100 Years of Sam Peckinpah
“It ain’t like it used to be… but it’ll do.”
— Sam Peckinpah, The Wild Bunch
For all its wealth and high-minded principles, America owes everything to desperate men willing to kill and die for a little freedom and maybe a patch of dirt to call their own. As a man of the West, Sam Peckinpah, legendary director and screenwriter of The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, knew it better than anyone.
Born on this day a century ago, Peckinpah grew up in a California that still knew itself. It was a place in time when the ghosts of New Spain still lingered in the ranchos and tales of outlaws and lost treasure captivated young boys. It was a country built on contradictions: a land flowing with milk and honey and promises of exaltation, but whose bottomless riches doled out curses and drove the unworthy insane. For centuries, California had lured desperate men from every corner of the globe, and for each don, cattle baron, or tycoon raised up, there were at least a dozen nobodies who fell between the cracks. Wealth and high-minded principles came later, but the old families never forgot the desperate times.
Making their way to central California sometime in the 1850s, these pioneers scratched out homesteads, cut timber in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and barely survived Fresno’s cattle barons. With time, many of the families prospered. Sam’s grandfather, Denver Church, spent years trapping, ranching, and prospecting, until finally becoming a judge and congressman. By the time Sam was born, his people were well-established and the land was long settled.
Sam was no stranger to the harsh realities of country life. He spent his growing-up years at Denver’s ranch, where he learned to rope, ride, hunt, and work like a man. Denver fascinated him, and the old patriarch’s stories of living hard in a land without fences pulled at his heart. The colorful characters Sam was exposed to — the dusty cowboys, bronc riders, and ranch hands — made an indelible impression, and he longed to know the West as they knew it. But the boy was caught between two worlds: a prisoner of that unsatisfying middle place, where old and new cannot be reconciled and crude reality intrudes on youthful dreams.
Sam venerated the men who had tasted the West at its wildest, but the old-timers also embodied the brutality and desperation lurking behind all the romance. These were hard men — unsentimental, rebellious, violent, sometimes cruel. High-minded principles did not move them. If anything, they shared an all-powerful desire to live on their own terms. After all, the West had not been won by poets and artists. The men who tamed a harsh and pitiless wilderness were themselves pitiless and harsh. As an artist, Sam knew he could never really experience the world as they had. The conflict between myth and reality would be his cross to bear, but it would give his art tremendous power and change the Western forever.
If Sam inherited anything from his pioneer forefathers, it was their insubordination. Throughout his life, he nursed a deep hostility towards anyone who dared to exercise authority over him. Like the country he came from, he was rowdy and riddled with contradictions. He was a class clown and troublemaker, but also a perennial loner. He was yanked out of high school for boozing, fighting, and stealing cars, only to volunteer for the Marine Corps in 1943, shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Deployed to China, he never fired a shot in anger but nearly murdered a fellow Marine suspected of rape. He was witness to violence, death, and misery at a scale few Americans could comprehend, and it sickened him. Still, he went on to film some of the most graphic scenes ever produced and faced accusations of glorifying sex and violence for most of his life. And when this heir to a political dynasty finally came home and went to college, he studied theater and worked as a stagehand.
In Hollywood, Peckinpah’s insubordination is the stuff of legend. An unapologetic enemy of all studio authority, he bristled at slick executives and meddling producers and never hesitated to tell them to go straight to hell. Beginning with his scripts for popular TV Westerns like Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, Broken Arrow, and The Rifleman, he bucked artistic conventions at every turn and fought tooth and nail to add complexity to a genre that was still coming into its own. His early clashes with television producers earned him a bad reputation, but it drove him to the director’s chair, where he could finally have the freedom he desperately craved.
