The Battles of Sam Peckinpah

11/4/05 to 12/16/05

  • The Wild Bunch, November 18

  • Upcoming
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  • Selected
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  • Past
    Films
  • Past
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Past Films

  • Cross of Iron

    • Friday, December 16 19:00

    The uncut European version of Peckinpah's only war movie, with James Coburn as a German grunt battling both the Russians and upper-class captain Maximilian Schell. Peckinpah's vision of WWII explodes any semblance of order, either narrative or moral.

  • The Osterman Weekend

    • Friday, December 16 21:30

    Peckinpah's adaptation of Robert Ludlum's novel is a complex thriller bulging with TV-induced paranoia: CIA chief Burt Lancaster recruits John Hurt to convince telejournalist Rutger Hauer that some of his best friends are Soviet spies.

  • Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

    • Wednesday, December 14 19:30

    Kris Kristofferson is a bedraggled Billy the Kid accompanied by friend Alias (Bob Dylan) and pursued by ex-friend Pat Garrett (James Coburn). Written by Rudy Wurlitzer, "the last real Western made by Sam Peckinpah (or anyone else, for that matter) . . . is almost insanely elegiac. The colors are ultra magic hour, and the characters are obsessed with growing old."-Village Voice

  • Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

    • Friday, December 9 19:00

    Warren Oates is a seedy American piano player turned bounty hunter driving across Mexico with a severed head for a sidekick in Peckinpah's weirdly funny, deeply pessimistic film.

  • The Killer Elite

    • Friday, December 9 21:00

    An S.F.-set plot about hired killers with CIA connections "is used as a mere framework for a compressed, almost abstract fantasy on the subject of selling yourself yet trying to hang on to a piece of yourself."-New Yorker. With James Caan.

  • The Getaway

    • Wednesday, December 7 19:30

    Introduced by Greil Marcus. With this story of a gangster and his moll taking it on the lam, Peckinpah delivers a precisely orchestrated fugitive fantasy à la High Sierra. Stars Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw are almost upstaged by the muscular cinematography and high-caliber montage.

  • Junior Bonner

    • Friday, December 2 19:00

    Washed-up bull-rider Steve McQueen comes home to Arizona, to mother Ida Lupino, father Robert Preston, and the artificial West of Prescott's Frontier Days Rodeo, in this stylistically aggressive yet emotionally good-natured picture.

  • Straw Dogs

    • Friday, December 2 21:05

    The moors of Cornwall are the setting for a saga of primordial violence starring Susan George as local lust-object and Dustin Hoffman as her timid husband whose dormant masculinity is awakened under siege.

  • The Wild Bunch

    • Friday, November 18 19:30

    "If they move, kill 'em": Peckinpah's most notorious Western shot the genre through with a sense of rage and apocalyptic exhilaration. "Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle."-Pauline Kael

  • Major Dundee

    • Friday, November 11 19:30

    Notoriously butchered by the studio, Peckinpah's chaotic, antiheroic Vietnam-era parable-a worthy predecessor to The Wild Bunch-is back with a new score and twelve minutes restored. Charlton Heston plays a disgraced Civil War general turned prison-camp warden.

  • Ride the High Country

    • Friday, November 4 19:00

    Peckinpah's sensitive, elegiac second film "allows the grand old veterans Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott to embody the ancient virtues of the Western with heroic grace and gallantry."-Village Voice. With exquisite cinematography by Lucien Ballard.

  • The Ballad of Cable Hogue

    • Friday, November 4 21:00

    Grizzled prospector Jason Robards finds his fortune in the desert in this comic character study, a leisurely and lusty musing on Western enterprise.