he grunts at one point, the turn of phrase leaving little room for ambiguity), yet how protective he is of her, how righteously indignant he gets at the motel owner who remembers Elita as a hooker and refuses her a room - Bennie sets the man straight in no uncertain terms and secures "the best room in the house". Bennie and Elita, as a couple, are fiery, passionate, argumentative, tender, rock solid together and totally vulnerable. Peckinpah threw himself headfirst into relationships and often saw them self-destruct. He knew the territory.

I love how the story essentially steals back from Charles B. FitzSimons the basic set-up of 'The Deadly Companions' (odyssey with corpse), taking what is little more than a gimmick in that early and severely compromised film and here demonstrating in unflinching and fly-blown detail the logistics of hauling a decomposing body part long distance. (Great scene: Bennie stops at a cantina to buy ice for an ad hoc head/refrigeration procedure. A kid notices the putrid burlap sack in Bennie's passenger seat, flies swarming around it, and asks about the contents. "Cat," Bennie replies. "Dead cat. Belonged to a friend of mine.")

I love how the set-up offers a very strong, identifiably genre-based hook, how the melding of imagery redolent of the western films and 'The Getaway' seem to point in a certain direction, only for any semblance of a traditional/generic narrative to devolve, fragment and segue into something weird, hallucinogenic and indefinable the further into his (and Peckinpah's and the audience's) heart of darkness Bennie journeys.

I love Bennie's monologues with Alfredo's head and how they develop out of his conversations with Elita earlier in the film. "The church cuts off the feet, fingers, any other goddamn thing from the saints, don't they?" Bennie postulates, evoking the sacred object as fetish in order to justify a spot of grave-robbing: "Well, what the hell? Alfredo's a saint. He's the saint of our money." Later, Elita gone and the money of no use to Bennie, he berates and abuses Alfredo: "You've got jewels in your ears, diamonds up your nose ... You son of bitch, I'll be damned if she's not keeping the best part of you company."

I love Bennie's shabby white suit and indifferent attitude to his musicianship. He makes me think of a bizarre filmic parallel universe where Dirk Bogarde's Von Aschenbach in 'Death in Venice' gets down with his more earthy side, ends up in some Mexican backwater and gets over the whole Tadzio thing with the help of a flame-headed and voluptuous siren.

I love that the film simultaneously plays to and flies in the face of the tired old criticisms of misogyny and violence levelled at Peckinpah.

Yes, the women in the film are ill-treated, but they are proud, strong and defiant and so much more knowing than the men ("I've been here before," Elita tells Bennie at one point, in a line which kicks that much harder once you know the context, "and you don't know the way." El Jefe's daughter, too; she withstands her father's power games for as long as she can before confessing Alfredo's name; in the final minutes of the film, however, she's the one in control who gives Bennie leave to do what he's been fixing to do since that awful moment in the graveyard. Yes, there is gunplay and blood squibs explode: Peckinpah's doing it deliberately, taking the piss out of the people who see nothing in his films beyond the corpuscle content. Bennie blows an antagonist away, then pumps a superfluous bullet in his dead body. "Why?" he asks himself. "Because it feels so goddamn good." Note to everyone who hated the film back in 1974: this was a joke ... at your expense. So's that bravura final shot (Peckinpah's way of shrugging his shoulders and saying "okay then, if that's all you'll give me credit for, then here it fucking is"): freeze frame - close-up - the barrel of a smoking gun - "directed by Sam Peckinpah" stamped across it.

"A walk thing": creating The Wild Bunch's most iconic moment

Pike Bishop (William Holden) pulls his boots on in the dingy room of a whore young enough to be his daughter - hell, his granddaughter. The girl washes herself lethargically while her baby cries, unattended, in a crib nearby. Pike's face is twisted in self-disgust. He's thinking back to what he and the Bunch saw on their return to Agua Verde: their comrade Angel (Jaime Sanchez) being dragged along behind General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez)'s automobile, beaten and bloodied.

