Reeling Backward: "Ride the High Country" (1962)

"Pardner, do 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."

In writing not long ago about cowboy actor Randolph Scott's late-in-life career resurgence, I mentioned that he and Joel McCrea made one final Western together before retiring from the big screen. That's not strictly true, as McCrea did make a handful of other film appearances after 1962's "Ride the High Country," though neither the films or his turns in them were notable.

"Ride," which is also widely regarded as director Sam Peckinpah's first important film, is better described as the coda on McCrea's long, and largely unappreciated, career. It did in fact mark Scott's last time on the big screen.

A low-budget film that barely made a cultural ripple at the time of its release -- it was actually the bottom half of a double bill with the Viking actioner "The Tartars" -- "Ride" has continued to grow in estimation over the years to the point of being heralded by many as a major film the helps mark the close of Hollywood's Golden Age.

Set in the early years of the 20th century, the two actors play aged ex-lawmen yearning to recapture something of their glory days. Meeting by happenstance, they join forces to guard a shipment of gold dust from a mining town back to the city. Though they don't set out with the intention of the proverbial "one last job," it inevitably becomes that.

The amount they're to be entrusted with is initially described as a quarter of a million dollars, later amended to one-tenth that upon the signing of the contract with the bank, and finally just a hair over $11,000 when they actually take possession. This is significant to Steve Judd (McCrea) only as a matter of personal pride, a measure of how much credit is left in the reputation of a famous relic like himself.

The sum is more important for Gil Westrum (Scott), as he intends to steal the gold rather than turn it into the bank. He spends much of the movie trying to enlist Steve to join the scheme, indirectly through little hints and suggestions. But he's prepared to betray his friend if needs be. His hotheaded young sidekick, Heck Longtree (Ron Starr), serves as his backup and insurance.

During one of their conversations on the trail, Gil does succeed in getting Steve to admit that if men like themselves were justly compensated for their work, he figures he would be due $1,000 for every time he's been shot. (Paying out four times, in his case). Instead, Steve has little to show beyond a decent horse, a fancy gun rig and frayed shirt cuffs.

For their trouble, the three men are being paid $40 a day -- half for Steve, $10 each for his two recruits -- which works out to a little more than $1,000 in today's dollars. So the temptation to steal $250,000, or even $11,000, is enormous.

Steve had spent the previous years working in brothels and bars, while Gil sunk even lower, portraying himself as "the Oklahoma kid," a fictional notorious gunman at carnivals and such. Wearing a fake mustache and ostentatious outfit, he bets rubberneckers 10 cents apiece that he can outshoot them at a game of spinning targets. Even then he has to rig the odds, loading his pistol with buckshot cartridges to ensure a hit.

Along the way to Coarse Gold, the squalid little mining town, they pick up a straggler in Elsa (Mariette Hartley), a young girl who lives alone with her fire-and-brimstone father (R. G. Armstrong). She can't stand the lonely life and her father's abuse, so she sneaks off to join the strangers.

She's clearly attracted to Heck, and vice-versa, but when he nearly forces himself upon her -- only being pulled off by the two older men -- Elsa resolves to continue her original plan of marrying Billy Hammond (James Drury), a man she courted who joined the gold rush.

Unfortunately, Billy has four brothers, and it soon becomes apparent that the Hammonds have a rather... socialist view when it comes to marriage and sexual relations. As in, "share and share alike." Billy seems unbothered by this, so long as he gets first dibs on Elsa's favors.

Needless to say, she's not enamored of the notion of becoming the family sex slave. The marriage goes through in a rambunctious, whiskey-soaked ceremony at the Coarse Gold saloon, but Gil, Steve and Heck rescue Elsa from the Hammonds' clutches. An inquest is called, and Gil threatens the town judge (Edgar Buchanan) to testify that he's not legally empowered to perform weddings. They make off with Elsa, leading to a fatal showdown with the Hammond boys.

