Professional Documents
Culture Documents
(1965), Wives and Lovers (1963), Ride the High Country (1962),
"The Westerner" (3 episodes, 1960), "Disneyland" (3 episodes,
1959-1960), "Zorro" (2 episodes, 1960), The Bramble Bush (1960),
Al Capone (1959), Band of Angels (1957), The King and Four
Queens (1956), A Kiss Before Dying (1956), The Proud Ones
(1956), The Magnificent Matador (1955), White Feather (1955),
Prince Valiant (1954), The Desert Rats (1953), Don't Bother to
Knock (1952), Berlin Express (1948), Laura (1944), The Lodger
(1944), The Outlaw (1943), Coast Guard (1939), Rio Grande
(1938), Highway Patrol (1938), Penitentiary (1938), The Shadow
(1937), The Devil's Playground (1937), and Crime and Punishment
(1935).
RANDOLPH SCOTT (23 January 1898, Orange County, Virginia - 2
March 1987, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, of heart and
lung ailments) appeared in 105 films, some of which were Ride the
High Country (1962), Comanche Station (1960), Westbound (1959),
Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Decision at Sundown (1957), ShootOut at Medicine Bend (1957), 7th Cavalry (1956), Seven Men from
Now (1956), A Lawless Street (1955), Ten Wanted Men (1955), The
Bounty Hunter (1954), The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953), The Man
Behind the Gun (1953), Carson City (1952), Man in the Saddle
(1951) , Fort Worth (1951), Santa Fe (1951), Colt .45 (1950), The
Nevadan (1950), The Doolins of Oklahoma (1949), Canadian
Pacific (1949), Return of the Bad Men (1948), Albuquerque (1948),
which he makes such telling use here and elsewhere, and from the
editor Frank Santillo. Peckinpah credited Santillo with teaching him
the flash-cutting that became a characteristic of his editing
stylethe use of very short shots, only a few frames long, to
capture rapid and violent action.
For Doug McKinney, Peckinpahs eye for detail adds
immeasurably to the movies impact: the hole in his boot, the
frayed cuffs, the touching way he goes to the john to take out his
glasses, telling Heck not to litter: all details which humanize Steve
Judd. Coarse Gold, Kates place, the slovenly quality of the
Hammonds camp, and the Knudsen farm are triumphs of detail,
while in the dialogue, the stories Steve and Gil reminisce over on
the trail...have a ring to them that must be recognized as a major
accomplishment. McKiney goes on to describe Peckinpahs
growing mastery of mise en scne in the final shootout, when Judd
and Westrum, walking steadily into the guns of the Hammonds
two against fiveare filmed from an increasingly low angle until
they loom as heroes of mythic proportions.
Southerner who has chosen to fight for the Union during the Civil
War, a stubborn but deeply divided man clinging to vague notions
of order, law, and duty. Because of his arrogant behavior at
Gettysburg, he has been relegated to the command of a prison
camp....Major Dundee was the subject of bitter conflict during and
after filming.According to the director he left the film at a length
of about two and a half hours. It was cut by Columbia to a release
length of 134 minutes. Whole scenes were excised, wrecking the
movies logic and rhythm. There is much to admire in what
remains, but the result as a whole has been described by Jim Kitses
as one of Hollywoods great broken monuments.
In 1964 Peckinpah married Begonia Palacios, who had
played a minor role in Major Dundee. It was a fiery relationship,
and the couple were to be married and divorced three times in all;
they had one child, Lupita. The anguish Peckinpah experienced
during the filming and editing of Major Dundee was followed by
another tremendous blow. Signed by Martin Ransohoff to direct
The Cincinatti Kid at MGM, Peckinpah began work in October
1964. He and the producer disagreed, and he was fired after four
days of shooting, the film being completed by Norman Jewison.
The release of the truncated Major Dundee in April 1965 renewed
gossip about Pekcinpahs intractability, and he was effectively
blacklisted throughout the industry, his career apparently at an end.
The only feature credit Peckinpah earned over the next
three years was or his script The Glory Guys (1965), a bitterly
cynical cavalry Western loosely based on the Custer disaster and
clumsily directed by Arthur Laven.He taught writing at UCLA in
the fall of 1967, and at this time, his reputation partially
rehabilitated, he reentered the movie industry.
Signed by Phil Feldman for Warner Brothers-Seven Arts,
Peckinpah began the second phase of his career with The Wild
Bunch (1969), now generally regarded as his masterpiece.
It was scripted by Peckinpah and Walon Green from a story devised
by the stuntman Roy Sickner, about the last days of the Wests last
gang of aging outlaws. It was shot by Lucien Ballard in Panavision
70 and Technicolor, has a marvelous score by Jerry Fielding,and
apart from its stars, features several of the character actors who
formed a kind of Peckinpah stock companyWarren Oates, Ben
Johnson, Strother Martin, and L.Q. Jones. From the outset,
everyone shared an awareness that they were involved in the
creation of an important film.
