THE MEANING OF SAM
There was a time when films were not just content/product and film criticism wasn’t an adjunct of the advertising and marketing wing of major studios. Part 2 in a series of short pieces about filmmakers and the ideas that motivated them — not profit, IDEAS!!!!!!!!!
What is the driving force of history? Strip away economics, politics all the big picture stuff. Human beings are the driving force of history. Individual lives, people like you and me, our quotidian acts, not those of the “great men.”
It is not easy to see the power of ordinary people. George Eliot knew this. the ending of Middlemarch makes my point:
“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
And the critical moment, for every individual, whether Middlemarch heroine Dorothea Brooke or you or me, is the realization that we will only live once and we will either accept the world as it is and make our way as best we can in it or will fight to change it. When enough people decide to fight for change, things begin to destabilize, you have a revolution or something near to it. That was what America was like 50 years ago precisely, on the day I am writing these words, when Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch opened.
Although Revolution was not what people talked about when they spoke about the film. Violence was how the film was sold and violence — apolitical, there for the specatcle — was what was delivered. It was the country’s Mise-en-scene.
In 1969, fear of Violence hung in America’s atmosphere, like the smell of gunpowder hovers over a 4th of July firework display.
There were hints of violence everywhere and when more than 400 critics viewed the Wild Bunch on a junket in the Bahamas — in those days film studios, in this case Warner brothers, used to fly the critics all expenses paid to a salubrious place and show them their upcoming releases, you can call it bribery if you like, I couldn’t possibly comment — the assembled wise folk decided the film’s violence was the talking point.
At a press conference the day after the screening, the film’s star William Holden defended Peckinpah’s movie against the charge, “Just turn on your TV set any night. The viewer sees the Vietnam War, cities burning, campus riots. He sees plenty of violence.”
Holden’s defense didn’t stop the conversation. It enflamed it. Judith Crist, nationally syndicated film critic and television personality wrote, audiences should bring along a “barf bag.” to the film. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby concluded his positive but not endorsing review “When I came out of it I didn’t feel like shooting, knifing or otherwise maiming any of Broadway’s often hostile pedestrians.”
It was a publicist’s dream — since there is no such thing as bad publicity. People who wouldn’t cross the street to see a Western any more joined the queue to see for themselves what the critics and moralists were talking about.
Maybe one of them was standing behind me, on a June evening outside the Randolph Theatre, a big old picture palace, on Chestnut St in Center City Philadlephia. I’m no fool. I went there the weekend the film opened. I knew studios often started hacking away at movies after they debuted. Sometimes in response to public outrage, more usually so that theater owners could squeeze another showing in during the course of the day. I wanted to see The Wild Bunch in its original form.
And I confess on first viewing the visual depiction of the gunfights was pretty overwhelming.
The violence is everything: pornographic, cathartic, ridiculous — there is a moment at the beginning of the final epic shoot out when Ernest Borgnine looks at William Holden and starts to laugh, and I remember vividly a moment several minutes into the orgy of bullets and slo-mo death when the audience started to laugh as well.
But the violence is a side show. The Wild Bunch is a meditation on history, it is about men who live long enough to have a second chance to consider whether they will accept the world as it is or fight against it. But it adds a level of complexity: the passage of time. And when you live long enough you won’t fear if your answer to the question leads to violence. Death holds no terror.
Although I didn’t realize that at the end of June 1969. I was too young and the times were moving too fast. Every day, people like me were being challenged to figure out whether to accept the world as it is or fight to change it. It is a real dilemma when you are still in your teens and have no idea yet of who you are and are being twisted around by every strong social/cultural/political breeze blowing
Several years later, sitting in an apartment in New York, failing at being an actor, and having reluctantly accepted the world as it is, I was killing time in the late afternoon. Dialling around on television I came across the last 10 minutes of a western. The final image was so overwhelming I burst into tears. Two older cowboys, played by Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, seem to be resolving a personal argument while on the way to fight some bad guys. There is a shoot-out. The bad guys are all killed. Joel McCrea is mortally wounded. Doubled-over on his knees, a mountain peak in the middle distance looming over the scene. McCrea asks Scott to leave. “I’ll go it alone.” Scott says, “I’ll see you later.
Then McCrea is alone, the camera, placed on the ground is tilted up and frames him and the mountain. He turns his face slowly to look at it for a few seconds, a last glimpse of the world’s beauty, then turns back and slumps out of the frame dead,
The name of the picture came up on the end credits, Ride the High Country. Peckinpah. Eventually I saw the film in a cinema. New York had so many repertory cinemas back then, sooner rather than later you could catch a flick you missed on first run or that came out decades before you were born. You could earn the equivalent of a Master’s degree in film, cheap double feature by cheap double feature, even while you were working in what was not yet called the gig economy.
The first time I saw Ride the High Country in a cinema, I cried at that last shot again. I’ve seen the film all the way through perhaps a dozen times, and seen it as I saw it the first time, partially, just coming across it by chance on television dozens more. I always stop what I’m doing and wait for that final shot and the cathartic tears.
We live once, and if we are lucky we live long enough to give a better answer to the question about accepting the world or changing it — even if the world is an entirely different place, even at the cost of our lives.
You can make too much of an artist’s biography in understanding their work but in Sam Peckinpah’s case knowing about his life is necessary
Peckinpah’s people had been living along the western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains for several generations by the time the filmmaker was born in 1925 in Fresno. They were the law — maternal Grandfather was a judge, father an attorney — and prominent enough that a peak in the Sierra Nevadas was known locally as Mt Peckinpah. Fresno was the modern commercial center of California’s main agricultural region the San Joaquin Valley but Peckinpah’s family had ranching properties back up in the Sierras and the director often skipped school to hang out there, join the ranch hands in their cowboying tasks, a participant and an observer of a world in transition.
