With audiences expecting another bullet-and-blood bath after The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah instead responded with an easygoing, comic character study that traipses through the Old West taking its own sweet time. “Sorry, old-timer” may be the first words spoken, but this particular ballad is no dirge for old-timer Cable Hogue (Jason Robards), a prospector double-crossed and left for dead in Nevada's vast desert. Stumbling across a water source, Cable turns his luck into a quick fortune, aided by a lecherous “preacher” (David Warner) and abetted (and abedded) by a friendly prostitute (Stella Stevens). An extended musing on the entrepreneurs of the Old West, the magic-hour landscapes of southern Nevada, and, this being Peckinpah, Stella Stevens's bodice, the film was quickly dumped into second-rate theaters by a studio caught off guard by its lack of sellable violence. Years later, it remained the film that Peckinpah most wanted audiences to see.