[Referring to The Wild Bunch last battle] Richard Gentner
and Diane Birdsall described this long orgy of killing as the
unparalleled montage event of cinema history. It is both son of
Potemkin and light years beyond it. It is the most exhausting reel of
film ever creatednot merely a cluster of quick cuts. . . but a
cascading avalanche of comprehension. The destruction of
Mapaches stronghold (and, of course, the Bunch along with it) is as
inevitable as it is exhilarating.
. . .The film ends with a shot of the Bunch laughing, culled
from an earlier sequence. By ending with these killers as they
laugh, behaving as everyone does, Peckinpah said, I wanted to
remind the audience that they were just people like themselves.
Cut from 148 to 135 minutes, The Wild Bunch was
previewed in June 1969 and released the same month. Its realistic
depiction of violence, the way blood spurts practically across a
room, provoked an outburst of almost hysterical vituperation from
critics, journalists, and other moralists. . . Peckinpah maintained
that he did not like violence: My idea was that it would have a
cathartic effect. Asked why, if he wanted to oppose violence, he
had not made a film about the Vietnam war, the director said: The
Western is a universal frame within which it is possible to comment
on today. Even at this near-raucous press conference, however,
there were those (like the critic Roger Ebert) who insisted that The
Wild Bunch was a great film...a masterpiece.
According to Doug McKinneym Peckinpahs thesis is that
violence is a part of all of us.Abhorring violence is not enough;
we must recognize that the enemy is within, and how that capacity
for violence works and shows itself. J.-P. Coursdon, on the other
hand, speaks of Peckinpahs exhilaration in depicting violence,
escalating it into orgiastic celebrations of death, given and received
as the ultimate experience.
Coursodon (in his American Directors, V. II) points out
that The Wild Bunch continues Peckinpahs refutation of the
Westerns moral Manichaeism, driving home the by then
familiar point that there is no such thing as Good or Evil, only
different forms and degrees of evil and different levels of awareness
of this evil. All the men in the film are motivated by self-interest
and greed and the only glimpse of a moral, lawful social
structure is the blatantly ludicrous Temperance Union. Law
enforcement is abandoned to outlaws and irresponsible killers.
women are venal and treacherous (all the female characters in the
film seem to be whores). Even the childhood image of innocence is
repeatedly deflated.
In his Freudian reading of Crucified Heroes Terence
Butler dwells on the misogynism of the film (or of its heroes), and
offers a thesis that Pike Bishop is driven by a death wish inspired by
the pain and confusion of unresolved homosexual impulses.
Coursodon speaks rather of the Bunchs instinctive adhering to an
unformulated, dimly grasped code of virile togetherness....
It is, as McKinney says, at the very least a landmark
Western, and there are those who think it the greatest of all
Westerns.
A much gentler film followed, again produced by Phil
Feldman for Warner Brothers-Seven Arts. The Ballad of Cable
Hogue (1970) was a original script by John Crawford and Edmund
Penney, brought to Peckinpah by his friend Warrem Oates. Once
again the director had Lucien Ballard as his cinematographer, Jerry
Fielding as his coposer, and several of his regular stock players. The
movie was shot in Nevadas Valley of Fire in the early months of
1969.Cable Hogue was a script that Peckinpah initiated and
greatly liked, but his next was the opposite. During the filming of
the former, the producer Daniel Melnick brought him a British
novel by Gordon M. Williams called The Siege of Trenchers Farm.
There is a rumor that Ride the High Country was first offered to
film director Budd Boetticher who had directed a number of
Randolph Scott Westerns in the late fifties and early sixties. When
he turned it down, the rumor continues, it was offered to Burt
Kennedy, Boettichers scriptwriter, who had recently directed his
first feature, The Canadians. When Kennedy turned it down, the
rumor concludes, Sam Peckinpah was offered the job. Another
rumor credits John Ford, the renowned Western director with
recommending Peckinpah for the picture. The truth is that
Peckinpah got the job on his own merit.
Richard Lyons, the films producer, recalled: Ive heard
several stories through the years that a number of other directors
were considered for Ride the High Country, but thats a lot of crap.
I was the producer, and Id know. The way Sam got the picture was
that he and I were both at the William Morris Agency in those days,
and Silvia Hirsch, who was with the agency, heard that I was
looking for a director for this Western and asked me if Id ever
heard of Sam Peckinpah. I said no and she convinced me to look at
a couple of the segments of The Westerner that Sam had directed.
So I did, and they really impressed me.
Now you have to understand that this picture was to be
made at Metro and they were very class conscious. I mean they just
didnt even consider hiring television directors. But I called Sol
Siegel who was head of production at the studio at the time and told
him that I had this director whod worked in television, and Id seen
four segments that hed done and I thought they were outstanding.