His truancy worried his father so much he was sent to military academy to learn some discipline. During World War 2 he joined the Marines but by the time he finished basic training the war was over and he was deployed to China, assigned to aid in detention and repatriation of Japanese soldiers. His deployment continued as the conflict between Chiang-Kai Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists ignited. The US did not want its troops drawn into the fighting. Peckinpah watched political prisoners tortured and beheaded, and could do nothing, he got close to fire fights and saw what happened to bodies when they encountered military ordnance. He learned that good guys — groups supported by the US — were often bad guys. And when he asked his commanding officer about stopping the atrocities he was told the mission was to observe, not intervene. And so he made mental notes of all the terrors he saw.
He also drank prodigious quantities of alcohol.
When he mustered out of the Marines he went home, took a degree in history at Fresno State university, married an aspiring actress, got hooked on the theatre, and followed her to Los Angeles where he slowly began working his way towards the film industry by directing plays.
Each of these biographical points fed into his film career. The remnants of the old ranching West, the indiscipline, the Marines — whose basic training is physically and mentally harsh and whose motto those who survive basic live by for the rest of their lives, Semper Fidelis. Always Faithful. He observed History and the violence that always accompanies historical change. From the theatre he learned how to draw out performances from actors. As for his visual sense. Well, that was just his personal genius.
His first break in cinema was casting extras for a prison picture, Riot in Cell Block 11. He brought the director, Don Siegel, a selection of real-life hard cases, not actors. He was a Marine, not just an effete theatre director, and could handle himself among hard men.
He also benefitted from being in the right place at the right time. By the late 1950s television had completely disrupted Hollywood. The studios were making bigger and more spectacular films in the hopes of getting people to go back to the cinemas rather than sitting around staring at the little box in the living room after dinner. But at the same time the studios began to produce programs for the TV. Most of the creative action was in New York but the one kind of story that could be produced easily in LA were Westerns. The infrasctructure was in place The area around Los Angeles had not yet been paved over into suburbs so there were plenty of locations — canyons and coyotes — a short drive from the backlot to film on. There were dozens of TV westerns in production.
Peckinpah quickly built a reputation for re-writing western scripts, putting authentic cowboy talk in the mouths of characters. He invented one of the most popular shows, The Rifleman. And created and kept control of another, The Westerner, where he began to invent his own world, an American West, in transition to the modern, populated by men who have outlived their times.
By the early 60s he had graduated to feature films. Ride the High Country, released in 1962, was his second. Filmed initially near the places he knew as a boy in the Sierras. Two aging lawmen, old friends, Steve Judd played by Joel McCrea, and Gil Westrum, played by Randolph Scott, meet up by chance at a town fair. They have fallen on hard times as the old West has become civilized. They get a chance to earn a buck guarding a shipment of gold from a mining camp up in the High Country. Gil decides to steal the gold, and obliquely sounds Steve out about joining in.
“Partner, you know what’s on the back of a poor man when he dies? The clothes of pride. And they’re not a bit warmer to him dead than they were when he was alive. Is that all you want, Steve?”
“All I want is to enter my house justified.”
There’s the dilemma, change with the times or stay faithful to the life you have lived. The pair march resolutely into a firefight to give their answer.
The film made Peckinpah’s reputation, troubles with authority nearly destroyed it, and then, in 1968, the director went down to Mexico to make the Wild Bunch. The question is the same but the historical detail echoes Peckinpah’s experience in China. A group of outlaws who have lived too long find themselves in the middle of a multi-sided civil war in Mexico. They get a second chance to decide whether to accept the world as it is — or make it better, even at the cost of their lives. They die trying to make it better, a group of Samson’s bringing the whole temple down on their heads.
In the ensuing four years, Peckinpah made five films, some set in the Old West, some in modern times, all but one deal with the basic question of outliving your era, and accepting the world or changing it.
I saw them all and unlike 1969 I understood what Peckinpah was getting at. By the mid-70s the question about accepting the world or changing it, had been answered by people my age. There would be no revolution. In our 20s we were already nostalgic for what might have been. The heroes we might have become. I thought often of a poem I had to memorize at school. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy. Last verse goes:
“Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.”
Peckinpah was Miniver Cheevy. And his drinking was the end of him. In this he wasn’t born too late, he was born too soon. Interventions and rehab didn’t become common until the late 1980s … and certainly he needed both … but by then he had drunk himself to death just shy of his 60th birthday.
The years go by, Peckinpah becomes a prisoner of critics. They see his destruction as the studios crushing a rebellious genius. He was rebellious and he was a genius but he was also an abusive drunk who needed help and didn’t get it.
His films are discussed in terms of the violence, the machismo, the misogyny, the code of honour among men. The critics miss the fact that he is a philosopher of history whose medium is film.
Sometimes when I look at the men — and women — my age at President Trump’s rallies, potbellied, white haired, MAGA hatted I think of what Sam meant in the Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country. You live too long, you get a chance to re-assess, accept the world as it is, or try to change it
I’m sure the folks at Trump rallies saw the Wild Bunch 50 years ago.
Make America Great Again or die trying to destroy the whole damn thing.
If you like this essay tell your friends, more importantly tell Medium. And start listening to FRDH, First Rough Draft of History podcast.
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