For Peckinpah, freedom was always a double-edged sword. As a director, he agonized over scripts and blew through deadlines and budgets with abandon. He demanded total control of his work and was often tyrannical, impulsive, and impossible to please. During the filming of his gritty cavalry drama, Major Dundee (1965), there were knock-out, blow-out fights on set, with Peckinpah berating actors, horses, and the crew until Charlton Heston finally threatened to disembowel him with a cavalry saber. Described as “Moby-Dick on horseback” by actor R.G. Armstrong, Major Dundee is an obvious thumb in the eye at John Ford and his romantic retellings of the West. The film’s ragtag cast of characters are anything but noble. They show no allegiance to higher principles, and the only thing that seems to bring them together is a mutual respect for violence and adventure. Peckinpah should have paid dearly for his rebellion against the Western’s golden-age standards. And to be sure, Major Dundee was a flop — the first of many. But the painstaking work he put into his characters probably saved the film from total ruin, and like many of Peckinpah’s duds, Major Dundee kicked off a period of artistic growth that produced a masterpiece.
This was not uncommon for Peckinpah. As seen in Major Dundee, his storylines often run out of gas or fall apart long before the closing credits. Many, if not most, of his films have this problem. But whether a bomb or box-office smash, every Peckinpah film has memorable and complex characters who help drag the whole ghastly endeavor across the finish line. Few directors could bring a character to life quite like him, and his unyielding devotion to the human subject makes even his worst films worth watching. Nevertheless, when he finally recovered from a string of flops and false starts, Peckinpah produced his magnum opus that would take the industry by storm.
His greatest work is The Wild Bunch (1969), and apart from being regarded as one of the best Westerns ever made, it forever changed the genre and made Peckinpah one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Before The Wild Bunch, the Western had been a kind of refuge from the countercultural storm raging across America. Its pristine values were a welcome relief to the sudden collapse of traditional mores, and its mythic imagery and romance helped viewers find escape. But like Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch seemed to turn everything sacred about the Western on its head. It had its own ragtag cast of characters and all the same themes that defined Peckinpah’s work up to that point: honor, courage, betrayal and redemption. But the setting was a Wild West on its deathbed – the protagonists doomed to embrace a tragic end.
It was the violence of The Wild Bunch that spoke loudest. For many, the film felt like an ambush, “ugly, pointless, and disgusting;” a stunning rebuke to everything virtuous and noble in the Western. Its “heroes” were criminals. The humor was dark and disturbing. There was blood, nudity, and unrepentant murder. It was visceral. Tasteless. Lots of longtime admirers hated it. And worst of all, Peckinpah did not care one bit. When asked to explain the film’s violence and defend its message, he responded flatly: “I have nothing to say. The film speaks for itself.”
Peckinpah had rejected the Western morality play once and for all, and not out of self-hatred or spite but a desire to capture the West and its simple virtues as he knew them. Some say the violence in The Wild Bunch is “realistic,” but he would probably scoff at that. Realism was never the goal. Peckinpah as an artist was concerned with telling the story straight. He used violence and conjured feelings of pity and fear to construct a tragedy and reveal the power of simple virtues — honor, friendship, loyalty, some freedom, maybe a patch of dirt… these were the things men should be willing to live and die for when the chips are down. There was nothing more to say.
Today fans and filmmakers hail Sam Peckinpah as a visionary, and his personality, failings, and outsize influence on the industry are the subject of countless books and articles. Virtually every Peckinpah film now has a cult following. The Western has never been the same either, and Peckinpah’s fingerprints can be found on almost every Western since The Wild Bunch. His use of sex and violence in his stories remains controversial. Despite generations of diehard loyalists, his name is sometimes omitted from the canon of great Western directors. But few would deny his significance.
It is Sam Peckinpah’s role in telling the story of the West that probably deserves the most praise. The Western is the true American art form. While Americans continue to drift further away from the frontier that so enchanted and terrified Peckinpah, they still mourn, consult, and search for it, even in the stars. If frontier mythology tells the story of American civilization, the Western tells the story of its people. And Sam told it straight, right from the gut — the only way he knew how to communicate it, in a world where ideals and sentiments drift on the surface of a dark ocean like flotsam on the tide. Perhaps this is why his legacy lives on thirty years after his death.
Lafayette Lee is an American writer and a contributing editor of IM—1776. He can be followed @Partisan_O.
