Sam Peckinpah: Genius of the Western

The new DVD collection.

Sam Peckinpah was one of the most talked about and written about directors ever to work in American film, yet almost every popular conception of him is wrong.

He is generally regarded as the ultimate martyr to the Hollywood system, but Marshall Fine, one of his biographers, disagrees: “Sam was a martyr to his own rebellious nature. He worked in Hollywood in the sixties, a time when rebels flourished, and he couldn’t fit in then. He would have been out of step in any era, in any profession.”

He is often referred to as an artist who reveled in anarchy, yet his best work is about friendship and family and how men hold on to old values in a society that no longer embraces them. Thanks to his genre-busting 1969 film, The Wild Bunch, he is universally regarded as American cinema’s poet laureate of violence—Monty Python spoofed his image in one of their most famous sketches, “What if Sam Peckinpah had been an Englishman?” Yet most of his best films have a sad, sweet, elegiac tone, including almost all of his Westerns. And he lamented after the box office failure of Junior Bonner, “When I make a movie where nobody gets killed, nobody comes to see it.”

The new and much discussed Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection (Warner Home Video, six DVDs, $59.98) brings together four films that you’ve probably seen or you wouldn’t have read this far: The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, all with appropriate commentary and production information. Peckinpah novices, though, are advised to start with Sam Peckinpah’s West: Legacy of A Hollywood Renegade, a documentary included in the package that is probably the best introduction to the director’s work.

Using clips, personal interviews, critical overviews, and, best of all, a never-before-seen treasure trove of production films Peckinpah made on the sets of his own features, the documentary places him firmly in the Western film tradition, as the successor to John Ford. “My father would have loved Westerns [even] if he had been born in Brooklyn,” says Sam’s son Matthew, whose father was born in Fresno, California. “He read all that stuff. He loved it.” (James Hamilton, who worked with Peckinpah as a writer on his World War II film, Cross of Iron, says that True West was one of the director’s favorite magazines.)

“The Texas-Mexico border, the entire Southwest awoke something in Sam,” says David Weddle, another Peckinpah biographer. “He did his best work there.” Peckinpah’s career in Westerns began in television in the early 1950s, when he directed numerous episodes of Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and other period classics. After piling up several seasons’ worth of credits, he was given his own series, The Westerner, starring Brian Keith. It became a cult favorite, which was “lauded for its originality and consequently lasted just half a season,” according to the documentary’s narrator, Kris Kristofferson.

From there Peckinpah moved to a little-seen low-budget feature, The Deadly Companions (1961), starring Keith and Maureen O’Hara, and then to the film that The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called “perhaps the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns,” Ride the High Country (1962), starring two aging Western icons, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. The finest Western ever made about the end of the frontier era, it is, as Weddle says, “one of the last classic Westerns and one of the first truly modern ones.”

Peckinpah practically invented—and some say also ended—the concept of the modern Western, with Ride the High Country, Major Dundee (1965), a deeply flawed but exhilarating adventure, the apocalyptic The Wild Bunch (1969), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and two lovely but largely ignored films, The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), with Jason Robards, and Junior Bonner (1972), with Steve McQueen.

Sam Peckinpah’s West also makes a convincing case for including a 1974 film set in contemporary Mexico, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, as a Western. Gleefully described by the writer, director, and Peckinpah aficionado Paul Schrader as “completely demented,” Alfredo Garcia, starring the perennial B-movie favorite Warren Oates, is probably the ultimate Peckinpah cult film. As The Village Voice’s Sebastian Dangerfield once wrote, “When Sam Peckinpah makes a film titled Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, you know that sooner or later somebody is going to bring somebody the head of Alfredo Garcia.”

A labor of love, Sam Peckinpah’s West includes tributes from actors who worked with him—Kristofferson, L. Q. Jones, Harry Dean Stanton—and others who have been influenced by him—Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Madsen, and Benicio Del Toro. “If Sam Peckinpah tried to make some of the stuff today he made back then,” Thornton says, “they’d think he was crazy.” They certainly would; they thought he was crazy back then. And he probably was, but he defined the turbulent 1960s and put a stamp on the Western film as did no other filmmaker. As Kristofferson says in a voiceover, “Sam did for the Western what Orson Welles did for film noir: he chiseled its gravestone.”

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.