PECKINPAH, Sam

(1925–1984)

   At one point in The Wild Bunch (1969), Angel asks Pike, “Would you give guns to someone to kill your father or your mother or your brother?” Pike responds, “Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties.” Such an attitude set the tone for the film that did more to change not just Westerns but action films in general. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was probably the most violent Western and perhaps the most violent American film in its time. It was not so much the quantity of killing in the film but the quality of killing—the amount of blood spilled and splashed, the stylized slow-motion scenes of death. Once all restraint was gone, Hollywood films never looked back. Peckinpah, like other directors, got his training in television Westerns in the 1950s, directing episodes of Gunsmoke and The Rifleman series among many others. Ride the High Country (1962), starring Randolph Scott in his last role, was Peckinpah’s first cinema Western. While a solid film, it did not show much of the Peckinpah style that would surface in the next few years. He followed that with Major Dundee in 1965, another good Western in the classic Western vein. But the world had changed greatly between Peckinpah’s first Western and 1969 when he released The Wild Bunch. Italian Westerns had attacked the very core classic Western values and styles. The Vietnam War was tearing the American culture apart, and riots in the streets were commonplace. Evening news accounts of the war were showing America live images of bloody combat it had never seen before. When the film came out, it immediately captured a receptive audience. Its repudiation of all the unquestioned Western myths and, by extension, all the unquestioned American myths reinforced the chaos pervading the culture itself. Peckinpah followed with other successful Westerns and non-Westerns, all continuing the assault on cultural myths. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), for example, questions the famous outlaw legend. Kris Kristofferson, just hitting his popularity as a songwriter and singer, played Billy the Kid, swaggering with style in this antimyth Western. James Coburn, just coming away from his cocky performances in Waterhole \#3(1967) and Fistful of Dynamite,aka Duck, You Sucker (1971), played Pat Garrett.