Sam Peckinpah's
Legendary Westerns Collection

"When I hear the name Sam Peckinpah," screenwriter Alan Sharpe once observed, "I see a bullet ripping through a man's body." That's pretty much where most film writers' thoughts on Peckinpah seem to end. Cursed with nicknames like "Bloody Sam" by the entertainment media while his career was active, he nonetheless managed -- over the course of about a dozen years, from 1962's Ride the High Country through 1974's Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia -- to revitalize and deepen action filmmaking in America. Warner Home Video's 6-disc set gathers four of his movies from this period and will surprise a lot of people who may think his work is nothing more than a series of bloody shoot-outs and angry misogyny.

For starters, there was his peerless command of editing, evident not only in the frenzied cutting of the shootouts in The Wild Bunch, but in the masterful use of inserts to suggest state-of-mind in a scene in The Ballad of Cable Hogue (when Jason Robards' Cable first meets Stella Stevens' Hildy on the streets of a western town). You can also see his skill at building character through visual detail -- a trait in which this humble writer feels he was every bit the equal of Alfred Hitchcock -- such as the moment in Ride the High Country when Joel McCrea's current situation is summed up by a quick shot of his shirt cuffs. There's a lot more to Peckinpah than blood squibs and bad men and the four films in this set offer considerable proof of that.

Ride the High Country (1962)

My art teacher in junior high school once told me that I needed to fully understand a rule before I could break it, good advice for any artist and a rule that Peckinpah seemed to follow in his first major work as a director. Though he already had one feature behind him, 1960's The Deadly Companions, it was this, his second film, that revealed just how deeply he understood (and felt within him) the myths of the Old West and the peculiar code of honor that its folklore offered up.

Joel McCrea's Steve Judd is an aging lawman who has worked to uphold that code of honor all of his life with little to show for it but the clothes on his back and the horse he rides in on. Hired to protect a mining company's gold and transport it through a treacherous mountain pass, Judd hires an old cohort, Gil Westrum (played by another long-in-the-tooth icon of the genre, Randolph Scott) to help him out in the endeavor.

Westrum adds two factors to the equation: he brings along his young partner Heck Longtree for the ride and he also plans to steal the gold the first chance he gets. Westrum is not satisfied with the knowledge that he's spent the best years of his life trying to uphold the law and has ended up with no money in the bank and no woman in his bed. The company gold might be just the thing to ease that pain away.

When he realizes he isn't going to be able to talk Judd into going along with him, Westrum ends up in a quandary: betray his friend, and his own principles to get his hands on the gold, or own up to the fact that the choices he's made over the years have made his own bed. But that's not the only complication. Heck has fallen in love with a young farmer's daughter, Elsa (played by Mariette Hartley, who is radiant in her film debut), and soon their mission changes from protecting the gold to protecting the honor of the young woman who makes the mistake of marrying into the wrong family.

Ride the High Country is the most traditional of Peckinpah's films and a number of things place it at odds with the other work in his filmography. For starters, the character of Elsa is unique in Peckinpah's body-of-work in that she's neither a whore nor a helpless victim. She fights to defend herself as best she can in a scene in which she is nearly gang raped by her new in-laws. If Peckinpah made this film ten years later, she wouldn't have been so lucky.

Steve Judd is a stoic hero in the mold of the older westerns, miles removed from the moral ambiguity of Peckinpah's later protagonists like Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch and the title characters of Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. In an interview with Peckinpah's younger sister Fern, she points out several similarities between the character of Steve Judd and the moral fiber of her and Sam's jurist father.

But the seeds of Peckinpah's later work is there to be found. For one, his stable of regular character actors like L.Q. Jones, Warren Oates, and R.G. Armstrong are present and he mixes his cast with newcomers like Hartley and Ron Starr (who plays Heck Longtree) with old-school stars like McCrea, Scott, and Edgar Buchanan. And the moral tone of his later films is hinted at in an exchange of dialogue between McCrea and Hartley in which it's pointed out that the world view of black-and-white/good-and-evil just doesn't work in reality.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Peckinpah's fourth film is his best known, infamous as the film that exploded the limits of screen violence -- on the commentary track it is pointed out that when the film was re-submitted for a rating in the early '90s, it received an X from the MPAA -- and oft quoted lines like "If they move...kill `em." The showdown between the forces of justice and dishonor in Ride The High Country is here replaced by a battle between the bad guys who nevertheless adhere to their own code of honor and the bad guy who broke that code, but now has the law on his side. Pike Bishop (William Holden, looking like fifty years instead of twenty had passed between this film and Sunset Boulevard) used to be friends with Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan, in perpetual squint-mode), but now Deke is in the employ of Pat Harrigan to bring Bishop back dead or alive (preferably dead).