The Hammonds make quite an impression as villains, combining a level of genuine malevolence with bumpkin-esque comedic relief. That's helped by the presence of Peckinpah favorite Warren Oates as Henry, the dimmest of the bunch. Oates furrows his brows in a vain attempt to understand basic societal conventions like taking baths or not shtupping your sister-in-law. And, for some strange reason, birds are attracted to Henry, constantly flocking about him or even perching on his shoulder.

The other brothers are Elder (John Anderson), whose name spells out his role; barely-past-boyhood Jimmy (John Davis Chandler); and stoic Sylvus, played by quintessential "that guy" actor L. Q. Jones.

Interesting aside on Jones: his given name was Justus E. McQueen, but in his first movie, "Battle Cry," he was cast as a character named L. Q. Jones, and he liked the moniker so much he used it the rest of his career, which included a lot of Peckinpah films. Another one for the May Wynn files.

I enjoyed "Ride the High Country," though it's hard to argue it up further than being a well-done B-movie Western oater. The central dynamic is Scott and McCrea as hard men who've absorbed a lifetime of being downtrodden and disregarded. Regret is at the core of every scene in the movie, such as when Gil inquires after Steve's one-time, long-ago chance at love and family.

They both still look the part of genuine cowboys, though McCrea sports a bit of a paunch, and his grey hairs are carefully combed over the thin spots. He carries himself with a sense of both shame and pride, mournful for past misdeeds -- including a stint on the wrong side of the law -- while retaining his certainty that it's not usually hard to tell right from wrong.

Scott's character is a little underdeveloped by comparison, failing to struggle much with any kind of moral quandary about stealing the gold. It's only after Steve catches them in the act that Gil seems to have a moment of self-reflection and doubt.

As with most of Peckinpah's work, the women don't fare so well. Elsa comes across as a naive temptress, repeatedly presenting herself to men for their attention and then becoming defensive when they respond too enthusiastically. Given today's watershed moment of awareness about sexual harassment and abuse, her repeated rape peril is titanically disturbing.

Although N. B. Stone Jr., is credited with the screenplay, according to most lore Peckinpah himself and William S. Roberts actually wrote it.

Though I think it's a trifle overrated, "Ride the High Country" is still a worthy conveyance for two Western stars to ride off into their well-deserved sunset.

Reeling Backward: "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" (1974)

"There ain't no more chances!"

Every other filmmaker looked at Warren Oates and surely thought, "What a great face for a character actor." Only Sam Peckinpah gazed up on his pinched, wizened features, unimpressive physique and horsey teeth and said, "That's my star."

(Well, him and John Milius, whose "Dillinger" with Oates in the title role beat Peckinpah's film to the theaters by a few months.)

Oates, perhaps in a combination of gratitude and resentfulness toward his famously exacting director, used him as a model for his signature irascible performance, going so far as to wear Peckinpah's personal sunglasses throughout most of the movie -- even scenes set indoors, at night.

You can't see very well that way, of course, or be seen, but maybe that's the point. In his Bennie, an ex-Army mook slumming his way through Mexico's seediest bars as a piano player for Yankee tourists, Oates gives the indelible impression of a man in hiding, mostly from himself.

Peckinpah was something of a south-of-the-border tourist himself, his last few movies failing to grab attention the way his masterpiece, "The Wild Bunch," did a handful of years earlier. He filmed "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" in Mexico using an entirely Mexican crew, and at one point vowed never to shoot in the States again. That got him in trouble with the film and television unions, who relented their boycott of the movie after the appropriate bowing and scraping.

The director, who co-wrote the script with Gordon Dawson, has acknowledged that the genesis for this film came from his friend Frank Kowalski, who suggested the idea of a manhunt for a man who was already dead.

Like much of Peckinpah's oeuvre, it's an overt reaction to and repudiation of tired Hollywood traditions. How many movies have we seen where some boss offers a rich reward for the capture, dead or alive, of some hated foe, and then we dutifully watched as the miscreant was hunted down -- or, if he was the hero, righteously overcame his pursuers?