Pike tosses some coins on a table and exits the room. Next door, the Gorch brothers, Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates), have been similarly engaged. "Let's go," Pike barks. A look passes between them. Understanding registers on Tector's face. Lyle blinks, momentarily uncertain, then his whiskery features harden. "Why not?" he replies.

Outside, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) is sitting against the brothel wall, whittling a stick. Whittling is probably the wrong word - he's going at it with a knife like it was Mapache himself. It was Dutch who was with Angel when Mapache's men captured him. Dutch who rode away and left him to his fate, there being no other course of action. Dutch more than any of them hurts at Mapache's torture of Angel. Dutch doesn't even attempt to assuage himself in the arms of whores; he simply sits and hacks away with his knife and waits.

When Pike and the Gorch brothers emerge, he and Dutch lock eyes. No word is spoken. Words aren't needed. Dutch slowly gets to his feet. He knows what's going to happen next. He's been willing it. He wants it.

The four men walk purposefully over to where their horses are hitched. They pull rifles out of saddle rolls, check pistols, thumb rounds into chambers.

It was at this point - as far as the script was concerned - that the action abruptly cut to the Bunch's arrival at the courtyard where Mapache and his dissolute revolutionaries are drinking and entertaining women. This, as far as the crew were aware, would be the next the thing they shot.

Peckinpah had other ideas.

Biographer David Weddle describes it best:

Assistant director Cliff Coleman ... began issuing marching orders for the next set-up ... but Peckinpah stopped him. "No, no, Cliff, wait ... I want to do a walk thing first."

"What do you mean, 'a walk thing'?"

Peckinpah growled something unintelligible, then began lining up Holden, Borgnine, Oates and Johnson to make a long walk through the outlying buildings with shotguns cradled in their arms ... Sam set up a group of drunken Mexican soldiers, playing guitars and singing, for the group to walk past. Coleman began layering in other extras ... "And all of a sudden, Jesus Christ," says Coleman, "the music's going and the camera's rolling and these fucking guys started to walk and everybody's going 'Wow, it's the real thing!' Nobody knew what Sam was going to do or what he wanted to do. Before you knew it, it built and it built and it built and it built until it became that scene."

A walk thing. An inspired piece of improvisation. Iconography in motion.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Wild Bunch

"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. We're finished!"




Background
The slow road out of his years in the wilderness following the 'Major Dundee' catastrophe and his firing from 'The Cincinnati Kid' began with his adaptation of 'Noon Wine' for the TV drama show 'ABC Stage 67'. Netting him Writers' Guild and Directors' Guild nominations and his best notices since 'Ride the High Country', he found himself in demand again. Head of production at Seven Arts, Kenneth Hyman was on a roll after the staggering success of 'The Dirty Dozen' and was looking to develop another action movie vehicle for Lee Marvin under the auspices of Warner Brothers. The project he had in mind was called 'The Diamond Story' and Peckinpah didn't think much of the script. Nonetheless, Hyman appointed producer Phil Feldman to work with Peckinpah. Neither of them cared much for 'The Diamond Story' and their attention was soon drawn to a couple of other scripts: 'The Wild Bunch' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue'.


It's entirely possible that Hyman would have called time on their extracurricular activities and ordered Peckinpah to knuckle down to 'The Diamond Story' but for one factor. 20th Century Fox had just paid half a million (an unprecedented amount for a script at that time) to William Goldman for 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' and handed the reins to George Roy Hill. Industry buzz was high. There was probably no better time to make a western. Feldman saw 'The Wild Bunch' as a challenge to 'Butch and Sundance' at the box office. He was convinced it had blockbuster written all over it. 'The Diamond Story' was summarily abandoned and Feldman and Peckinpah threw themselves into 'The Wild Bunch'.


