Lost In Translation
While touted in some reviews as a Brief Encounter-like romance, Lost in Translation is much more than that, including an examination of aging — the confusion met upon reaching adulthood, the staleness of married life and the aloofness of being past your prime.

Special Feature: Sam Peckinpah

Looks That Kill
What is unique to Peckinpah is the distribution of these points of identification. Rather than focusing on the protagonists alone, the audience is encouraged also to witness the action from the perspectives of horrified onlookers and victims of crossfire.
Ride the High Country
A film of abundant visual beauty, it’s also a highly literate one through whose heart blows a chill valedictory breeze.
Major Dundee
Moby Dick tells us that pursuing your obsessions can destroy you; Peckinpah should have been more wary.
Algonquin Kids’ Table: The Wild Bunch
In which various participants gush and squibble over Peckinpah’s classic tale of bad men in bad times.
Straw Dogs
If Peckinpah truly wanted to make Death Wish, he’d have made Death Wish. But Straw Dogs isn’t a vengeance orgy at all unless you’re not quite paying attention.
Junior Bonner
The Tao of Sam Peckinpah.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
The very title suggests a brace of opposing forces, an either/or that needs sorting out, but it’s a riddle that Peckinpah, even had he been sober and left to his own devices, had no intention of solving because he knew it couldn’t be done.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
There’s no heroic scale, little beauty, and the tenderest relationship is between a man who’s dead and one who ought to be. All that’s left is a vein of black humor a mile thick and a feeling of disgusted rage potent enough to blow you across the room.
The Bottom Shelf: Convoy
It was as if Stanley Kubrick had decided to follow Barry Lyndon with a lavish adaptation of “Disco Duck.”
The Osterman Weekend
Peckinpah was always a foe of received wisdom, and this is why: The Osterman Weekend isn’t a terrible movie. It’s not even a bad movie. It’s certainly not a great movie, but its status as the movie that literally and figuratively buried him is entirely unjust.
Pick a Peck of Poses
A Beginner’s Field Guide to the Peckinpah Actor.
 

Wherefore Art Thou, Bloody Sam?

BY Hayden Childs

Welcome to The High Hat’s Sam Peckinpah feature. For those of you not in the know, Peckinpah was an American icon: the hard-drinking, punch-throwing, philandering salty old prick with desert-trash poetry in his soul and the eye of a scrub-brush Michelangelo. He made brilliant films that turned a cold eye on humanity and showed us in our violent, kind, cruel, chaotic, naturalistic, honorable, heroic, dumb, bitter, tired, poetic, ever-loving glory.

When we first conceived doing this, we thought that we’d try to have an essay on each of Peck’s movies, as well as an essay on his style. As it turns out, though, not a one of us wanted to make a run at The Wild Bunch alone. So, we’ve decided that we’ll all have a conversation about TWB instead, and now it’s the subject of this month’s Algonquin Kids’ Table discussion.

A few of Peck’s minor movies, The Deadly Companions, Noon Wine and Cross of Iron, went unclaimed by our writers. Then a few writers decided that they just didn’t have enough to say about their subjects. Bye bye, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Getaway and The Killer Elite.

Which leaves us with the following:

Peckinpah was a challenging director at his best (and possibly more challenging in his decline, as Von Doviak’s and Pierce’s articles show). We hope you enjoy reading us wrestling with his movies.

One last note: it is a crime that Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, the director’s cut of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia have not been released on DVD. Criterion, we’re looking right at you.


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Look for Brett Grenadier Richards' article on Cross of Iron here!