1973 - PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, Peckinpah's eulogy for the western film

Sam Peckinpah directed yet another one of those "end of the west films" which puts him in good company with John Ford. Don Siegel, Sergio Leone and George Roy Hill.  Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is about the friendship of Garrett and the Kid.  As the frontier ends and civilization i.e. corporate greed takes over Garrett chooses to take the side of corporate interests at the expense of getting rid of his outlaw friend

Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid was a difficult production for Peckinpah.  Peckinpah's alcoholism, production overruns and a very hostile relationship with the failing MGM studios resulted in Peckinpah losing control over the final cut of the film.  The history of this film gets even more complicated as the film actually exists in three different versions.  The studio cut, Peckinpah's preview cut and finally a cut that assembled scenes from the studio cut and the preview cut which is called the special edition cut. Confused yet?

 

Peckinpah hired a cast of performers that he had worked with in the past. It's almost a curtain call of western actors,  James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Slim Pickens, Richard Jaeckel, Chill Wills, Barry Sullivan, Katie Jurado, Jack Elam, R. G. Armstrong and in some really offbeat casting Bob Dylan. Dylan wrote the score for the film which really displeased Peckinpah.  Peckinpah himself shows up as what else, an undertaker towards the end of the film.

Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid's reedited versions are now considered something of a masterpiece.  No question Peckinpah has a great feeling for western landscape.  He's also good with his actors and no one can photograph gunfights like him.  However I though  this film was very choppy and disjointed as the story moved from scene to scene.  I think you can blame this on Peckinpah's tampering with Rudy Wurlitzer's original script.  

In general Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is a good film but it is probably of greater interest to fans of the director.  

The film was written by Rudy Wurlitizer with uncredited rewriting from Sam Peckinpah, the running time is 115 minutes.

1983 - THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND - Peckinpah's final film

There is just not a lot you can say about this film.  Sam Peckinpah took on the film to show that he was still employable.  Peckinpah's drug and alcohol abuse had seriously affected the later part of his career.

 
Peckinpah didn't care for the story or the screenplay and as usual didn't get along with the producers.  He was in ill health at the time of filming and the film does seem to reflect his disinterested attitude.

As it is a few of the action scenes come off, but overall the film is a disappointment.

 

The running time is 103 minutes, the screenplay was by Peter S Davis and William N. Panzer with contributions from Peckinpah.

1971 - STRAW DOGS, a violent mess of a film

Sam Peckinpah's film is usually called controversial.  However so much time has passed since the film was released and film violence has seen the bar raised to new levels about the only thing controversial about this film is the rather shoddy story structure.  I still wouldn't let the kids watch this film if you are looking for a fun family night at the movies.

Dustin Hoffman plays the wimp college professor living in Cornwall England with his little too sexy for her own good wife played by Susan George who specialized in these trampy parts.  After lots of what can only be called sexual harassment leading too non consensual sex (maybe) the film hits its climax with a violent attack on Hoffman's home by a bunch of the locals.  The point of this all appears to be that Hoffman discovers his ability to kill while defending his home.

For a guy who started his career as a writer and who took a writer's credit on this film.  The story structure is really a mess.  Hoffman's character is a very unpleasant guy so you can't work up much sympathy for him.  Susan George has the truly thankless role of being the tease who starts all the trouble.  Peckinpah is apparently trying to make some point about violence and sex but what?  Being a naughty girl can get you in trouble?

Even as a director this is a disappointing film.  There is none of his famous slow motion violence and the Cornish countryside is certainly not filmed to exploit it's scenery.  But who am I to say this film is considered a classic.

117 minutes written by Sam Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman.

1966 - NOON WINE, Peckinpah's TV film

Sam Peckinpah wrote and directed this adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's short novel.  This is a Peckinpah film at it's most lowkey with the exception of Jason Robards giving his usual over the top performance.  The guy had a hard time with that subtle acting thing.

Katherine Anne Porter's story is essentially a character study of a farmer called Royal Thompson a big mouth small town braggart personality constantly running his mouth.  The actual story provides most of the interest in this adaptation it certainly isn't anything special in terns of film technique.  The film looks to be shot on video tape and is in black and white which gives it a very dated look.