The production was suitably epic. Peckinpah, predictably, went overbudget. He exposed 330,000 feet of film, printing most of it so that he'd have an amorphous mass of material from which to work in the editing room. There were over 1,200 camera set-ups. Feldman didn't question any of Peckinpah's techniques. Their relationship was so good that their next project, 'The Ballad of the Cable Hogue', went into pre-production while editing work was still being completed on 'The Wild Bunch'. Things very quickly and irreversibly soured between them. While Peckinpah was scouting locations for 'Hogue', Feldman - pressured by the studio to bring 'The Wild Bunch' down to a two hour cut - caved in and, behind Peckinpah's back, snipped twenty minutes out. This was the last straw for Peckinpah - who already considered the 140 minute cut a compromise from his original three and a half hour version - and, true to form, kicked off very publically against Feldman and Warner Brothers, ending his association with both.

Synopsis

Grizzled outlaws Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) and the bunch ride into the town of Starbuck. Disguised as US army personnel, they storm into a railroad office and steal the payroll at gunpoint. Outside, under the nominal command of Pike's former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a posse of bounty hunters are lying in wait for them. Deke entered into a bargain with railroad boss Harrigan (Albert Dekker) whereby he's bought his way out of jail in return for hunting down the bunch. A vicious shoot-out occurs and some of the bunch are killed. The surviving members head back to their rendezvous with Sykes (Edmond O'Brien) and divide the loot - only to realise they've been had. The money bags they risked their lives for are filled with washers. With Deke and the bounty hunters on their trail, they cross into Mexico where they stay briefly at youngest gang member Angel (Jaime Sanchez)'s village. The place is decimated; Angel's father has been killed by despotic Mexican general Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) while his girlfriend has gone off and whored herself at Mapache's hacienda. The bunch fetch up at Agua Verde where a rash decision on Angel's part precipitates an uneasy alliance with Mapache, who is being advised by a high ranking officer of the Imperial German army. The bunch are soon contracted by Mapache to rob a munitions train. The robbery is well-planned and executed, but they still have to face Mapache's treachery, the pursuing bounty hunters and the realisation of their own failings.

Analysis

Broadly speaking, the key themes of Peckinpah's work are:

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

2) Technology encroaches, its results only ever destructive.
3) Loyalty, honour and codes of conduct are thrown into harsh relief - and tested sorely - by the inherently compromised morality of his protagonists.

4) How men behave, interact, are defined by their actions and - sometimes - redeem themselves.

Just as broadly speaking, the most recurrent visual motifs in his films are: mirrors (as early as the 'The Deadly Companions' there's a shot of a gunslinger pumping a bullet into his own reflection, an image revisited with shattering clarity of purpose in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'), children bearing witness to or emulating the worst of adult behaviour (in almost every film: here it's a bunch of giggling children watching red ants swarm over a scorpion before heaping kindling over insects and arachnid alike and burning the lot), and automobiles as avatars for the death of the Old West (first glimpsed almost running Steve Judd over in 'Ride the High Country' and later a threat to Cable Hogue's business in Peckinpah's 'Wild Bunch' follow-up).

Not only are all of these present in 'The Wild Bunch' - along with his stylistic trademarks of slo-mo and freeze frames - but they synthesize perfectly into a vital, intense and immediate statement of who Peckinpah was as an artist, as a filmmaker and as a man. Re-reading these last few paragraphs, I've used the word "men" a lot, and probably opened myself up to the kind of criticism that dogged Peckinpah throughout his life and is still applied by commentators unable (or unwilling) to look into his films with the depth they demand. It's such an easy thing to do to label Peckinpah "macho", to say that he made films about men that were shot through (pardon the pun) with an aesthetic of violence. It's easy to say that because - on an incredibly superficial level - it's true. But Peckinpah, for all the gunfire and the blood squibs, was a director of anti-violence. What gives his films their psychological complexity - and what continues to render his work difficult for some people - is that he incorporated the anti-violence, the bloody and infinitely painful messiness of it, into a powerfully realised iconography that challenged the audiences' reactions. Michael Haneke works towards a similar end - but without the acutely observed degree of characterisation that makes even the most minor characters in a Peckinpah movie spring to life, and with a coolly cerebral European approach that establishes an intellectual distance between the screen and the audience - and scoops critical plaudits.

