Blues on the Western FrontThree great films by Sam Peckinpah.
Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006, at 1:29 PM ET
Many of us were first introduced to the director Sam Peckinpah when The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. We were shocked to see a Western with unsoftened profanity and the heavy measure of blood that Arthur Penn first brought to the screen in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde. Following that movie, Peckinpah used slow motion to render gunbattles with a fresh and terrible authority. He intensified their mythic quality by creating two narrative velocities. Two events seemed to take place in as many tempos. This is very close to actual experience: An endangered person in a car accident sees things moving quite slowly because the brain speeds up perception and magnifies all events for survival purposes—but the safe onlooker perceives the same events happening at great rapidity.
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StumbleUponThat expansion of narrative rhythm proved that Peckinpah was a technical genius, but that was not all he had to offer. The new DVD collection The Classic Westerns of Sam Peckinpah contains, besides The Wild Bunch, one inarguable classic featuring Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, Ride the High Country, and what many consider an elegiac mess, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but which is actually an extraordinary character study. It was the last Peckinpah Western and the final great tale of the West before the miniseries Lonesome Dove, which was superior to all that came after it and much that went before.
McCrea and Scott were at the ends of their film careers in 1962 when Peckinpah, only 36, made his debut as a filmmaker after about seven years of writing Western scripts for television. McCrea and Scott had many mythic Hollywood Westerns behind them, but in Ride the High Country, they play outdated men, either bewildered to the point of corruption or doggedly maintaining their integrity as the world in which they had made their reputations dissolves into lies, fraud, and contrivance. As the two recall the past, the audience believes that youth was both sweet and cruel to them; but most of all, they have reached the stage at which most situations are quick studies. They perceive the meaning of a context much more quickly than a young person would. Even so, their decisions, as well as the consequences of those decisions, are complex, stirring, and tragic.
Many people claim that Peckinpah did not understand what Sergio Leone was doing in languorous Westerns like Once Upon a Time in the West, but Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid proves that assessment wrong. It is a Western set at a slow blues tempo in which melancholic introspection is paced by vengeful or offhanded violence. Garrett takes his time hunting the Kid, hoping the fugitive will leave the United States for Mexico but knowing that's doubtful. Frustrated and progressively alienated from everyone, Garrett builds up and focuses his rage incrementally. James Coburn, in perhaps his most impressive performance, portrays him as a lonely man whose doubts are drowned in alcohol. Full of painful guilt and self-disdain, Garrett finally does the bloody deed and rides away alone, with a child throwing rocks at him. He's mournfully resentful of his circumstances and his choices, having taken the assignment from men for whom he had no respect and called "big pecker heads" to their faces.
The men in question, wealthy land- and cattle-owners, didn't need to inspire loyalty with charisma, like the Kid. If there was a problem, they just raised the price. This is not a romantic picture of the West, which Bob Dylan's sometimes distracting score would lead you to believe. Neither Billy the Kid nor his gang are depicted as victimized innocents just seeking freedom. No matter their abundant human qualities, they are, finally, scroungy killers whose lives are walled in by boredom. For fun, they shoot off the heads of chickens, attend cockfights, drink bad whiskey, eat beans for breakfast, and go to bed with interchangeable whores. For work, they steal cattle or murder people. The presence of pigs and flies about them is not accidental.
No less corrupt than the big guys, the Kid and his gang are just less organized. Peckinpah was probably more sympathetic to small-time freelance criminals than he was to those with bigger designs and more power to impose their high-collared self-interest. But he was also aware of the bitter irony of the Old West that civilization follows the latter, not the former. The brilliantly selected cast includes Kris Kristofferson, who will surprise many with the subtlety and gravity he brings to Billy the Kid, who is no more than an overgrown boy made dangerous by his willingness to kill out of spite or desperation. In his small, dusty world, perfectly captured by the grimy sets and the surroundings, the Kid has the status of a free spirit, a man of honor and elemental codes. In fact, he is no more than an outlaw who will lose that status if he goes to Mexico, where he will become just another drunken gringo defecating chili peppers and "waiting for nothing."
