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: "Slap Shot" (1977)

Paul Newman has commented that he did not swear much before making "Slap Shot," a 1977 sports comedy that was considered very raunchy for its time. Newman's character and most others drop the F-bomb liberally, and also spew epithets about gay men and women that would be considered very un-P.C. today. Supposedly Newman found much of that language creeping into his everyday speech.

A modest hit at the time, "Slap Shot" has gone on to cult film status, particularly among sports writers who regard it as one of the best sports comedies ever, and fans who call it one of the finest hockey movies of all time (which isn't saying that much since there aren't that many of them.)

For me what makes it stand out is that it's one of the few sports movies that is openly contemptuous of its sport, or at least the modern state of it. Professional hockey in the view of screenwriter Nancy Dowd has devolved into a shallow show of grandstanding and violence, in which the blood-dripped spectacle is more important than the skating or the scoring. It remains the one mainstream team sport in which fighting between players is tacitly encouraged.

Director George Roy Hill seems to have gone out of his way to show as little hockey action as possible, focusing instead on the mayhem and the fisticuffs. In defiance of every sports movie cliche, the big championship game at the end is decided by forfeit.

The result is both very funny and very depressing, at least if you're a hockey purist.

The film is one of those seemingly light comedies that has a strong vein of social commentary running just underneath the surface. The fans of the inept Charlestown Chiefs only get excited about their home team when they resort to goon tactics. In this sense, "Slap Shot" is thematically closer to "Network" than "Semi-Tough" or "The Longest Yard."

It's more akin to "North Dallas Forty" than anything else, and I'd speculate there was cross-pollination between the two creations. Peter Gent's book came out in 1973, before Dowd wrote her screenplay based on her brother's experiences in minor league hockey, but the film version of "Forty" came out two years after "Slap Shot." Indeed, Dowd is reported to have served as an uncredited writer on the football film.

(The Oscar-winner for "Coming Home" enjoyed a low-profile career where she often wrote uncredited or under a pseudonym.)

"Slap Shot" was the third and final pairing of Hill and Newman, after the phenomenal success of "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid" and "The Sting." He also made another film, the underrated "The Great Waldo Pepper," with Newman's co-star in those other two films, Robert Redford. The easy, loose feel of Newman's performance is probably due to their well-established rapport.

Newman plays Reg Dunlop, a once-great player eking out an existence as player-coach of the Chiefs. When the local mill is scheduled to close, it becomes clear that the team's mysterious owner plans to disband it. Reg, who is cagey if not necessarily intelligent, comes up with the idea of making the team viable to be sold to a new owner by amping up the violence.

The impetus for this new tactic is the arrival of the Hanson brothers, a trio of young hockey enforcers who have become the most enduring iconography of the film. The brothers' thick black glasses and long hair became their trademark, both in the movie and real life. They were based on an actual trio of brothers who were hockey players, and in fact two of the three were played by the actual siblings. The third couldn't appear because he had been called up to the NHL. Many former and current pro hockey players also acted in the movie.

The Hansons are angelic bruisers, who play with toy cars when not in the rink and dole out punches and brutal take-downs when in it. There seems to be no malice in them, being perfectly polite and respectful of their elders. To them, that's simply the way hockey is played. It's an opportunity to hit people without the fear of arrest ... or at least less chance of it.

In a couple of famous scenes, the Hansons start a fight when the teams are doing their warm-up skate, and are the victims of a reprisal as soon as the puck is dropped. Perhaps the funniest moment in the film is during the national anthem, when a referee clued into the Hansons' tactics screams at him not to try any of that stuff on his rink. "I'm trying to listen to the fucking song!" the lead Hanson retorts, and this sideways appeal to patriotism shuts the other man up.

After some initial hesitation, the other members of the Chiefs happily join the punch-drunk party, especially when they start racking up wins as a result. The one player who won't go along is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), the team's clean-cut leading scorer. The noble knight-errant of the story, Ned refuses to sully the purity of the game ... at least until it serves his purposes.

