The Battles of Sam Peckinpah

11/4/05 to 12/16/05

The Wild Bunch, November 18

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Past Films

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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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The Battles of Sam Peckinpah

11/4/05 to 12/16/05

Sam Peckinpah (1925–1984) was the stuff of legend, a volatile and ornery director whose artistic vision inspired loyalty in some, disdain in others. Behind the camera there was often turmoil, but what rose from the havoc was a feisty, well-muscled cinema that challenged myths of manhood, violence, and the Old West. Peckinpah's best-known film, The Wild Bunch, shut the barn door on the glories of national expansion and the rugged individual. This rudely revisionist Western saw a cruel and unprincipled pragmatism guiding the unruly West; honor, if there was any, was likely to be conveyed through the muzzle of a gun. A gritty, sodbusting film, The Wild Bunch also ushered in an era of chillingly poetic violence, garnering Peckinpah the nickname Bloody Sam. But beyond the slo-mo mayhem and massacres, Peckinpah wrestled with the thorny dilemma of men (he didn't do women well) relying on the worst parts of themselves for the best of reasons. Ride the High Country, perfect until its dying breath; Straw Dogs, primordial in its cultured savagery; The Getaway, a pulpy duet with shotgun; and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a manic monologue for decapitated audience-these and others were masterful attempts to find a moral man inside the carnage of civilization. Sam Peckinpah: bloody good, bloody original, and sometimes just bloody.

Curated by Steve Seid

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Special thanks to Mike Pogorzelski, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Dennis Bartok and Chris D, American Cinematheque; Bill Foster, Northwest Film Center; Alex Winitsky, Lantana Productions; and Melissa Peckinpah.