Well, Siegel was coming in over the weekend and said hed have
look at one. So he came in, and
we ran one, and then he did just
what Id done. He said, You got
any more? So we looked at them
all, and when we finished Siegel
turned to me and said, Hire
him.
Ride the High Country
was Rick Lyonss first major
picture as a producer. ...Lyons
was hired to produce a small
budget Westernroughly
$800,000primarily for release
in European markets to offset
expensive productions, which
were then being made by Fox, like Lewis Milestones Mutiny on the
Bounty starring Marlon Brando. The story Lyons finally decided to
film dealt with two over-the-hill gunfighters who get one last
chance at glory when they are hired to escort a fold shipment from a
High sierra mining camp back to civilization.
Lucien Ballard did a magnificent job, stated Joel
McCrea. He was very smart. He knew Sam better than any of the
rest of us, and he had a very tactful way of saying, What would
you think of it if we shot it from over here? and, of course, it would
look twice as good. He is a very talented fella.
McCreas co-star, Randolph Scott, retired from the motion
picture business following completion of his work on Ride the High
Country, leaving behind a distinguished career. He is now a private
businessman in Southern California and declines to give interviews
or talk about old movies. In a phone conversation, he did,
however, make the following statement about his experience with
Peckinpah: Sam, in my estimation, is one of the top directorsthe
upper echelon of directors. I would have liked to have worked on
other films with him. I wish that he had come along earlier in my
career, which is not to say that I was not satisfied with the many
men I did work with. But Sam is a great troubleshooter on a film. he
has an innate instinct and talent for dealing with a script that many
others just do not have.
Principal photography for the picture was completed on
November 22, 1961. Then Peckinpahs luck took over.MGM
employed a full-time staff of cutters under the direction of Margaret
Booth, MGMs editor-in-chief, who had begun her career as an
editor working for D.W. Griffith before MGM had even been
formed. As a consequence, MGM could easily have decided to take
the film as shot and turn it over to Booth for routine editing by a
staff editor with minimal interference from Peckinpah on the
directors cut. There was one complication, however, Margaret
Booth disliked the daily rushes that had come in from location and
had virtually said that the film would be impossible to cut. Siegel,
on the other hand, had been impressed by what he had seen. This
circumstance, coupled with the fact that Siegel was a fighter and
had liked Peckinpah from their first meeting, caused him to offer
Peckinpah a legitimate chance to make the first cut on the
picture.We had a marvelous little editor name Frank Santillo, and
Sam spent fourteen weeks with Frank in the cutting room editing
the picture until they threw him off the lot. But in those fourteen
weeks, Santillo taught him how to edit.
[Santillo:] The thing thats really difficult in cutting for
Sam is that he shoots a lot of film, but its all good. That makes it
difficult to decide what to keep and what to throw away. With other
directors, you start to assemble a scene and about half the stuff is no
good, so you can throw it away. You have no problem in deciding
what to use. Sams footage is just the opposite. And Sam knows
every inch of that film. Youll almost be finished with a picture, and
Sam will look at it, and hell say there was such and such a shot and
to cut it in. And Sam doesnt care how long it takes. Youve got to
find it because it is essential to Sams conception of that character.
But probably the best illustration of what Sam was able to
do with Ride the High Country is in the final shoot-out sequence at
the end of the film. Margaret Booth had seen the dailies and said:
This is the worst footage Ive ever seen. Its impossible. Two old
guys who have been trapped by three young ones. Nobody will ever
believe they could possibly win. And the number of shots they all
fire when theyre standing there in the open. Its ridiculous!
At any rate, I had done montage for Metro for years, and
during the Second World War I had worked for the military censors
at the Pentagon. Wed get the footage shot by the Army, and wed
have to cut it quickly, making a little story out of it, and then turn it
over to the newsreels. So when we came to this final sequence in
the picture, Sam was upset because he didnt really want to cut any
of it. I mean it was all good footage. So as always, I took it and
made a rough cut. But because of my work with Vorkapich, I knew
that even with a one-frame cut the audience could retain something
of what was on the screen, and because of my war experience, I
knew how exciting a battle sequence could be made by cutting it to
a fast pace..Consequently, I cut the sequence and some of the
shots were only six frames long [one-quarter of a second on the
screen], and I said to Sam that even at that length some of them
would appear to be too long on the screen. And he said, Oh, no. I
could tell that he was afraid that maybe Id cut them too short
already.
So we went to the screening room and looked at what Id
cut, and after the sequence was over Sam looked at me, smiled, and
said, You know, youre right. And then we went back, trimmed
the sequence down until it was exactly the way Sam wanted it, and
some of the shots were only two frames long. Sam has always given
me credit for teaching him how to flash cut like that.
The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center
and State University of New York at Buffalo
with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News