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"If they move", hisses stern-eyed William Holden, "kill 'em". So begins The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's bloody, high-body-count eulogy to the mythologized Old West. "Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle", observed critic Pauline Kael. That exploding bottle also christened the director with the nickname that would forever define his films and reputation: "Bloody Sam".

David Samuel Peckinpah was born and grew up in Fresno, California, when it was still a sleepy town surrounded by pine forests. Young Sam was a loner. The child's greatest influence was grandfather Denver Church Peckinpah, a judge, congressman and one of the best shots in the Sierra Nevadas. Sam served in the Marine Corps during World War II but - to his disappointment - did not see combat. He married Marie Selland in Las Vegas in 1947 and enrolled as a theater graduate student at the University of Southern California the next year.

After drifting through several jobs--including a stint as a floor-sweeper on "The Liberace Show" (1952)--he got a gofer job with director Don Siegel(Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)--in which Sam had a small part--who took a shine to him and used him on several of his pictures. Peckinpah eventually became a scriptwriter for such TV programs as "Gunsmoke" (1955) and "The Rifleman" (1958) and was the creator of the critically acclaimed western series "The Westerner" (1960).

In 1961, he directed his first film, the nondescript western The Deadly Companions (1961). The next year, things got better, however. His four-star Ride the High Country (1962) featured the final screen appearances of Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea plus an aging-gunfighter storyline that anticipated The Wild Bunch (1969). Then came major problems with Major Dundee (1965), the film that brought to light his volatile reputation. During hot, on-location work in Mexico, Peckinpah's abrasive manner, exacerbated by booze and marijuana, provoked usually even-keeled Charlton Heston to threaten to run him through with a cavalry saber. Post-production conflicts led to a bitter and ultimately losing battle with the film's producer and Columbia Pictures over the final cut and, as a result, the disjointed effort fizzled at the box office. This contributed to Peckinpah's losing out the job of directing The Cincinnati Kid (1965) with Steve McQueen to Norman Jewison.

His second marriage now failing, Peckinpah did not begin his next project for two years, but it was the one for which he will always be remembered. The success of The Wild Bunch (1969) rejuvenated his career and propelled him through highs and lows in the 1970s. He would provoke more rancor over violence with Straw Dogs (1971), introduced Ali MacGraw to Steve McQueen in The Getaway (1972), oversee a muttering Bob Dylan in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) and direct from good (The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)) to bad (Convoy (1978)) to worse (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)). His last solid effort was the Eastern Front WW II anti-epic Cross of Iron (1977) (Maximilian Schell, James Coburn), bringing the picture in successfully despite severe financial problems,

Peckinpah lived life to its fullest. He drank hard and abused drugs, producers and collaborators. Being considered for the Stephen King-scripted "The Shotgunners", he died from heart failure in Mexico at age 59. At a gathering afterwards, Coburn remembered the director as a man "who pushed me over the abyss and then jumped in after me. He took me on some great adventures".

"Peckinpah shot the dream going, gone rotten, machines and money choking the garden, those hard-won gatherings at the river mutating into cold centers of commerce. Chinese boxes of powder and paranoia."
--Kathleen Murphy

On the 29th December 1984, the day after Sam Peckinpah died at the age of 59, a small obituary appeared in The New York Times. It claimed that Peckinpah, "best known for his westerns and graphic use of violence. attained notoriety for such films as The Wild Bunch, a brutal picture that was by several thousand red gallons the most graphically violent Western ever made and one of the most violent movies of all time." With the release of The Wild Bunch (1969), Peckinpah became known as "Bloody Sam". In 1971, Straw Dogs hit the screen and the cult of notoriety was cemented: Peckinpah became a marketable, yet controversial director. Much sought after, he gave contentious interviews to a variety of newspapers and magazines including Game, Playboy, Films and Filmmaking and Take One, while also writing letters to newspaper editors justifying his work and slamming his detractors. Under the microscope of feminist film theory his sometimes aberrant treatment of the representation of women and his "excessive" use of violence was noted and condemned. The critical uptake of the notion of Peckinpah as the "master of violence" and the momentum of the debates that ensued affected not only the discussion of his so-called "violent films" but also the reception of his more "gentle" ones. Peckinpah made numerous television serials and three films before The Wild Bunch, none of which was heralded as brutal, or violent. After The Wild Bunch, he made The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and after Straw Dogs he made Junior Bonner (1972). Both The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner are about individuals who are running out of time and space-but they are also full of the affirmation of life.

