Peckinpah's Violent Ballet

Sam Peckinpah.

The name alone screams westerns. A hard living, hard drinking man who wrote, produced, and directed some of the most violent movies of his time.

He worked with some of the biggest stars of their time, well of all time. McQueen, MacGraw, Holden, Johnson, Heston, Borgnine, Hoffman, Kristofferson, Robards, Coburn, Hauer, even Bob Dylan and a hundred more.

Take his signature film for example, The Wild Bunch. The story of a group of men who had outlived their time and as the story unfolded they knew it. The blending of the old west with the turn of the 20th century in Mexico.

Yeah the story is simple on the surface but you can see how each man starts to come to grip with the idea that their time is now over with. They deal with that realization by being who they are, hard and violent men.

What is ironic is that Peckinpah stuck with the western genre while Hollywood was forgetting about it more and more. The same as many of the characters in his masterpiece. Men who had no place anymore in the world around them.

Sam Peckinpah knew how to film hard and violent men. He didn't care to make them sympathetic. He didn't care to treat his women with kid gloves either. What he did care about was the story and his art, well that is about all he cared about if you read many of the stories about him.

He is probably more responsible for modern violence in films than nearly any other director of that time. He influence can be seen in a thousand movies today.