An early hold up goes awry in a shootout that leaves a great many innocent bystanders dead, along with a couple of members of the gang (Bo Hopkins brief bit as "Crazy Lee" includes the ever quotable line "why don't you kiss my sister's black cat's ass?") and, as violent as this sequence is, it's nothing compared to the bloodshed that closes the film. Peckinpah is reputed to have said, in regard to the violence in the film, "Now you folks know what killing is all about." Released in the turbulent times in which the Vietnam War was in full swing and assassinations seemed to be occuring every other day, it was meant to reflect the culture, but the culture was not really up for such a sobering look at its excesses.

The film did end up striking a chord with counterculture audiences and its box-office success ended up being a blessing and a curse for the director. From that point on, the films he made that didn't involve buckets of bloodshed -- such as his follow-up to The Wild Bunch, 1970's The Ballad of Cable Hogue -- were ignored by audiences, while his more violent fare (like Straw Dogs and The Getaway) were big hits.

The Wild Bunch is the only film in this set that had been previously available, but the new disc has at least one major improvement over the previous release: you don't have to flip the disc over to watch the last forty-five minutes of the movie. It also includes a feature length documentary, taken from the Encore western channel about Peckinpah's life (that is nowhere near as good as the documentary Man of Iron that was available on the Criterion Collection's now out-of-print DVD of Straw Dogs), a reel of deleted scenes that is more like short ends and outtakes than any deleted sequences from the movie, and a commentary track. In addition, all four features include commentaries by four Peckinpah scholars who really know their stuff.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)

Peckinpah described this film as a comedy, but in the interview with actress Stella Stevens that is included on this DVD, she more accurately points out that the film is really a tragic love story. Often referred to by Peckinpah as his favorite among his films, it is an interesting experiment with some great moments and a touching sense of romanticism (though, this being a Peckinpah movie, it's a love story between a gristly old curmudgeon and a whore). Still, some other elements fall flat.

While Peckinpah has often been celebrated for the bravura way he uses slow motion in his action sequences, here he tries using sped-up motion for comic effect and ends up falling on his ass. He makes this mistake several times in the movie, but it's a testament to the film's power that it still comes off as really damn good, despite this flaw.

Down on his luck like many a Peckinpah protagonist, Cable Hogue's luck changes when he discovers a spring of water in an otherwise dry stretch of desert. With the help of a self-styled preacher who alternates between Godliness and bawdiness (a wonderfully oily turn by David Warner), Hogue sets up a homestead in the desert and turns it into a rest stop for folks travelling between two cities via stagecoach. When he meets Hildy on the streets of the town of Gila, he finds himself able to think of little else but her...but she's got her own plans and they don't really include Cable.

That seems to suit Cable just fine, since he's bent on getting revenge against the two former partners of his that left him to die in the desert (played by L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin, who contributes such a likeably pathetic turn that you actually hope Hogue changes his mind). But a funny thing happens to Cable and Hildy out there in the desert and they end up falling in love. A nice little change of pace for Peckinpah, this film doesn't quite reach the heights of The Wild Bunch or Ride the High Country, but it's still one heck of a piece of work.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

This is one of those great unknowns in Peckinpah's body-of-work since the film was taken away from him by the studio and released in a series of disastrous recuts over the years that left in the gunplay and little else of the film that provides its unusual flavor. A kind of flipside of The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid shares with the earlier film several themes and plot elements: an outlaw being pursued by a former friend who is now an agent of the law, the end of the old west/beginning of the twentieth century, and the price one pays for living a life charged with violence.

As Billy, Kris Kristofferson has a disheveled charm -- even though he does seem a little old for the part -- and James Coburn lends an icy cool to his portrayal of Pat Garrett. Western fans will enjoy the presence of genre stalwarts like Jack Elam, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor, Katy Jurado, and Gene Evans in cameos throughout the film and Peckinpah himself has a brief role. In some oddball casting, Bob Dylan appears as Alias, a member of Billy's gang (he also provides the soundtrack) and Rita Coolidge, Kristofferson's wife at the time, makes an appearance as well.

This 2-disc set contains two cuts of the film: the 1988 "preview version" that was put together following the letter of Rudolph Wurlitzer's script and a 2005 recut that seeks to tighten up the 1988 version and offer a hypothetical take on what Peckinpah might have done if he were able to work on the film a little longer. A lot of reviewers seem to prefer the 2005 cut but, since I'm more used to the 1988 version, watching the recut made me feel like I was watching a movie I knew really well being cut for television.

We'll never know what Peckinpah had in mind. He didn't leave a memo to work from (like the one Walter Murch and Jonathan Rosenbaum had to work from when they recut Orson Welles' Touch of Evil) so the versions on the disc are never going to be an authentic realization of his intentions. Still, it's a tantalizing piece -- either a brilliant failure or a flawed masterpiece -- and it's the last taste of the Old West we ever got from Sam Peckinpah. -- Christopher Hyatt