Sam Peckinpah
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David Samuel Peckinpah (February 21, 1925 - December 28, 1984) was an American film director, known as Sam Peckinpah. He became one of the major filmmakers of the 1970s through his innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence as well as his revisionist approach to the Western genre.
Genealogy
His great-grandfather, Rice Peckinpaugh, was a merchant and farmer in Indiana during the early-1800s. The family decided to move to California in the 1850s to Humboldt County, California of California, and also changed their last name to Peckinpah. The family then settled down in the area to log. Peckinpah Meadow and Peckinpah Creek have been officially named within U.S. geographical mapping.
Peckinpah often claimed to be partly of Native American ancestry, but this has been denied by surviving members of his family.
Biography
He was born in Fresno, California and attended Fresno grammar schools and high school. However, he spent much time skipping classes with his brother to engage in cowboy activities like trapping, branding, and shooting. Sam joined the Marines in 1943 and he was stationed in China. While his duty did not involve any combat situations, he did witness acts of war between Chinese and Japanese soldiers. According to friends, these included several acts of torture and other atrocities against which the Americans were not permitted to intervene. This reportedly affected Peckinpah deeply and may have influenced his later depiction of violence in his films. After the war he attended college, earning a master's degree at USC in 1950. He was involved in stage work and theater productions before moving on to television.
Throughout his life, Peckinpah was plagued by alcoholism, drug addiction, and, according to some, mental illness (possibly manic depression or paranoia). He was married unsuccessfully three times. His personality reportedly often swang between a sweet, soft-spoken, artistic disposition and bouts of rage and violence during which he often verbally and physically abused himself and others. He was fascinated with guns and was known to shoot the mirrors in his house during his benders. This image occurs several times in his films. Peckinpah's reputation as a hard-living brute has overshadowed his legacy in many respects, and his friends have often claimed that this does a disservice to a man who was more complex than he is often given credit for. Peckinpah seems to have been able to inspire extraordinary loyalty in certain friends and employees. He used the same actors and collaborators in many of his films and several of his friends and assistants stuck by him to the end of his life.
Peckinpah spent a great deal of his life in Mexico, eventually marrying a Mexican woman and buying property there. He was reportedly fascinated by the Mexican lifestyle and culture and he often portrays it with an unusual sentimentality and romanticism in his films.
Peckinpah was seriously ill through the last years of his life, as a lifetime of self-abuse began to catch up with him, although he continued to work until the end. He died in December of 1984. At the time, he was in preparation for an adaptation of Stephen King's Gunslinger series.
Career
He worked initially as a scriptwriter and director of Western genre television series such as Gunsmoke and The Rifleman. In the early 1960s he moved into film and earned a reputation in Hollywood as an enfant terrible of the cinematic world.
His first film The Deadly Companions passed largely without notice. His second, Ride the High Country, starring aging Western stars Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, went unnoticed in the United States but was an enormous success overseas. Beating Frederico Fellini's 8 1/2 for first prize at the Belgium Film Festival, the film was hailed by foreign critics as a brilliant reworking of the conventions of the Western genre.
Peckinpah's next film, Major Dundee, would be the first of the director's many unfortunate experiences with the major studios financing his films. The movie was taken away from him and substantially reedited. Peckinpah would hold for the rest of his life that his original version of Major Dundee was among his best films.
For several years after this Peckinpah was unable to work in Hollywood. In 1969, he made one of the most - literally - explosive comebacks in film history with The Wild Bunch. Irreverant, ferocious, and unprecedented in its explicit violence; the film was an instant and controversial classic. Many critics denounced its violence as sadistic and exploitative, while other critics and many of Peckinpah's fellow filmmakers hailed the originality of its rapid editing style and praised Peckinpah's revitalization of traditional Western themes. It was the beginning of Peckinpah's legend, and he and his work would remain controversial until and after his death. In a fascinating irony, when The Wild Bunch was rereleased for its 25th anniversary, it received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, proving the film's undiminished impact after so many years.
Defying, as he often would, audience expectations, Peckinpah followed up The Wild Bunch with an elegiac, funny, and completely non-violent Western entitled The Ballad of Cable Hogue. The story of a small-time entrepreneur who makes a fortune by finding water in the desert, the film was largely ignored on its initial release, though it has been rediscovered in recent years. It is often pointed to by critics who wish to emphasize the breadth of Peckinpah's talents. They claim that the film proves Peckinpah's ability to make unconventional and original work without resorting to explicit violence.
Doing another 180 degree turn, Peckinpah then directed his most violent and psychologically disturbing film to date. Straw Dogs starred Dustin Hoffman as an American mathematician living uncomfortably in his beautiful young wife's native village in the south of England. The locals' resentment of him slowly builds to a shocking climax in which the mild-mannered academic kills several of the locals as he defends his home. The film deeply divided critics, some of whom pointed to its obvious artistry and the bravery of its confrontation of human savagery; others attacked it as a misogynistic and fascistic celebration of violence. Most of the criticism centered around the film's lengthy rape scene and its seeming message of violence as a redemptive act. The film was banned completely in the UK and remains controversial, although some critics have come to hail it as Peckinpah's best film and a modern classic.