In working through the criticism that has evolved around Peckinpah's 14 films, what becomes evident is the concentration on specific moments in this working history. The personal mythology surrounding Peckinpah is inscribed in much of the writing generated by these films. A drunk, a coke addict, a sentimental romantic, possibly schizophrenic, a little man with a big chip on his shoulders-Peckinpah is said to be many things. Yet it is obvious from the large body of critical literature, which includes reviews, articles and numerous books, both critical and biographical, that Peckinpah is not a "neglected" filmmaker; rather, there is an unwillingness to deal with the paradoxical nature of his films. In an allusion to Pauline Kael, the 1995 Peckinpah retrospective held by the Film Society of the Lincoln Centre was entitled: "Blood of a Poet". In this short phrase Kael captures something elemental about Peckinpah's films, something that is often ignored-that the intensity, resonance and vitality of these films' aesthetic expressiveness, be it violent or utopian, takes us into the realm of the poetic.

Charting the path of Peckinpah's critical and personal reputation is something like taking a roller coaster ride. From the late '60s through to the '70s, Peckinpah was both celebrated and condemned as the cinematic poet of violence. After this brief period, although occasionally producing films that express the strength of his artistic vision, he went into an erratic artistic and physical decline. By the end of the '70s, he disappeared into obscurity; yet after his death, he slowly began to re-emerge as an influential presence who left us with a disparate but rich cinematic oeuvre. In 1993, the BBC produced Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron (Paul Joyce, 1992), a feature-length documentary dealing with his personal life and films. Retrospectives have also been staged at the Cinémathèque Français in Paris, at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and at London's National Film Theatre, while Film Comment and Sight and Sound have published reappraisals of his work. Major publications in the last ten years include David Weddle's 1994 insightful biography, Paul Seydor's 1997 "Reconsideration" of his 1980 text Peckinpah: The Western Films (1980) and two collections of essays on The Wild Bunch. Michael Bliss' Justified Lives: Morality & Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah, which was published in 1993, is one of the few texts that deals with all of Peckinpah's films; while Stephen Prince's Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies explores Peckinpah's work in the context of changes within the industry and the social milieu in which this filmmaker was working. Some of the most insightful and thoughtful work on Peckinpah's films has been produced by theorists and critics such as Bliss, Terence Butler, Jim Kitses, Mark Crispin Miller and Paul Seydor who address Peckinpah's films within the context of an American literary tradition and the western genre. Bliss and Seydor have picked up where Jim Kitses started, claiming Peckinpah as the son of an American cultural tradition that includes Cooper, Emerson, Hemingway, Faulkner and Mailer. Both these writers address his films in the context of the western, discussing his tarnished approach to the original ideal. These major reappraisals, the re-release of The Wild Bunch and the retrospectives have all helped to re-ignite interest in Peckinpah's legacy as both a mercurial personality and an important director whose influence is acknowledged by many contemporary filmmakers, including Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and John Woo.

Peckinpah's early career path is a focused one. He enlisted in the Marine corps in 1943 and in 1945 he was sent to China where his battalion was assigned to the task of disarming Japanese soldiers and civilians and sending them home. He left China at the end of 1946 without ever seeing combat. On his return home it was assumed that he would study law and enter the family firm but a meeting with a young drama student, Mary Sellard, who later became his wife, helped to re-kindle an adolescent passion for theatre, poetry and drama. Peckinpah completed a B.A. in Drama at the Fresno State College in 1949 and went on to complete a M.A. in 1950 at the University of Southern California. Although his choice of medium changed from theatre to film, he singularly pursued his desire to direct. After a stint as the director and producer in residence at Huntington Park Civic Theatre in California, he worked as a propman and stagehand at KLAC-TV in Los Angeles; then from 1951 to 1953 he worked as an assistant editor at CBS. In 1954 he had the good fortune to work as an assistant and dialogue director to Don Siegel. As Garner Simmons notes in his thorough research on Peckinpah's television work, it was through Seigel that Peckinpah came in contact with the CBS series Gunsmoke and ended up writing several scripts for the show. Thus began the period of Peckinpah's television work in which he wrote scripts for numerous series including Broken Arrow, Tales of Wells Fargo and Zane Grey Theatre. The "The Knife Fighter" (1958) episode of Broken Arrow was his first attempt at directing. He went on to direct episodes of The Rifleman and between 1959 and mid-1960 he oversaw the production of ten episodes of The Westerner. It was during his television years that Peckinpah began to assemble actors like Strother Martin, R.G. Armstrong and Warren Oates who would later become part of his "stock company".