Only Peck would short-circuit the chase in the first act, informing us that the quarry was killed in a drunk-driving accident days earlier. Bennie, starting to spin in a circle of what he knows to be a slow spiral to the bottom, sees a last chance for a payday and a fresh start by simply finding the sap's body and appropriating the head, without even having to kill anybody.

He arranges to collect $10,000 for finding and killing Alfredo from American mercenaries, not knowing they're merely the frontmen for El Jefe (Emilio Fernández), the regional crime lord who has offered a cool million for the offending head. It seems Alfredo, once regarded by El Jefe as his own son, has impregnated his teenage daughter and run off. In the opening sequence, he has the girl tortured to reveal the name of the father in full view of the assembled family, her bones breaking with a sickening crunch.

An entire army of assassins and bounty hunters is dispatched. Two of the creepiest, a pair of Americans named Sappensly (Robert Webber) and Quill (Gig Young), stumble upon Bennie's bar and ask after Alfredo. One of them knocks out a prostitute for plying her wares by simply swinging an elbow, demonstrating both their ruthlessness and queer propensities (and I don't mean the Tolkien-esh use of that word).

Bennie knows Alfredo as the former beau of his erstwhile girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega). He learns from her that 1) Alfredo is dead, and 2) he spent several days in her company immediately beforehand. He quickly gets over his anger for her cheating, since how can you really break fidelity vows that remain untaken?

Bennie hatches upon what he thinks is a brilliant plan: he and Elita will take a pleasant car trip to the countryside to retrieve Alfredo's topmost appendage, and use the money to go someplace they've never been before and start a life as man and wife. Bennie, heretofore reluctant to commit, is so ensorceled by the idea that he even begins to refer to Elita as his missus.

Things, obviously, don't go so well. First there is an encounter with a couple of pot-bellied bikers who want to rape Elita, or kill Bennie, or both. She readily goes along to spare his life -- as a prostitute, the use of her body as a commidity is familiar to her. But Bennie, who has stated that he "shot a lot of pistols in the Army," gets the drop on the bikers and plugs 'em both.

(One of the miscreants is played by Kris Kristofferson, an odd cameo by a singer/songwriter who'd already segued into leading film roles in "Cisco Pike" and "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.")

The sudden incursion into violence, and Bennie's evident expertise in that area, leaves Elita shaken. Their disunion grows wider when Bennie finally reveals the reason for wanting to visit Alfredo's grave; Elita makes clear that she'll help him if that's what he chooses, but it will be their final moment together.

Vega, like many actresses in Peckinpah's films, is used mostly as a canvas upon which to paint male lust and venality, evidenced by her frequent nude scenes of the barest necessity. She has her top down more in this movie than Bennie's battered red 1962 Chevy Impala convertible.

The last act is a tragedy worthy of MacBeth. Elita falls victims to the plot, and Alfredo's head becomes Bennie's obsession and totem, as it passes hands from one interested party or another, but always finding its way back to Our Man. He begins talking to Alfredo, blaming him, then absolving him.

Bennie is less interested in the money than exacting revenge -- though, it should be noted, after plunking El Jefe in cold blood, he turns back to pick up the briefcase full of cash.

In the end, the story to me is about how we capriciously assign value to things, and how that can change in a wink. Bennie at first invests little emotional currency in his relationship with Elita, but that quickly compounds. Elita places more worth on saving Bennie's life than her own virtue. Bennie is not willing to kill for $10,000, but will do so to preserve his own pride. A man's legacy is worth nothing, but his bodily scraps will buy you into the millionaires' club.

"Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" is a weird, glorious and brutal film. It is not Peckinpah's greatest movie but is probably his most quintessential one. If you wanted to boil Peckinpah's worldview and cinematic aesthetics down to their base elements, this is what you'd get.

Reeling Backward: "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970)

After essentially blowing up the Western genre, what do you do next?