Peckinpah made films about men, but he wasn't afraid to show their failings. Pike fucks up: it's his complacency which leads to Deke's arrest which in turn leads to his deal with Harrigan; backstory reveals that it was his complacency in his affair with a married woman that got her killed; and it's his complacency in dealing with the handover of munitions to Mapache following the train robbery that sees Angel - already antagonistic towards Mapache - sent with Dutch to trade the last batch of rifles. Mapache accuses Angel of stealing a case of rifles and takes him prisoner. A grim, guilt-ridden Dutch rides out of Agua Verde alone, leaving Angel to his rival's brutal ministrations. At least two of these mistakes lead to a testing of the friendship between Pike and Dutch. Take their altercation after Deke's men open fire on a defenceless Sykes:

Dutch: Damn that Deke Thornton to hell!

Pike: What would you do in his place? He gave his word.

Dutch: Gave his word to a railroad!

Pike: It's his word!

Dutch: That ain't what counts - it's who you give it to!

This mirrors an earlier contretemps between a disgusted Thornton, surveying the aftermath of the protracted gunfight in Starbuck, and a brutally pragmatic Harrigan:

Thornton: Tell me, Mr Harrigan, how does it feel gettin' paid for it? Gettin' paid to sit back and hire your killings with the law's arms around you? How does it feel to be so goddamn right?

Harrigan: Good.

Thornton: You dirty son of a bitch!

Peckinpah said of 'The Wild Bunch': "I wasn't trying to make an epic, I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. 'The Wild Bunch' is simply about what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is that you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." When Peckinpah says "simple story", he means simple in terms of its plot. Psychologically and subtextually, it's fucking complex. He's right: his characters are killers; remorseless ones and not scared of death themselves. Suspecting that Mapache's second-in-command Herrara (Alfonso Arau) will attempt to shanghai the munitions from them off the robbery, they rig up the wagon with dynamite and call Herrara's bluff by light the fuse. He backs down, but the scene is played out with such steely resolve that there's no doubt Pike and co. would rather blow themselves to hell than back down. When they reach the end of the line, it's not just because Thornton's men have kept them trapped in Agua Verde. When they - SPOILER ALERT - go out in a hail of bullets after a protracted gun battle against vastly stronger numbers, it's not just because of what happened to Angel. They have reached the end of the line in that they have outlived their times; the world has moved on and there is no place for them in the new scheme of things. 'The Wild Bunch' is Peckinpah's first western to be set in the twentieth century, not the 1860s. 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', set in the early 1900s, continued the theme while the prologue to 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' sees Garrett as a bitter old man in 1909 before flashing back to the main body of the action in 1881. 'The Wild Bunch', though, is Peckinpah's most explicit j' accuse of the social, political and technological upheavals that destroyed the Old West and buried the frontier spirit. 'The Wild Bunch' takes place in 1913.

"These days are closing fast," Pike muses, early on, "we gotta start thinking beyond our guns." The point is rammed home when the Bunch encounter Mapache's automobile. They summarily label it an "ugly damned thing", only for Sykes (ironically the oldest of the group) to prove the most cognizant of changing technology: "I hear they got one of those things up north that can fly." Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson) mocks him: "You damned old fool, that's a balloon." Pike sets the record straight: "No, the old man's right. They've got motors, wings, go sixty miles in less than an hour. Gonna use them in the war, they say." One year before the Great War, the atrocity that - to quote Wilfred Owen - "slew ... half the seed of Europe one by one." Pike Bishop and the Bunch in this world? Hell no, they'd rather die first, a decision borne out when the one remaining survivor of the Bunch, Sykes, throws in his lot with the men from Angel's village. "Ain't the way it used to be," he muses, in a line which pretty much sums up Peckinpah's worldview and his directorial ethos, "but it'll do." But - and this is the masterstroke - before these kiilers, these bad men, reach the end of the line, Peckinpah gives them their humanity. The sojourn in Angel's village allows us to see them variously relaxing, larking about and reminiscing. When Pike, midway through a reflective conversation with the village elder, breaks off to watch the Tector and Lyle (Warren Oates) playing a game of cat's cradle with one of the village girls, laughing innocently and exhibiting none of their usual lasciviousness towards anyone female, he remarks "Now that I find hard to believe." In a line that is key to any heartfelt appreciation of the film, the elder replies: "Not so hard. We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all."