On the strength of his television work Peckinpah was hired to direct his first film Deadly Companions (1961). The film is about a dance hall hostess, Kit Tilden (Maureen O'Hara), and her desire to prove her son's legitimacy. The film received little attention and Peckinpah washed his hands of it claiming he had little freedom during its making. His next feature, Ride the High Country (1962) won the Grand Prix at the Belgium International Film Festival over Fellini's 8½ (1963), the Paris critics' award, the Silver Leaf award in Sweden and was judged the best foreign film at the Mexican Film Festival. A glorious yet simple take on the dying West, the film evokes great sentimental appeal by bringing together Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott-both ageing, iconic western figures. Critics like Kael and Andrew Sarris reviewed it with high praise; but it died a quick death in America as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could see little point in marketing a revisionist western.

The production of Peckinpah's third feature, Major Dundee (1965), marks the beginning of his volatile relations with producers and distributors. Set during the end of the civil war, the film's protagonist Dundee (Charlton Heston) is an officer in charge of a Federal prison where Confederate soldiers are held. Although Dundee is short of men, he is determined to wipe out a group of marauding "Indians" who have kidnapped three little boys. Major Dundee is a jagged but dynamic foray into potent human extremes but it is difficult to ascertain if its unevenness is due to studio intervention or Peckinpah having lost control of his project. Sensing that the film was too long and convoluted for a commercial audience, Columbia made numerous cuts before it was released. Enraged, Peckinpah claimed that in cutting a large amount of the last third of the film they had rendered his film unintelligible. Subsequently, what occurred was the first of many public outbursts that continued throughout Peckinpah's working history. He was fired from his next film, The Cincinnati Kid (Norman Jewison, 1965), and blacklisted without work for three years. But during this period he was offered a chance to direct Noon Wine (1966), an ABC television special adapted from Katherine Ann Porter's novella. Noon Wine earned award nominations and high praise.

In the context of the times, Peckinpah's next film The Wild Bunch was seen as being extremely violent. A group of outlaws ride into a dusty, small town called Starbuck. They hold up the bank and in the process annihilate the town. But the job is a set-up: the loot they get away with is worthless steel washers. The law and the railway men send a group of bounty hunters out after the "Bunch". To escape the law, they cross the border into Mexico, where they agree to do a job for the dictatorial Mexican General, Mapache (Emilio Fernandez). It is to be their last job. It is impossible to determine whether this film is the most violent "ever made", or if it was the most violent of its time, and the question is probably irrelevant. What we can say is that with the newly gained freedom attained through the development of the Code and Rating Administration and in the midst of a volatile cultural milieu, Peckinpah, with the help of the brilliant editor Louis Lombardo and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, developed a stylistic approach that through the use of slow-motion, multi-camera filming and montage editing, seemed to make the violence more intense and visceral.

With all the publicity surrounding The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah found himself a viable director, but the difficulties faced during his next production, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, are reminiscent of those affecting Major Dundee. Suffering constant threats from Warner Brothers to close down the film, the production was besieged by problems. Warner Brothers, expecting another action packed "blood bath", took one look at this sweet, comic and lyrical film and refused to invest in its publicity, dumping it to second billing, and letting it die a quick death. The film tells the story of a man, Cable Hogue (Jason Robards), who, robbed and left for dead in the desert, miraculously finds water and survives. Max Evans puts his finger on the pulse when he observes: "To follow the most violent picture ever made with one full of warmth, love and humour, as well as magnificent acting, would. create yet another world-wide controversy."

With his reputation as "Bloody Sam" firmly established, the 1970s were a prolific time for Peckinpah in which he made eight films in as many years. In 1971 Straw Dogs was released, followed by Junior Bonner in 1972. Made in England, Straw Dogs is about an American mathematician, David (Dustin Hoffman), who goes on sabbatical to a small village in Cornwall with his wife, who is a native of the area. As an outsider and an intellectual, David is harassed and mocked by the local lads, while his "baby doll" wife (Susan George) disturbs his work and flirts with the locals. The film descends into a siege with David turning from a maligned pacifist into a resourceful and half-crazed killing machine. The violence in Straw Dogs quickly became a "hot" issue, with publications like Cinema, Esquire, Life and Playboy all printing interviews with Peckinpah. On the other hand, apart from the odd review, Junior Bonner was a critical and commercial failure. In Junior Bonner, we find none of the explosive violence of The Wild Bunch or the misogyny of Straw Dogs. Set in small-town Arizona, the film is the story of an aging rodeo star Junior (Steve McQueen) who returns to his hometown of Prescott determined to win the rodeo. Gentle, mellow, sweet and sad, the most violent episodes in this film are the exhilarating and edgy bull-riding sequences.