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is lyrically photographed with superb attention to the oceanic space of the West. Peckinpah also personalizes Leone's conception of both the close frontal shot and the profile as monumental architecture. Such faces, as Quentin Tarantino says, are the back story. All that was enjoyed, lost, or foolishly attempted in a very lean world is made clear in the amplifying reaction shots. Tiers of meaning come from Chill Wills, Jack Elam, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Gene Evans, Richard Jaeckel, Elisha Cook, Dub Taylor, Harry Dean Stanton, Jason Robards, Barry Sullivan, and the astonishing Katy Jurado, who, were it not for the ethnic provincialism of her time, could have been America's answer to Anna Magnani.
All of these actors bring to Sam Peckinpah's last Western a somber regality as well as a crude poetry of laconic and hilarious dimensions. A perfect example arrives in two masterfully paced scenes with Chill Wills. At first, Garrett treats Wills' saloon owner amiably, with wit and camaraderie. But we gradually see that Garrett is, as Will tells him, "Sitting there with all that law crammed inside of you, just busting to get out." As Garrett's drinking progresses, the lawman becomes ominous, paranoid, surly, and finally homicidal as he finds a target, focusing his bitterness and anger on a member of the Kid's gang. With its fresh meditative pace, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid acknowledges the ongoing American blues that comes of having to choose between a rock of disorder and the hard place of business.
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Excellent as Crouch's review, I would strongly disagree with his description of Dylan's soundtrack as being "distracting" in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. How can one view the image of Slim Pickens dying of a gut shot, his Mexican wife – his deputy, no less! – holding out her hand to reach him, knowing she can't follow and not be struck by how beautifully Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" works for that moment? Billy's final scene gets nowhere close to this swan song.
No matter how many times I watch the Pickens scene, my eyes still well up.
--Splendid_IREny
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For "Pat Garrett," Peckinpah was pitted against short-term MGM head James Aubrey, who had been "the smiling Cobra" at CBS (he fired Jack Benny by saying, "You're through) and who took a sadistic pleasure in cutting budgets of MGM movies and re-cutting them over the makers objections. Blake Edwards and Clint Eastwood were other "Aubrey victims," and Robert Redford steered "The Sting" away from MGM just to make sure Aubrey couldn't hurt it.
Due to a camera defect, first reels of "Pat Garrett" were all out of focus -- Aubrey told Peckinpah to keep them that way and not to reshoot. Peckinpah snuck reshoots, and battled, scene by scene, to shoot scenes in the script that Aubrey wanted out (crucially, one in which a raft floats down a river.)
When Peckinpah jokingly ran a staged photo in Variety of himself on the "Pat Garrett" set getting an IV tube of whiskey, Aubrey declared war. The movie was chopped down and shipped out months earlier than planned.
"Pat Garrett" has since been restored and put back together, somewhat, and it is fascinatinly languid film (Slim Pickens death scene is indeed moving -- he pretty much gets killed doing a grudging favor for Garrett on the spur of the moment). But that "Pat Garrett" is a mess while "The Wild Bunch" is a fine jewel reflects Peckinpah's relationships with very different studio heads.
--lucabrasi
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Stanley Crouch […] apparently perceives the film aurally rather than visually. He talks about the languorous pacing, the "slow blues tempo," the "ongoing American blues"—so much so that I get the feeling the soundtrack CD ought to tell me as much as the film itself. But Crouch has a problem with Dylan's "sometimes distracting score," too. […]
Peckinpah works more in a visual way, tempered by the potential for violence. How else do you interpret the scene where Billy (the young Kris Kristofferson) has just broken out of jail and is confronting a guard with the guard's own shotgun (its shells loaded with dimes instead of buckshot, because the guard bore a particular hatred for Billy). We see Billy from the standpoint of the guard, looking up at him from the street to where Billy stands on the second floor. It's a tense moment. Then, of course (this is Peckinpah, after all), Billy gives him both barrels of dimes and says, "Keep the change, Bob." At this point I forget about the music or the pacing.
The way Peckinpah works, he builds up the potential for violence in each of his characters or groups of characters, then runs them into each other. The pace is however much time he needs to bring all their kettles to a boil. The scenes of conflict are always stunningly, and primarily, visual. And if his pace is slower, you have to realize that the pace of all films was slower in that era.
--rob_said_that
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(4/14)