Things get so bad that Reg starts openly hitting on Ned's deeply depressed wife Lily (Lindsay Crouse), who dresses like a man, drinks like a fish and drives like a hellion. He's only doing it in hopes of riling Ned up, but is nonplussed when his wooing works and Lily actually shows up on his doorstep with dog and suitcase in tow.

Reg foists her off on his estranged wife (Jennifer Warren), who he thinks will serve as a model of how happy a woman can be when she gives her hockey-playing husband the boot. Part of the comedic gold of Reg's machinations is that he genuinely feels like he's doing everyone a favor. He's really a manipulative mook, but he's so gosh darn charming at it.

The roll call of supporting players is rich and deep, including Strother Martin as the Chiefs' bow-tied, conniving PR man; M. Emmet Walsh as the local newspaper hockey beat reporter, who's always "trying to capture the spirit of the thing" but usually getting conned  into carrying Reg's water; Swoosie Kurtz as an uptight hockey wife; Melinda Dillon as an enemy player's lovesick wife who has a fling with Reg; and Jerry Houser as a player who thinks Reg's goon philosophy is not incompatible with the New Age harmonies of yoga and meditation to which he's attuned.

Personally, I'm not much of a hockey fan. It's too violent, but if you took the violence out everyone would realize how profoundly boring it is. I think the greatest trick of "Slap Shot" is undermining the state of hockey while mining it for comedy gold.

3.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "The Champ" (1979)

"The Champ" did not get very good reviews when it came out in 1979, with the general consensus being that it was a brazen, manipulative tearjerker. That's true, but it also happens to be a very effective manipulative tearjerker. To wit: I welled up several times watching it.

That's mostly what people remember about the movie these days: that it's very sad. In fact, a few years ago the Smithsonian Magazine ran an article dubbing it "The Saddest Movie in the World," based on some research by some at the University of California, Berkeley. They tested clips from hundreds of movies, and determined that the final scene of "The Champ," where young Ricky Schroder bawls his eyes out weeping for his dead boxer father, elicited the strongest emotional response from people.

What's lost in all this is the absolutely amazing, unforgettable and emotionally vibrant performance of Schroder, who was only 8 years old when they shot the film. It truly is one of the most affecting things I've ever seen on film.

I've often said that identifying good child acting is like that Supreme Court justice's quip about pornography -- you know it when you see it. I definitely see it with Schroder, who was acting in his very first feature film after several years apprenticing in television commercials.

What's so arresting about the towheaded youngster is how utterly unfiltered his performance is. Whether he's crying, or experiencing a fleeting moment of happiness, or just glumly soldiering on as the son of a never-do-well washed-up former boxing champion, Schroder is completely in the moment. There's no barrier between his emotions and the audience. It's so raw, it's difficult to watch at times.

I'm officially bumping Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense" as the crownbearer for Best Child Acting Ever in favor of Schroder. (Elizabeth Taylor in "National Velvet" probably comes in third.)

Schroder won a Golden Globe for his performance, but wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award, which I find just appalling. Great acting by very young performers often gets overlooked when it's Oscar time. But another kid, Justin Henry, got nominated the same year for his turn in "Kramer vs. Kramer." Henry's solid in that movie, but he can't hold a candle to the mega-wattage of talent radiating off of Schroder in "The Champ."

The other thing that struck me about "The Champ" is how little boxing there is in it. To me, it's not really a sports movie. Director Franco Zeffirelli, known for high-toned material like "Romeo & Juliet," and screenwriter Walter Newman keep the focus on the human story rather than the fisticuffs.

Billy Flynn, the 37-year-old fighter and single dad played by Jon Voight, doesn't even begin training for his comeback until the 90-minute mark of this two-hour film, with the actual bout taking up perhaps 12 minutes of screen time. The aftermath, with young T.J. watching his father die, then pulling at his corpse hollering "Wake up, Champ!" and "I want the Champ!" goes on nearly as long.

