Hearing that Sam Peckinpah had fired fifteen people during the filming of Major Dundee (1965), the great Hollywood director George Stevens commented thoughtfully: “Sounds like he wanted to make a good movie.” Himself a perfectionist, Stevens (whose Shane Peckinpah loved) would recognise the dedication behind the ruthlessness. Peckinpah was always a producer’s nightmare and his films came to resemble his heroes: wounded, driven, reaching towards self-definition, full of a fierce grandeur.
Peckinpah died of a heart-attack in 1984 at the age of 59. Drink and drugs had taken their toll as well as his constant conflicts with the corporate mind of the new Hollywood. “He’d outlived his era,” commented one of the most loyal of his supporting players, L. Q. Jones. The Wild Bunch (1969) was to remain the film with which he is most closely associated, the ultimate revisionist western whose new extremes of violence exploded this elegiac genre into the modern age. Yet the 1970s also were to yield riches, notably the majestic Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), and the harrowing Cross of Iron (1977), which Orson Welles described as the best film about war he had ever seen.
One must pay tribute to some of his key collaborators: actors like James Coburn, Jason Robards, David Warner; his key cameramen Lucien Ballard and John Coquillon; and the composer Jerry Fielding. Equally, though, he brought out the best in them. One of Hollywood’s great mavericks, Peckinpah also belongs to a tradition of American arts that would include writers like Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway: individualists whose work touched religious and mythic dimensions beyond the scope of their imitators and who celebrated masculinity whilst also putting it to the test. Even in its mutilated form, Peckinpah’s corpus of work, like that of Welles, has the magnificence of a major artist. The anguish behind the creation is there for all to see, but so is the achievement. To borrow the marshal’s fine phrase from Ride the High Country, Peckinpah entered his house justified. — Neil Sinyard.
Notes on all films, expect Noon Wine, written by Neil Sinyard.