In the case of Sam Peckinpah, coming off the divisive glory of "The Wild Bunch," which was excoriated for its brutal violence, you make a silly -- yet slyly consequential -- comedy like 1970's "The Ballad of Cable Hogue."

A casual observer of Peckinpah would be hard-pressed to even recognize the filmmaker's fingerprints on this gentle, life-affirming movie starring Jason Robards as a desert hermit who builds his own oasis in between tumbleweed towns. But they are there, including a general pessimism about the ability of the individual to conform to the strictures of society, and a sober realism about the usefulness, and misuse, of violence to address conflicts.

A big flop at the time, "Cable Hogue" essentially ended Peckinpah's career as an auteur. From there on out, he became a hired gun brought in -- usually reluctantly, due to his well-earned reputation for drunkenness and absenteeism on the set -- to work on prepackaged studio projects. But the movie has come to be reevaluated over the years and found new admirers, including myself.

Cable Hogue is not your typical Western protagonist, and he's certainly no hero -- at least not a cookie-cutter one. He's illiterate, ill-tempered, a skinflint to barter with, and seems to prefer the sun-baked company of lizards and rattlesnakes to that of most people. In the opening minutes he's even revealed to be a bit of a coward, declining to shoot his back-stabbing gold mining partners when he has the drop on them.

Yet Peckinpah and screenwriters John Crawford and Edmund Penney (plus an uncredited Gordon T. Dawson) delve deeper into Hogue's dust-caked, odorous personage and find a well-hidden nobility. Cable may be uncouth but he's not dull-witted; he's stubborn but capable of self-reflection and change; and he's intrinsically invested with enough pride to demand respect from those who would laugh at him -- which is pretty much everyone he meets, at least initially.

The movie is a celebration of a seemingly ordinary man who demands that he be accepted as he is, prodigious faults and all. He will make his own rules and abide by them, as will those who wander into his tiny two-acre domain. And he will never forget himself and dream of becoming something other than what he is.

In short, he is Cable Hogue, he is a man, and he will not be denied.

The story begins with those scheming partners, Taggart and Bowen (Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones, respectively), betraying Cable and leaving him in the desert to die without a drop of water or any possessions beyond the clothes on his back. Near death, he communes with the Lord, giving his feeble life over into His hands, and is rewarded by stumbling across a tiny water hole in the middle of nowhere.

Actually, the hole -- soon expanded into a well -- is right along the stagecoach route to the town of Deaddog. Cagey Cable reasons that having a place to stop and water horses will prove valuable to parched travelers. He refuses the offer of a lift into town and sets up shop, though his first transaction doesn't go so well when the customer refuses to pay the 10 cent fee to drink and Cable is forced to shoot him dead. But the miscreant has enough money in his pockets to secure the deed to the land, and Cable is officially in business.

His second customer is a mite better, the lecherous Reverend Joshua Sloan (David Warner), who sees the descended light of heaven in the curves of the female form, and is always ready to lay his gentle ministrations upon their quivering flesh. He wears a reverend's collar that can be turned around to become a gentleman's tie, depending on need and circumstance. Josh soon becomes Cable's confidante, assistant and needler-in-chief.

The heart of the story lies in Cable's initial visit to Deaddog to secure his claim and grubstake to build something out of nothing.. Laughed at by the town children, thrown out of the stagecoach office when he offers to sell half the deed to his land for $35, Cable runs into a pair of friendly faces that brighten his perpetually sour mood.

The first is Hildy (Stella Stevens), the preternaturally pretty town prostitute who kindly directs Cable to the proper destinations he seeks (since he can't read the signs) and rewards him with a backward glance or two. With her painfully thin waist and incongruously heaving bosom and ample hindquarters -- which Peckinpah's camera lingers over, again and again -- Hildy looks like a caricature of every female character in every Western ever made. She's sweet-natured but ambitious, mercenary but generous of spirit (and flesh). Hildy looks upon Cable with pity, which he interprets as affection, and to her surprise her feelings do eventually evolve in that direction.