And, as those Berkeley scientists concluded, it's heartrending stuff. I think what makes it so powerful is that other men are in the room, trying to hold it together for the sake of this little boy who just lost not just his father but his heroic idol, and several of them break down themselves in the face of T.J.'s eruption.

It's never quite clear exactly why Billy climbs back in the ring, other than saying "I gotta do something for my boy." They are flat broke, but that's not a new experience for them. They live on the backstretch of the Hialeah, Fla., horse racing track, where Billy works as a horse walker.

(I noticed that many summaries for the movie erroneously refer to him as a "horse trainer," which is something else entirely. A trainer is a prestigious job, someone who often oversees an entire stable of racehorses and all the employees who work there. They pick the horses, train them, decide how and when they'll race, and oversee breeding. Successful ones are famous, get interviewed on television and become quite wealthy. A horse walker merely warms up or cools down the animals before and after races, and is even lower on the thoroughbred racing rung than the African-American stable boys. They're nobodies.)

Billy is good-hearted, but selfish and weak. He constantly goes out and gets drunk, gambling away whatever money they've earned. When he says he wants to do something for his boy, I think Billy really means that he wants to do something for himself. He wants to recapture his old life from seven years ago, before his wife left him and when he was the champion of the world. He was good enough to hold the title for another five years, so we're told, but he admits he just didn't want it anymore.

Now that he finds his life a shambles, Billy wants to be the idealized -- and idolized -- version of the father figure T.J. sees in him.

T.J., for his part, already thinks he's the greatest dad in the world, refusing to call him anything other than "Champ."

This movie is, of course, a remake of a 1931 film starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper. Beery and writer Frances Marion both won Oscars for that movie, unseen by me. I think a lot of older critics are bedazzled of that movie, which likely adds to their inability to connect with the remake.

If the 1979 version has a weakness, I think it's the portrayal of T.J.'s mother Annie, played by Faye Dunaway. She walked out on them, and Billy has told T.J. that his mother died in a car crash. She married a rich gerontologist (Arthur Hill), and they spend their days cruising around on a magnificent yacht and giving fashion shows.

Billy is extraordinarily angry at Annie for leaving them, and at first refuses her requests to spend time with T.J. (without telling him who she is). Over time, though, his brittle exterior softens, and he even ends up offering to let her come back to him. She refuses him, again, which seems to be what pushes Billy to put on the gloves again.

Dunaway's just fine in this; my main problem is that I never really bought her and Billy as a couple in the first place. Dunaway's refined, aristocratic manners contrast so sharply with Billy's loutish ways and Brooklyn accent, it's difficult to grasp the concept of what would've drawn her to him in the first place. An ambitious, smart woman with a craving for the finer things, she possibly would've had an opposite-attract type of feelings for him.

Narratively it probably wouldn't work, but maybe a scene or two of them before T.J. was born would have made their screen pairing more palatable.

Mary Joe Catlett also has a too-small role as Josie, a friend who helps out Billy and T.J., and seems to have an attraction toward the aging fighter. She's the sort of solid, loyal woman who would make a perfect complement to their harried little family, but because she has plain looks Billy takes her for granted as simply someone to lean upon.

I should mention that several iconic screen actors appear in brief supporting roles: Elisha Cook, Jr. as Billy's bucket man, Strother Martin as an amiable member of the crew at the racetrack, Joan Blondell as a rich horse owner, and Jack Warden as Billy's old boxing trainer, who takes his corner in the ring despite some reservations.

Sometimes it seems like Jack Warden appeared in every single movie made in the 1970s ... not that that's a bad thing.

"The Champ" may be a weepie, but it's a damn fine one. I really can't overpraise how good Rick Schroder is. I will carry the experience of watching him with me always.

3.5 stars out of four