Peckinpah turned to contemporary times for this tale of a “motel cowboy,” ironically set in the staged-West milieu of the Frontier Days Rodeo in Prescott, Arizona. Steve McQueen is Junior Bonner, a fading rodeo star come home to find his family's farm being bulldozed, his father (Robert Preston) hospitalized, and his mother (Ida Lupino) working in a “Western antiques” knicknack store. Junior's entrepreneurial brother Curly, however, touts his mobile-home business as “Total Electric Living,” a perfectly domesticated West complete with animals in cages. Peckinpah realizes the ironies implicit in favoring Junior's re-created West, the rodeo, over Curly's, but he does it anyway. As Junior readies for the rodeo, Peckinpah turns into a crazed Cowboy with a Movie Camera, enlivening this good-natured tale with an editing aesthetic more Soviet Constructivist than Old West, able to cage and restage time itself through a blinding series of quick cuts and montages of bull's-eyes, stopwatches, hands, and rope.