Olivia de Havilland plays Robard's wife and she gives a good restrained and thoughtful performance.  Then again anyone would look restrained next to Robards.

48 minutes

1972 - THE GETAWAY, slick, commercial product from Peckinpah

Steve McQueen is super cool criminal Doc McCoy who along with his wife played by super non actress Ali McGraw, rob a bank and are chased by the police and a bunch of crooks.

This is probably the most impersonal project Peckinpah ever worked on, a big empty commercial film with almost no interest.  Peckinpah made some bad films like The Killer Elite, Convoy and The Osterman Weekend but at least they had something to them.  The Getaway is just a very slick piece of junk that almost any journeyman could have made.  The slo-mo action scenes are well done as usual but add nothing to the film other than they look neat.

Sam Peckinpah was not exactly known for his enlightened approach to women in his films, but The Getaway is a low point in it's portrayal of women as either useless appendages to men or worthless little tramps.  The Sally Struthers character in particular is pretty awful to watch.  Ali McGraw is a complete failure as an actor and struggles to register any kind of emotion.

Clearly a film made to make money and help keep the star and director bankable in  Hollywood,  The Getaway is a very depressing film to watch.

122 minutes.

1975 - THE KILLER ELITE, semi incoherent spy thriller from Sam Peckinpah

Spy vs spy double cross junk with James Caan and Robert Duvall as secret agent buddies who are now on opposite sides in the world of cut throat espionage. 

The Killer Elite was directed by Sam Peckinpah who doesn't appear to have had much interest in telling a coherent story.  The performances are very lazy, in fact the whole film seems pretty lazy.  By this time in the 1970's this "dirty side of the spy business" had run it's course as a plot line, the lack of originally about The Killer Elite is it's most notable feature.

The film has some of  Sam Peckinpah's flourish with an action scene and as usual nobody has ever really figured out how to film and edit fight scenes in slow motion the way he can.  In The Killer Elite, Peckinpah adapts his action technique to the martial arts genre, the results are interesting but not as outstanding as they are in some of his other films.

The Killer Elite is probably more notable for the beginning of Peckinpah's decline as a film maker which ended with his final film The Osterman Weekend.

122 minutes, written by Stirling Silliphant.

1977 -CROSS OF IRON, Peckinpah's very mixed bag of a war film

Unlucky enough to come out around the same time as Star Wars which probably killed every serious film that year, Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron was doomed by it's cliche ridden script.  It's to bad because the film has some excellent battle scenes and an interesting point of view for a World War II film

 

Peckinpah had a screenplay from an old Hollywood writer named Julius J. Epstein.  Epstein had written Casablanca along with other Warner Brothers films.  His story was about a German Army unit in World War II fighting along the Russian front.   Having a war film with this point of view was interesting unfortunately the screenplay was a pile of cliches.  There were the good Germans, the evil Nazi Germans and James Coburn's character Sergeant Steiner who was the tough but war weary soldier.  

The film had a good cast.  James Mason was a "good" German general who gave his usual expert performance.  David Warner was the cynical philosophical German Captain commenting on the action and lamenting on the state of humanity in war.  One of the few actual German actors in the film Maximilian Schell,  gave a very broad performance as the evil German Colonel.   Schell really hammed it up as the bad guy and he  seemed right out of an old 1940's war movie, probably a character Julius Epstein had written at Warner's.

It was surprising that Peckinpah didn't recognize the problems with the screenplay, before he was a director he had been a decent screenwriter.  Then again Sam Peckinpah could never make a film with out having some kind of conflict going on.  He was usually fighting with his producers or battling his own chemical dependency problems in most cases it was both. 

As with just about any Peckinpah film, the action scenes are outstanding.  Peckinpah was probably the only director who understood how to film action in slow motion.  He had a special technique of inter-cutting the slow motion action with other angles which always gave his scenes a kinetic look.

Unfortunately for the rest of the film,  Peckinpah couldn't match this high quality of work.

Running time, 133 minutes.