We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all. I'll put that line up against all the criticism that's ever been levelled at Peckinpah that he was nothing but a director of violence. Paul Seydor states in his magnificent book 'The Westerner Films - A Reconsideration' that is "impossible not to recognize in [Peckinpah] the wounded romantic, the tragic idealist, the agonizer believer". And it is impossible, in my opinion, to watch 'The Wild Bunch' and not be utterly convinced that, in his finest moments as a filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah entered his house justified.

Ride the High Country

"Let's meet 'em head on, halfway, just like always."



Background
The disappointment of 'The Deadly Companions' didn't stop Peckinpah from being offered another directing gig very quickly. 'Guns in the Afternoon' was a long, rambling script by N.B. Stone. This time round, Peckinpah was permitted to take a shot at rewriting it. He cut out the cliches, rewrote the majority of the dialogue, gave the story real depth and moral density, and changed the title. With western movie legends Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott on board, an excellent supporting cast, and ace lensman Lucien Ballard as cinematographer, 'Ride the High Country' emerged as Peckinpah's first fully articulated artistic statement as a film-maker. Nonetheless, he spent such an inordinate amount of tim editing the film, that the studio had him locked out of the editing room and finished the job quickly. 'Ride the High Country' then suffered the ignominy of being released on the first half of a double-bill with plodding historical effort 'The Tartars'. Critical response proved the studio wrong: 'Ride the High Country' garnered superlative reviews and picked up a slew of film festival awards - the Silver Leaf in Sweden, the Silver Goddess in Mexico, the Paris Critics' Award and the Grand Prix in Belgium.



Synopsis
Ageing ex-lawman Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) takes a job guarding shipments of gold being transported to the bank from the mining town of Coarsegold. He ropes in his former partner Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) and cocky young gunslinger Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) as back-up. Gil and Heck plot to steal the shipment, but Gil is agitated at the thought of double-crossing Steve and subtly tries to sound him out as to his integrity. Overnighting at a farm owned by preacher Joshua Knudsen (R.G. Armstrong), Heck takes a shine to Knudsen's headstrong daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley) but is rebuffed. Mariette, against her father's wishes, intends to marry Billy Hammond (James Drury), one of five brothers working a claim in Coarsegold. The phrase "white trash" could have been specifically invented for these boys. When Billy incapacitates himself on the wedding night, his brothers crowd into the bridal suite figuring on consummating the marriage on his behalf. Steve, Gil and Heck intervene and Elsa leaves with them. Gil fails to appeal to Steve's baser instincts and he and Heck put their plan into action. Meanwhile, the Hammond brothers are on their trail and things come to a head at Knudsen's farm.



Analysis
With 'Ride the High Country', Sam Peckinpah made his first bona fide masterpiece. As a stand-alone film, it's lovingly crafted, graced with excellent performances, and deeply nostalgic without ever sacrificing the realities of the moral conundrums and physical dangers facing its world-weary protagonists. Viewed as an integral part of Peckinpah's filmography, it represents a quantum leap from 'The Deadly Companions' and practically serves as a blueprint for the remainder of his directorial career.

Within the first five minutes, Steve Judd has been identified as an old-timer (the quintessential Peckinpah protagonist is an older man) and almost run over by the unexpected intrusion of a motor car along the rutted street of a frontier town (cars as the harbingers of unwanted and destructive technological progress reappear in 'The Wild Bunch' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue'). Judd watches two young boys being dragged away from the sight of a gyrating belly-dancer (children bearing witness to the crudities and violence of the adult world provide a recurring motif - beginning with Kit's ill-fated son in 'The Deadly Companions'). Later, discussing the terms of his contract with the bank manager, he's told "the days of the forty-niners are past and the days of the steady businessman are here" (big business replacing - indeed, literally fencing off - the freedom of the open range is savagely critiqued in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid').