The other kind encounter is with Cushing (Peter Whitney), the local banker who, like seemingly every banker in a Western, resembles a cross between a walrus and an owl. Cable barges into his office and starts rambling about how the world has wronged him, and they quibble over the meaning of "collateral," and if Cable has something of value to secure a loan.

Halfway out the door, Cable turns back and gives Cushing this look that is just an ocean of emotion and meaning -- pain, anger, regret, confusion, despair, neediness. Honestly, it's probably my single favorite moment of Jason Robard's career. The words that follow are almost beside the point:

"Well, I'm worth something, ain't I?"

In every other movie you've ever seen, the penitent man walks away rebuffed, and the unctuous official returns to his paperwork. But Cushing is genuinely moved and offers Cable $100 to start his business. He later makes sporadic visits to Jackass Flats, now redubbed Cable Springs, to check on his newest customer. In one sojourn, Cable is moved nearly to tears to receive an American flag designating his outpost as an official stop on the stagecoach line.

Most of the second half of the movie is taken up with romance. Joshua becomes enamored with a town woman whom he thinks has just been widowed, until her huge husband shows up in a huff. Hildy is thrown out of Deaddog by the burgeoning Bible-thumber movement, and opts to shack up with Cable (he has built himself a shack by this time) before lighting out for San Francisco. Her plans are to marry a rich man, preferably old or frail, and become "the ladyiest damn lady you ever saw!"

The love between Cable and Hildy deepens, but she is too set in her plans to remain, and he too focused on his little empire to go. That, and Cable has an ulterior purpose. He figures that if he remains in one key spot long enough,  Taggart and Bowen are bound to stumble across it and he can exact his revenge.

This actually does come to pass, but plays out in a completely different way than you'd expect of a Peckinpah film. It soon becomes clear that though Cable did have a score to settle, it was not with his erstwhile partners but with himself. Having failed to live up to his self-image of manhood, he cannot complete his journey until he proves to himself that he can pull a trigger when he has to. Having done so, his bloodthirst leaks out of him like sweat in the hot sun, and is consumed by the insatiable, uncaring desert.

The ending of "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" is a little too quick and gimmicky for my taste. I often feel that filmmakers kill off their main character because, having completed his or her personal quest, they don't really know what else to do with them. Personally, I would've liked to known if Cable Hogue, the humble but defiantly self-made man, could've stuck it out as Hildy's nicely creased arm candy.

Reeling Backward: "Convoy" (1978)

Whatever you want to say about Sam Peckinpah, the quintessentially American director was not a cuddly guy. His films were about the intersection between the structure of society and the violent impulses buried not so deep in our individual souls. Peckinpah peered into the carefully constructed order humanity wears like a tidy suit and saw the raw, writhing heart of chaos hammering away beneath.

After the blood-soaked glory of "The Wild Bunch," his filmography become more and more uneven as time went on, reportedly due in part to substance abuse. By 1978 he was a wreck in a need of a job, so a movie based on a country-and-western gag song was the best he could hope for. According to author David Weddle, Peckinpah was so far gone that his friend James Coburn was brought in to help out, and ended up directing much of "Convoy" himself.

The final product is an odd mix of comedy and outrage, hijinks and bloodshed. It's more interesting as a historical document of its time than as a compelling piece of narrative fiction.

"Convoy" arrived at the height of the trucker boom, in which the pilots of massive semi-tractor trailer trucks or muscle cars were idolized as lovable outlaws of the road, fighting onerous cops and the outrage of the 55 m.p.h. national speed limit.

"Smokey and the Bandid" had come out a year earlier and been a big hit, and was followed by a spate of open road projects, from "Cannonball Run" to television's "B.J. and the Bear," which, God help me, I watched religiously as a kid. At the age of 10 I even horrified my teachers and parents by putting down "truck driver" as my career goal. Considering the state of the whole journalism thing, trucking is practically as safe as government bonds by comparison.

