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His other films included "Major Dundee" (1965), "The Getaway" and
"Junior Bonner" (both 1972), "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973),
"Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" (1974), "The Killer Elite"
(1976), "Cross of Iron" (1977), "Convoy" (1978) and "The Osterman
Weekend" (1983). Most of his recent films were box-office failures.
Mr. Peckinpah directed two music videos for Julian Lennon, son of the
late Beatle John Lennon, including the recent "Valotte" production.
In his career, Mr. Peckinpah developed a reputation as a maverick
stylist and personality, a throwback to the crusty filmmaker whose
idiosyncratic vision often seemed out of step with commercial trends
and considerations. At one point in the mid-1960s, his reputation as a
"troublesome" director led to his being blackballed in Hollywood and
on television. His quarrels with Hollywood producers and studio
executives were as legendary as his tough visual style and his
hard-drinking, two-fisted personal life. Not surprisingly, the theme
of doomed outlaw figures waging a fierce but losing battle against
impossible odds coursed through his films.
Two years after directing an acclaimed television drama of Katherine
Anne Porter's "Noon Wine," Mr. Peckinpah made a triumphant movie
comeback with "The Wild Bunch," described by Life magazine as "the
first masterpiece in the new tradition of 'the dirty western.' "
The moral ambiguities that clouded so many of Mr. Peckinpah's films
were at least partly rooted in the judicial/familial tradition that
saw his grandfather, father and brother all become judges.
"I grew up with all those judges and it was law and order, honor,
truth, and justice from morning till night," Mr. Peckinpah told an
interviewer in 1969. "I just sat there listening and then I started to
question. What do they mean? Is there such a thing as a good that
leads to evil? I think there is . . . I'm not a pessimist, but I've
learned to question. That's what most of my films are about."
Mr. Peckinpah is survived by his brother and a sister, Fern Lea Peter.
His marriage to Cecilia Selland ended in divorce in 1962. They had
four children. Begonia Palacios was his third wife, and they married
and divorced three times, his brother said. They had a daughter,
Lupita, 11.
--Photo:
http://www.quinzaine-realisateurs.com/_press/Ride_The_High_Country/Sam_Peckinpah_1.jpg
--Appreciation: Son Of The Changing West
FROM: The Washington Post (December 29th 1984) ~
By David Remnick, Staff Writer
"All I want is to enter my house justified."
Sam Peckinpah's father used to tell him that, and years later it would
become the motto for "Ride the High Country," a movie that critic
Pauline Kael called "the last good western."
Academy and by forcing him to sit through the trial of a teen-aged boy
charged with statutory rape.
Peckinpah served with the Marines in China during World War II. Of
that experience, he once said, "The Communists cut the Peking-Tientsin
railroad and they pulled us out. But I didn't want to leave. I wanted
to stay in Peking . . . I was in love with a Chinese girl . . . Maybe,
in a funny way, I've been trying to go back to China ever since."
He returned to the United States and enrolled at Fresno State College,
where he directed a production of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass
Menagerie." He worked as an actor and director for a summer-stock
theater in New Mexico and for a television station in Los Angeles.
Liberace, the master of glimmering couture, fired Peckinpah from a TV
special when he refused to wear a business suit instead of blue jeans
to work.
Peckinpah worked at the writer's trade during the 1950s. He wrote
scripts for "Gunsmoke" and helped finish the screenplay for "The
Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
As a director, Peckinpah made some awful movies. "The Getaway," "Bring
Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" and
"Convoy" are unlikely to enhance his reputation in any circle. The
scene in "Straw Dogs" in which Susan George begins to enjoy being
raped is possibly one of the most repellent moments in recent film
history.
"The Wild Bunch," like Samuel Fuller's "Shock Corridor," continues to
have appeal as a titillating, if limited, work. Peckinpah, who saw his
own version of the West lost to development and time, was obsessed
with the theme of change. "The Wild Bunch" depicted the last raucous,
bloodthirsty burst of violence from a gang of outlaws, but Peckinpah
also treated his theme in gentler ways.
In "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970), Jason Robards plays a destitute
man abandoned by his friends. But he discovers water "where there
wasn't none," a discovery that makes him prosperous. He falls in love
with a prostitute played by Stella Stevens and, for a while, they live
together happily. Eventually, she leaves. The automobile makes the
watering hole obsolete. The old man is hit by a car and dies. "The
Ballad of Cable Hogue" won the plaudits of numerous critics and made
the Ten Best list of The New York Times in 1970, but it was a
box-office failure.
Peckinpah moved around a lot, living in London, on the beach in Malibu
and on a ranch in Nevada. His home for the last 11 years of his life
was in Mexico.
He always kept a photograph with him of the first buck he ever shot.
He was an avid hunter and cooked the beasts on an outdoor spit. He
despised hunters who carelessly left carcasses to rot.
As a hunter, Peckinpah always ate what he shot. He was not afraid of
violence. He embraced it, rejected it, tried to understand it. For all
his mistakes, the same was true of his attempt through the movies to