Cast-wise, the seeds of Peckinpah's most creative actor/director relationships are present. The nucleus of what you might call the Peckinpah Irregulars - Warren Oates, John Davis Chandler, L.Q, Jones - are present and correct, while R.G. Armstrong essays the first of three theologically motivated characters he'd play for Peckinpah (Knudsen would be followed by the Reverend Dahlstrom in 'Major Dundee' and Deputy Ollinger in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'), all of them unhinged to some degree or other.

Knudsen's protective/jealous behaviour towards Elsa (he strikes her when she questions his authority) is her catalyst to run away from home and betrothe herself to Billy Hammond. Steve and Gil reluctantly allow her to ride with them. Arriving in Coarsegold, Heck sees Elsa to the Hammonds' camp where he is mocked and driven away by the brothers. Knudsen's earlier comment - "that mining town is a sinkhole of depravity" - is borne out. It's a rough and squalid place peopled by the boozing, brawling likes of the Hammonds. Social activities centre on a brothel whose garish and obese madame, Kate (Jenie Jackson) is more obviously in charge of things than the pathetically drunken Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan). Elsa starts regretting her decision immediately. Still, she goes through with the wedding. The ceremonies are conducted at the brothel. Kate appoints herself maid of honour. Four tired and bored looking whores act as her flower girls.



If Coarsegold is Elsa's purgatory, then the inner demons that Gil and Heck come to wrestle with during the course of the film travel with them on the trail. The gold collected (there's nowhere near the amount the bank anticipated), Elsa rescued from a fate worse than Billy Hammond (ie. his brothers), and Judge Tolliver menaced by Gil in order to beat the ministrations of a miners' court appointed to try Elsa's case, Steve leads his companions on the long trek back to town. Gil, banking on convincing Steve to join him and Heck in making off with the gold, admits defeat after a conversation where he lampoons his old friend for being a poor man wearing "the clothes of pride" and Steve responds, "I want to enter my house justified."

This is one of the most famous and resonant lines in Peckinpah's filmography, establishing Steve's rigid code of ethics and effectively contrasting the simple beliefs of a man of honour (Steve) with the sanctimonious rhetoric of Knudsen. It would be the easy way out, critically, to look at Knudsen and Dahlstrom and Ollinger, not to mention the god-fearing townsfolk who run Hildy out of town in 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' or get caught in the crossfire in 'The Wild Bunch', and declare that Peckinpah was anti-religion. But the issue, as with much of subject matter in his films, is a lot more complex and a lot less simple than that. A conversation between Elsa and Steve serves as a rueful encapsulation of Peckinpah's aesthetic of grey areas, compromised morality and the tendency of the things in life to not be as they should:

Elsa: My father says there's only right and wrong, good and evil. Nothing inbetween. But it's not as simple as that, is it?
Steve: No, it isn't. It should be. But it isn't.

Shades of grey in the relationship between Gil and Heck, the younger man all cocky and big-talking at the start, but Gil's influence gradually being replaced by Steve's. "That old man is about half rough," Heck muses begrudgingly after Steve teaches him a lesson for treating Elsa disrespectfully. Later, when the Hammond wedding party is whooping it up at Kate's place and Heck looks utterly wretched and broken, it's Steve who offers the words of comfort and buys him a drink, not Gil. Shades of grey, too, in Peckinpah's depiction of the Hammonds: disreputable and no respecters of women's rights they might be, there's some far-removed, tobacco-stained, bastard version of Steve's code of ethics to which they are somehow, inexplicably, beholden. When they have Steve and Gil pinned down, and Steve invites them to "finish this thing out in the open", the elder Hammond suggests they "catch 'em when they raise up", Billy immediately rounds on him, affronted, and demands "Ain't you got no sense of family honour?"

'Ride the High Country' is a 90-minute western which the studio treated as a B-movie. It's astoundingly complex, flawlessly executed and remains one of the jewels in Peckinpah's crown.

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".