I think in the wake of Watergate, the oil crisis driving people into chintzy little cars and a general feeling of malaise, Americans loved the idea of sticking their collective middle finger at symbols of authority. It was an age in which the political unrest of the 1960s had trickled down into the mainstream of the '70s, as the Baby Boomers settled into careers and marriage, and still wanted a little rebellion in their lives.

Police officers in these sorts of highway adventures are invariably depicted as old, fat, corrupt and possibly brutal representatives of the old order. Jackie Gleason found a second lease on his career as the  Smokey of "Smokey and the Bandit," and a man of similar acting experience and girth, Ernest Borgnine, was brought in to play the heavy in "Convoy."

Story-wise, the screenplay (by Bill L. Norton) is pretty spare. Martin "Rubber Duck" Penwald is an independent-minded trucker who runs afoul of some lawmen abusing their positions, stands up to them, and then spends the rest of the movie running away. Other truckers soon join in, forming a convoy of a hundred or more vehicles riding roughshod through roadblocks, whose destination and shining noble purpose are never really made clear.

Whatever narrative thread is pretty much supplied by the C.W. McCall song, right down to the name of the protagonist. The film also is notable for incorporating the C.B. radio lingo prevalent of the day, starting with the colorful names (or "handles") the users give themselves.

For instance, Burt Young's character dubs himself "Love Machine," despite looks that are more worthy of the moniker his fellow truckers gift him, "Pig Pen" (also due to his cargo of live, smelly hogs). Sheriff Lyle Wallace (Borgnine) uses his CB affinity to impersonate a trucker, luring them into his speed traps, where he then extorts bribes in lieu of black marks on their driving record.

After several years away from movies, Ali MacGraw unwisely chose "Convoy" to be her comeback vehicle. It's an odd choice, especially since her character doesn't have any kind of backstory, or motivation, or really a reason for being there. (I didn't even think she had a name, though various sources credit her as "Melissa"). She's driving an expensive sports car when we first meet her, which she then sells so she can ride along with the Duck.

She does have a high-end camera that she uses to document the convoy when it starts to become a folk sensation, attracting the attention of the media and the ambitious governor (Seymour Cassel), who wants to use the truckers' plight to springboard himself into the U.S. Senate. For a moment it seems like the story will spin into a tale about disillusionment, as even Melissa appears ready to sell out her access to Rubber Duck for a few bucks. But then Sheriff Lyle kidnaps/arrests Duck's friend Spider Mike (Franky Ajave), prompting a rescue attempt that leads to a predictable showdown.

Kris Kristofferson has a natural ease in front of the camera that serves him well in the role of the Rubber Duck. He's depicted as a natural peacemaker, willing to accept police malfeasance as long as it doesn't edge into brutality -- at that point, he's ready to fight back and accept he consequences. When he's held up as the leader of a great movement, the Duck demurs: "I'm not the leader. I'm just up front."

Kristofferson, who got his start as a musician, was a throwback type of movie star. Unlike the sensitive, talkative types who tended to dominate the box office during that period, Kristofferon was taciturn and laconic. Some even dubbed his acting style wooden, though I would call it more minimalist than anything else. He liked to let his pauses between lines speak more than the words he uttered piecemeal.

I'd like to make note of the tans the stars wear in this film. Kristofferson spends a good portion of the movie shirtless, revealing the lean, muscular torso that helped propel him to stardom. He's also burnt to a nice medium brown, a popular look at the time (which I, with my nearly translucent northern European flesh, have never been able to achieve). MacGraw, on the other hand, looks practically deep-fried to a unhealthy crispiness. Gosh knows how many Boomers would end up with carcinoma as a result of the fad.

The film went on to be the biggest box office hit of Peckinpah's career, though it was the beginning of the end for him. Word about his (non) work on the film soon spread around Hollywood, and job offers dried up. He would only direct one other feature, the lackluster spy thriller "The Osterman Weekend" five years later.

"Convoy" was a low point on the long, lonely road to even lower.