Before Tarantino, it was "Bloody" Sam Peckinpah who was notorious for the use of graphic violence in his films. His seminal release The Wild Bunch (1969) was called "the most graphically violent Western ever made and one of the most violent movies of all time." The film itself can be seen as a huge catalyst: the Western genre was never the same after Peckinpah, soaking the once docile desert landscapes with blood and bravado. It is his most famous and successful film, despite the public outrage. The trend only continued with Straw Dogs (1972), another brutal film with the nature of violence at its center.
Made in England, about an American mathematician named David (Dustin Hoffman) on sabbatical with his wife in a small English village, of which she is a native. His wife's flirtatious nature begins to intervene with his work, while the local lads harass and mock him for his "outsider" nature. The film descends into a craze with David turning from a maligned pacifist to a resourceful killing machine. The violence of Straw Dogs quickly became a controversy, and was band in England for some years, yet had a favorable run in the States, and quickly became one of his most successful films. Oddly enough, his follow up film, Junior Bonner was a critical and commercial flop. We see none of the explosive violence of The Wild Bunch or misogyny of Straw Dogs
From 1972 to 1977, Peckinpah made The Getaway (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), The Killer Elite (1975), and Cross of Iron (1978). These years resulted in an uneven body of work yet too little attention has been paid to how these later films evolve from Peckinpah's earlier work and reflect the continuous development of his concerns.
Looked upon as his most surreal and nihilistic film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a fever-soaked escapade.
With the lowest budget he's ever had and lacking a great cast, he ventured into Mexico with no real idea of what he was trying to accomplish. However, after all was said and done, he went on record to say that Garcia was the only film of his that was released exactly as he envisioned it, without a single edit or cut from studio heads. Sadly, it was at this point that his alcoholism and destructive lifestyle was reaching its peak, even saying he couldn't direct while sober. In fact, Warren Oates modeled his performance in Garcia after Peckinpah himself, a somewhat haunting revelation as Oates' character is the very definition of low-life. Allure aside, Garcia is one of the Peckinpah's strongest films, similar in tone to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, a hopeless narrative but rich in aural and visual texture.
His last great film was Cross of Iron The film concentrates on the efforts of Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn) to protect the squad of men under his command. Many reviews called the film "gory" and "hysterical", even though, after seeing the film, Orson Welles cabled Peckinpah that it was the best anti-war film he had ever seen about the "ordinary enlisted man." Although a critical and commercial failure in the States, it was released to great acclaim in Europe in 1977. It even became the biggest grossing picture in Germany since The Sound of Music.
Peckinpah's films were mutilated by the studios, and most of the critical literature mostly revolves around his mythology: a drunk, a coke addict, a sentimental romantic, possibly schizophrenic, a little man with a big chip on his shoulders -- Peckinpah is said to be many things. To give true testament to the man, it's nest not to focus on the violence or the vices; what we have is an admittedly uneven collection of work that, when good, deal with two of the most complex issues of the human condition: our fear of violence and death and the hope for a better life.
Peckinpah shot the dream going, gone rotten, machines and money choking the garden, those hard-won gatherings at the river mutating into cold centers of commerce. Chinese boxes of powder and paranoia. -- Kathleen Murphy
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