The Bloody Paws of Peckinpah

A friend of mine in Portland, Oregon, sent me a disc with the HBO documentary on Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns on it. He knew I was an ardent fan of the maverick director, so he recorded it for me.

Since I have read all the books on Peckinpah and seen all his movies, including his first Western, “The Deadly Companions,” which wasn’t easy to find, plus I have seen “Wild Bunch” at least 8 times, the documentary did not break new ground for me. And I knew all about his pugnacious character, his troubles with producers and authority, his womanizing, his drinking and coke habit, and his inescapable urge toward self-destructiveness. I saw “Wild Bunch” for the first time in Eugene, in July 1969. The HBO special allowed me to once again appreciate what great things he accomplished in a span of twenty years. There’s no question that “Wild Bunch” is his masterpiece, but there are 3 or 4 others that also have enduring qualities. I did take away one true insight from the Special: How autobiographical his movies are, something I hadn’t given much thought to before. That is much clearer to me now, how he would divvy up various facets of his own complex personality and put them into various personae on screen, which he would then manipulate like a puppet theater. This is a particularly modern penchant among artists. Who and what they are becomes their favorite subject matter. It’s fair game for a man of great talent, which Sam certainly was.

When my wife and I walked out of the theater in Eugene in 1969, she turned to me and said, “I’d say that film is the last Western. No one will top it.” A few days later I read a review of it in LIFE magazine by Richard Schickel who called it a “dirty Western.” They were both right. It can be considered the last Western in the sense that it sums up the tradition of the American Western as it has existed for two generations, while at the same time it transcends the past and opens the Western to more psychological and mythic interpretations. After “Wild Bunch” Western characters and cowboys had to be believable as human beings, not just pasteboard imitations carrying six guns. When I first saw the film I was overwhelmed by the reality of Pike Bishop and the other characters, their truth on the level of psychological weight and emotional substance; they were outlaws and killers but they were real people, a gang who stuck together—and they had personality. (The second time I saw the movie it was in a theater in the Fillmore district in San Francisco, and when Pike, the leader of the gang, gives his speech in the sand dunes about the importance of sticking together or “else we are just animals,” the theater erupted in applause and shouts of affirmation. The theater was full of young Hispanics and African Americans. They heard what Pike said and took it to heart. They saw it as an us against them situation. And being in the minority, sticking together was seen as an essential virtue.) The members of the gang were not saints, far from it, but they were real, you could identify with them and their dilemmas in time and space. They were men caught in the vise of historical circumstances, as the 19^th century faded away and the 20^th was being born, as automobiles were replacing horses, machine guns were replacing six guns, and revolutions were over taking anarchy. As Pike saw the situation, their options were narrowing and he knew it. It was an existential predicament that has some resemblance to what’s happening today, as instability rules. We can share their plight, walk in their shoes, and admire Pike’s integrity and loyalty, and even his sense of doom and nihilism. When he is with the young whore with the baby, he knows he has reached the end of the line; you can see it in his face. He throws away the empty bottle of Mescal, gives the woman his gold coins, and walks to his compatriots and says, “Let’s go,” and they know what he has in mind: Go get Angel, the gang member being abused by General Mapache, the local warlord. The four men begin what has come to be called “the long march” to what is now called “the bloody porch,” where the final violent confrontation takes place. They were either going to save Angel or go out in a blaze of gunfire, with the latter being what happened. At the end of the battle we see Pike dead at the machine gun, his finger still on the trigger, the barrel of the gun pointed straight up at the sky, as if he wanted to blast the deity off his throne. It was a bold and harsh gesture that it took guts to make.

The “dirty Western” is a reference to the over-the-top violence in the film and maybe the whoring too. Sam had insisted on a on a realistic portrayal of violence, and because of that he got the nickname “Bloody Sam.” When “Wild Bunch” was released in 1969 the country was in the grip of the War in Vietnam, which was spilling into living room across America every night on Television, with news of high body counts and vivid pictures of the wounded and the dead in body bags. Sam simply raised the realism bar, showing the country the visceral side of modern warfare. We hadn’t seen the bloodletting before; Sam rubbed our noses in it, in the wet red dirt. Now it’s standard stuff in movies and TV programs like CSI, but in 1969 it was in defiance of the unofficial Liberal Code, which had attempted to protect delicate sensibilities from extreme violence. Many were shocked at the realism; others, including Roger Ebert, were dazzled by the truth of it all and the pictorial richness and texture of the gunfight scenes, aided by the interjections of well-placed slow motion sequences. But it was the sixties when the mantra of many artists was ‘Tell it like it is,’ and down with sugarcoating the truth. The two shoot-out scenes at the beginning and end of the picture have been justly celebrated since and have never been duplicated, although some have tried. They were brilliantly constructed, orchestrated, and shot and edited, as was the earlier scene of the blowing of the bridge with several horsemen on it, which had to be carefully done to avoid injuries. The only other director who comes close to matching Sam’s style when it comes to large-scale violence would be Sergio Leone in “Duck You Sucker.”

Let me end on a note about his penchant for autobiographical material entering his pictures. In at least two of his movies, “The Deadly Companions” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” there is a scene of a gunslinger shooting his own image in a mirror. In each case I think it is a metaphor for self-loathing, perhaps even a disguised suicidal impulse. In Pat Garrett’s case it is a reaction to having just killed Billy the Kid, as if he were suddenly aware he had just killed the best part of himself, his ambitious and carefree youth. It culminates his own drive to destroy his besotted adult self. He was only 59 when he died, done in by alcohol and cocaine, being his own worst enemy.