“Would you believe that heroism has become old fashioned?” So says a character in Sam Peckinpah‘s underseen 1975 gem “The Killer Elite.” Peckinpah, a man who spent his entire career dealing with the theme of what it means to be a hero, was also known as “Bloody Sam,” which gives you all the details you need to know about this renegade filmmaker. Although his directing career started in the early ‘60s, it wasn’t until the late ‘60s that he made a name for himself with his revisionist western “The Wild Bunch.” Here was a man who shook up Hollywood and who saw things with a different lens. His immense talent for visuals and resonant themes can be seen in Cinemasters’ latest tribute video to the man considered one of the greatest maverick filmmakers. You’ll see all his classics being paid respect, from “The Wild Bunch” to “Straw Dogs” to the vivid action sequences of “The Getaway.”
In the video montage you get to see the quick-silvered and uniquely stylized action Peckinpah was known for. He didn’t go for subtlety, but opted instead for the raw. He didn’t shoot violence as much as feel it right to his very core. “The Wild Bunch” might not be seen as the most violent movie today, but it still hits hard whenever you watch it because of the way Peckinpah’s revolutionary multi-angle quick cut editing brought a new vocabulary to the western game, still unmatched in its efficiency to this day.
To say the man was a pessimist would be an understatement. His classics were brutally nihilist views of a corrupt and violent society gone astray. Although many of his male characters try to live up to the expectations set on them by society and build a solid foundation for themselves and their loved ones, the rooted evil that lurks between the cracks always makes them have to compromise.
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In the corrosive “Straw Dogs,” Dustin Hoffman‘s mathematician gets bullied, and his wife raped, by the workmen repairing his farmhouse. Not only is his life in danger, but so is his masculinity. The only way to find redemption for himself, and more importantly for his wife, is not to call the authorities or the law, but to do unto others what they did to him. Revenge. “Straw Dogs” ends with 20 minutes of bloody, vengeful mayhem. There’s scalding, boiling whiskey being thrown, legs being shot off, bear trap decapitations, and a guy being clubbed to death. It’s as if the lawless societies of the Westerns Peckinpah grew up watching as a kid transform into present day.
Peckinpah’s bout with alcoholism is well documented; he was known to show up on set plastered drunk, but he still marched on, sometimes creating great films, other times making jumbled, fascinating messes. 1974’s “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” is the former. It all came into place because the film’s main character, Bennie, was essentially a man fighting the same demons as Peckinpah. Roger Ebert famously said, “I can feel Sam Peckinpah’s heart beating and head pounding in every frame of the film,” and he wasn’t wrong. We all feel the same urgency as well. The film’s hero Bennie (the terrifically grizzled Warren Oates) has a drink in his hand in almost every scene of the film, and is definitely at the very least drunk in every one of the film’s deliciously lurid 112 minutes. Yet he marches on trying to bounty hunt for the head of Alfredo Garcia because a large sum of money awaits him at the end of the day. Just like Bennie, Peckinpah huffed and puffed his way to finishing the job, with a drink in his hand of course and drunk enough to send most people to the hospital with a bad case of alcohol poisoning.
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There are, unsurprisingly, more than a few shots of “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” used in this montage video. It’s the greatest film Peckinpah ever made, but it was also his most deeply personal. Just like the very best films of his filmography, his inner demons were all up there on screen waiting to stir up our minds.
