“No one has been as loyal to the Western as Sam Peckinpah, so persistent in its theme of absurd, heartfelt honor or so inventive in finding new anecdotes about it that drift into the twentieth century (and across the Mexican border). Having studied the photographs of the real time and place, he has dispensed with movie-star handsomeness and peopled his films with sleazy, untidy roustabout supporting actors--often in leading roles. His West is a haven for picaresques and eccentrics, but his Westerns snort on terrible beauty, whether it be the choreography of death in The Wild Bunch or the swirls of dust left by trucks in Convoy. Before there was law and order, sighs Peckinpah, there was hallucination.
“In half a dozen movies in the late '60s and '70s, like Keats on tequila, Peckinpah kept the abused and neglected Western alive. The Ballad of Cable Hogue is one of his best, with water as its treasure and dice. Hogue (Jason Robards) marks a period of transition--the new age of automobiles, the nostalgia for whores in shacks--but he is a characteristic Peckinpah man: amused, fatalistic, hedonistic, abrasive, doomed and chuckling. There is also still an innocence in this West, just conscious of the danger of being spoiled. No one has shown more ecstasy in action and horizons, or been so rueful about their loss. Hard as it is for Peckinpah to make movies the way he wants (because of his perversity as much as their callousness), he reminds us that passion is central to the Western. He's the voluptuary of the genre: you can almost touch his Westerns in oils, and come away sticky with blood or booze, sweat or semen.” David Thomson