Although never again in Peckinpah's working history do we see such intense critical focus on this filmmaker, between 1972 and 1977 he made The Getaway (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), The Killer Elite (1975) and Cross of Iron (1977). These years resulted in an uneven body of work yet too little attention has been paid to how these later films evolve from Peckinpah's earlier work and reflect the continuous development of his concerns. Many critics and theorists argue that after the making of The Getaway Peckinpah went into a steep decline. Although The Getaway is a fairly straightforward action film and The Killer Elite is often confused, with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Cross of Iron we see a continual development in this filmmaker's work. Although labelled "violent" films, their neglect appears to be partly due to their strange complexity and haunting lyricism, which few writers seem capable of addressing. "All they saw was the violence"-Kael's statement in relation to the outrage spurred by The Wild Bunch-can just as easily be applied to the responses to these films.

Looked upon as Peckinpah's most "surreal" and "nihilistic" film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was almost not released because United Artists wavered over the rating it received due to its violent content, claiming it would not be commercially viable. Made on a low budget in Mexico and lacking a stellar cast, the film traces the tragic and inevitable path of Benny (Warren Oates), a small time gangster and piano player, who takes on the job of finding Alfredo Garcia, the man responsible for the pregnancy of the daughter of a tyrannical Mexican patriarch. This film's narrative is as hopeless as that of Pat Garrett and the Billy the Kid, but similarly it has a rich aural and visual texture that grants us a poetic and sensual experience.

Cross of Iron establishes its story firmly on the front line of war, depicting its horrors and the psychological damage it inflicts on its participants. Made in Yugoslavia on a low budget, this sombre and claustrophobic film deals with a German platoon involved in the 1943 retreat from the Russian front. The film concentrates on the efforts of Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn) to protect the squad of men under his command. Many reviews called the film "gory" and "hysterical", even though, after seeing the film, Orson Welles cabled Peckinpah that it was the best anti-war film he had ever seen about the "ordinary enlisted man". Cross of Iron was a critical and commercial failure in America; however, it was released in Europe in the spring of 1977 to rave reviews. In Germany it was awarded a Bambi and, ironically, it became the biggest grossing film in Germany and Austria since The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965). In this film Peckinpah returns to the intense, ecstatic sequences of violence that we find in The Wild Bunch. He tempers these sequences with tragic and personal emotional responses and insights into the function of war and the reasons why men join armies and fight while surreal, dream-like sequences explore the psychological damage inflicted on these men.

Obviously, we have come a long way since the gentle sweetness of Ride the High Country and the fabulous vitality of The Wild Bunch, for these later films, although involving violent action, are less concerned with its ecstatic function and more meditative about the psychology of their characters who participate in its action and whose fates often seem inevitable. Yet in moments such as when Captain Steiner rescues a Russian soldier "boy" with an angelic face, who instead of pulling a gun, brings out his mouth organ and begins to play, as when Benny and Elita engage in raucous songs and rough and tumble play, and in the luminous beauty of the landscape that Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) traverses, these later films still offer us a profound experience that is charged with intensity, sweetness and hope.

In the late 1970s Peckinpah slipped into obscurity. By the time he made the "trucking" film, Convoy (1978), his health and working reputation were shattered. An attempt to address the populist myth in a contemporary setting, Convoy opens on a grand western vista which is now inhabited by huge, shiny Mac trucks. Similarly, his next and final film The Osterman Weekend (1983) suffers from poor plot and character motivation and development. Like The Killer Elite, The Osterman Weekend is a spy thriller dealing with high-levelled C.I.A. corruption. Scripted from a Robert Ludlum thriller, the plot lacks subtlety, but we still find in Peckinpah's direction a dazzling inventiveness as he turns this film into an exploration of facets of reality, commenting on the unreliability of technological communication while turning the screen into a multi-purpose surveillance device.

Peckinpah's films have been mutilated by studio intervention and much of the critical literature has been coloured by the Peckinpah mythology. Further damage has been inflicted on these films by the linkage of social and cultural debates about "real" violence and arguments about "screen violence", a linkage often leading to simplistic and reductive "moral" judgments and the neglect of his more gentle films. If we are to do justice to Peckinpah's films, we need to disengage the actual film texts from the mythology and allow them to be what they are-an uneven collection of films that at their best deal with two of humanity's most fervent concerns, our fear of violence and death and our dreams of a better life.

© Gabrielle Murray, May 2002