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Texas
| Features | Books
Sam Peckinpah:
Interviews
Kevin J. Hayes,
editor
(Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2008.)
Pages xxxiii + 179. Paperback.
ISBN: 978-1-934110-64-5.
Book Review by
Dr. Kirk Bane |
Colorful,
cantankerous, crude, and controversial, legendary director Sam Peckinpah
(1925-1984), who set several of his films in Texas,
is best known for his classic--though exceptionally violent--Western,
The Wild Bunch (1969). Other significant Peckinpah pictures
include Ride the High Country (1962); Major Dundee (1965);
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970); Straw Dogs (1971),
labeled "the first American film that is a fascist work of art" by
critic Pauline Kael; The Getaway (1972); Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid (1973); and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
(1974). Evaluating Peckinpah's movies, Dr. Hayes, a professor at the
University of Central Oklahoma, contends that they "depict loners,
losers, misfits, outsiders, people living on the fringe, men and women
involved in an underworld or an older world with its own way of doing
things and its own set of codes, people who survive in a brutal world
yet who sometimes manage to eke out a modicum of tenderness amidst
the brutality."
A maverick himself, Peckinpah directed many of cinema's most talented
and popular actors, including William Holden, Charlton Heston, Robert
Ryan, Steve McQueen, Burt Lancaster, Robert Duvall, James Coburn,
Warren Oates, and Dustin Hoffman, who viewed his Straw Dogs
director as an anachronism, a dangerous Wild West desperado. "Sam
Peckinpah is a man out of his time," Hoffman observed, "a gunfighter
in an age when we're going to the moon." Combative, uncompromising,
and hard-living, Peckinpah frequently clashed with producers and other
studio honchos over creative control of his films. He preferred Mexico
and Montana to Hollywood, which the moviemaker once dubbed "a dunghill."
Peckinpah served in the U.S. Marines and was educated at Fresno State
and the University of Southern California. Known as "Bloody Sam" because
of the graphic violence in his movies, he initially worked on popular
Fifties television Westerns like The Rifleman, Tales of
Wells Fargo, Have Gun--Will Travel, and Gunsmoke.
Peckinpah possessed a talent for screenwriting, penning such films
as The Glory Guys (1965, directed by Arnold Laven) and Villa
Rides (1968, directed by Buzz Kulik). Intriguingly, in the final
year of his life, he directed two music videos for pop star Julian
(son of John) Lennon, "Too Late for Goodbyes" and "Valotte." Julie
Mann, Peckinpah's assistant at the time, asserted that the iconic
filmmaker "was excited about breaking into a new field."
"Bloody Sam" comes to life in the pages of this excellent volume,
which contains fifteen interviews, drawn from such publications as
Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, Playboy, Rocky Mountain Magazine,
the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times; the conversations
cover the years 1963-1982. These discussions, Hayes maintains, "offer
a vivid portrait of the man and his work." For example, Peckinpah
had a reputation for ruthlessly firing crew members who failed to
meet his demanding expectations. Explaining his actions, he declared,
"I make trouble with shoddy workmanship, and with shoddy, shabby people,
people who don't do their job, and the whiners, and complainers, and
the bitchers, and the sore-asses who talk a good piece of work and
never produce." Moreover, Peckinpah strongly defended his use of gore.
"I don't think it's excessive at all...I really think we show violence
as it is, and people will recognize it as it is. I don't put violence
on the screen so that people can enjoy it. I want them to understand
what it is...but unfortunately most people come to see it because
they dig it, which is a study of human nature, and which makes me
a little sick." And in one of his interviews, he denigrates Dallas.
"The rifle shot that rang out in Dallas
in 1963 was a very big and ugly noise. You know, I wouldn't film any
part of The Getaway in Dallas.
We were set to go in there and shoot some railroad sequences. I was
driving around and I stopped for a stop sign and I looked up and there
was this plaque on a building and I realized I was at that crossing.
I said, 'Let's get the hell out of here. We aren't going to shoot
any part of my picture in this town.' You want to go shopping at Neiman-Marcus?
Fine. Great store, the greatest in the world. But staying in Dallas
to put some part of yourself on the line there? No." Clearly, Peckinpah
spoke candidly and bluntly.
Cinema enthusiasts--especially devotees of action films and Westerns--will
relish this anthology, part of the University Press of Mississippi's
Conversations with Filmmakers Series. In addition to Dr. Hayes' outstanding
text, a number of insightful studies have been published on the director,
including Marshall Fine's Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam
Peckinpah (1991, 2005), Stephen Prince's Savage Cinema: Sam
Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (1998), and Michael
Bliss' Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah
(2012).
Review by Dr. Kirk
Bane, Ph.D.
Blinn College (Bryan campus)
April 3, 2015
More Book Reviews by Dr. Kirk Bane |
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