This Day in Film History (Death of ‘Bloody Sam’ Peckinpah, ‘Wild Bunch’ Director)

Dec. 28, 1984—Sam Peckinpah, a writer-director-producer who revised notions of the American West with films of beautiful landscapes, ugly violence and blurred moral lines, died at age 59 of heart failure in Inglewood, Calif.

Writing about Peckinpah now is my way of compensating for inability to write about The Wild Bunch, his most famous and controversial film, on the 50^th anniversary of its release this past summer. While denying neither its importance to the cinema of the Sixties nor the qualities that have led many critics to hail it as a masterpiece, I find it deeply problematic for the way it immerses audiences in violence. 

This carnage—especially slow-motion action sequences that bracket the film—has influenced the likes of Martin Scorsese, John Woo and Quentin Tarantino. (An image from the film accompanies this post--the famous walk to the climactic shoot-out featuring, from left to right, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine.)

Roger Ebert, in a contemporary review at the time of its 1969 release, defended the movie for presenting “death and violence in such a definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence, and a reaction to it.”

I am not so sure of this. In recent years, psychologists have debated whether prolonged exposure to violence, rather than acting as a prophylactic against killing (as Peckinpah said he intended), instead desensitizes witnesses to it. 

I will say this: in depicting a small unit of Americans in 1913 Mexico, The Wild Bunch held up a distant mirror to the audiences of its time. As Richard Slotkin observed in his 1992 cultural history, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, the movie opened just as American newspapers were reporting on the My Lai Massacre. 

Just as Pike Bishop and his outlaws were using a machine gun to kill soldiers and even civilians, U.S. forces were using the latest destructive firepower in a foreign country where their options were limited and poor at that. The fear that had gripped some observers of the frontier—that Americans would, by crossing a border, “go native”—had come to pass.

 

Nicknamed “Bloody Sam” for his predeliction for onscreen bloodshed, Peckinpah was also nicknamed “Mad Sam” for his volatile ways on and off the set. He boozed and brawled from one set to another—and, as if that were not enough, added cocaine to the mix—shortening his filmography and, ultimately, his life.

Television work in the Fifties and early Sixties in series such as The Rifleman and The Westerner gave Peckinpah a thorough grounding in the genre he would come to revise, as well as give him the reputation for being difficult that would dog him for most of the rest of his career.

His second full-length feature, Ride the High Country (1962), starring two western veterans, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, demonstrated a mastery of the genre it eulogized. It includes an unambiguous hero, McCrea’s Steve, who, with his strict moral code ("All I want is to enter my house justified"), was likened by a number of observers to Peckinpah’s own father.

In his following film, Major Dundee (1965), the director enraged the normally equable Charlton Heston to such an extent that the star was sorely tempted to run him through with his character’s cavalry saber. 

Though the star eventually came around to support him vigorously, Peckinpah’s disputes with Columbia Pictures over the final cut were so tumultuous that they led to him being replaced on his follow-up, the Steve McQueen film The Cincinnati Kid (1965), by Norman Jewison.

A triumphant return to TV, an adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's 'Noon Wine" for ABC Stage 67 (1966), revived Peckinpah’s big-screen career, and the critical acclaim and box-office success of The Wild Bunch afforded him more creative control. 

But he continued to test the patience not only of studio bosses but of his admirers. A scene in Straw Dogs (1971) involving Susan George led the normally supportive critic Pauline Kael to claim that he endorsed rape by depicting the protagonist's wife seemingly enjoying an assault by her ex-boyfriend. 

Straw Dogs placed front and center another charge often made against Peckinpah: misogyny. His films are filled with desirable women equally dangerous to males—and frequently subject to their outbursts of violence. (In The Wild Bunch, a woman shoots Holden in the back, whereupon he retaliates with a shot of his own and “Bitch!”) 

John Patterson’s March 2016 Guardian retrospective of the director's work noted the speculation that much of this animus may have derived from bitterness toward his mother, who had sold the family ranch that he and his brothers worked in their youth on the expectation that they would inherit it.

That same work in his youth also gave him a deep appreciation of the beauty of the West, the folkways of men in constant contact with it, and the agony of the passing of this way of life. All of these, along with the formal artistry of his landscapes and the performances he coaxed from actors, inform the best moments of the 14 films that Peckinpah managed to complete before his death. 

The question is the extent to which the human values exhibited in his films compensate for their unbelievable body counts or the nihilism that fueled these. Thirty-five years after his death, the cinema of “Bloody Sam” continues to pose this troubling dilemma.