Despite his controversial reputation, Peckinpah was extremely prolific in this period of his life. In 1972 he released two films. Junior Bonner, the tale of a rodeo rider down on his luck, was Peckinpah's last attempt to make a non-violent film. Its total failure with audiences led him to remark "I made a film where nobody got shot, and nobody went to see it." However, he and Junior Bonner's star Steve McQueen went on to release The Getaway in the same year. A gritty but sentimental crime film about lovers on the run, the film was Peckinpah's biggest box office success. Its reputation, however, has not stood the test of time, and most of Peckinpah's admirers consider it a minor work.
1973 would mark the beginning of the most difficult period of Peckinpah's life and career. Having agreed to make Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for MGM, Peckinpah was convinced that he was about to make his definitive statement on the Western genre. However, clashes with MGM and numerous production difficulties, combined with Peckinpah's growing problems with alcohol and drugs, resulted in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid being released in a version truncated by the studio and largely disowned by Peckinpah. The experience soured Peckinpah forever on Hollywood and many date the beginning of his decline from this moment. In 1988, however, Peckinpah's director's cut of the film was released on video and led to a reevaluation, with many critics hailing it as a mistreated classic and one of the era's best films. Other filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, have also praised the film as one of the greatest modern Westerns.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia would be the last true "Peckinpah" film in the eyes of his admirers, and the director himself claimed that it was the only one of his films to be released exactly as he intended it. An alcohol-soaked fever dream involving revenge, greed, and murder in the Mexican countryside, the film featured Warren Oates as a thinly disguised self-portrait of Peckinpah and co-starred a leather bag containing the severed head of a gigolo being sought by a Mexican patrone for one million dollars. Castigated by critics upon its release, its reputation has also grown in recent years, with many noting its uncompromising vision as well as its anticipation of the violent black comedy which would become famous in the films of directors like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino.
Alfredo Garcia is generally considered the last of Peckinpah's great films, though he continued to direct several more films before he passed away. Of these later films, 1977's Cross of Iron is widely considered to be the best, and was reportedly a favorite of Stanley Kubrick's.
Peckinpah's career remains wildly controversial. His films were visually inventive, having a style of film-making that was unconventional for the time period, and was a pioneer in the use of slow-motion, and rapid-fire edits.
Peckinpah's critics, on the other hand, panned the filmmaker's use of blood and gore, and how often violence was cast as a redeeming action, bringing closure to its perpetrators and a brand of rough justice to its victims. This, however, was not always the case. Where film critics of this era were conditioned to expect movies with heroes, Peckinpah's films were often peopled with only victims and villains.
Peckinpah drank and abused drugs, girlfriends and producers. His mean streak and abusiveness towards his actors while filming Major Dundee (1965) so enraged star Charlton Heston that the normally even-keeled actor threatened to hit Peckinpah with his cavalry saber if he did not show more courtesy to his cast. During the filming of The Killer Elite (1975) Peckinpah allegedly discovered cocaine. This led to increased paranoia and his slow psychological breakdown. At one point he overdosed, landing himself in a hospital and receiving a second pacemaker. He died in Inglewood, California from heart failure at the age of 59.
He is generally regarded as one of the most original filmmakers of Hollywood's second golden age.
Themes
Peckinpah's films generally deal with the conflict between values and ideals and the corruption and violence of human society. His characters are often loners or losers who harbor the desire to be honorable and idealistic but are forced to compromise themselves in order to survive in a world of nihilism and brutality.
The conflicts of masculinity are also a major theme of his work, leading some critics to compare him to Ernest Hemingway. Peckinpah's world is a man's world, and feminists have often castigated his films as misogynistic and sexist. Many of his defenders point out that, while the women in his films are generally seen through men's eyes, it is the men who are abusive, corrupted, and violent. The women are generally either victims of the brutalities of men or survivors attempting to eke out an existence in the unforgiving world created by men.
Peckinpah's approach to violence is often misinterpreted. Many critics see his worldview as a misanthropic, Hobbsian view of nature as essentially evil and savage. In fact, Peckinpah himself stated the opposite. He saw violence as the product of human society, and not of nature. It is the result of men's competition with each other over power and domination, and their inability to negotiate this competition without resorting to brutality. Peckinpah also used violence as a means to achieve catharsis, believing his audience would be purged of violence by witnessing it explicitly on screen. However, Peckinpah later admitted that this was mistaken, and that audiences had come to enjoy the violence in his films rather than be horrified by it, something that troubled him deeply later in his career.
Peckinpah, who was born to a ranching family that included judges and lawyers, was also deeply concerned by the conflict between "old-fashioned" values and the corruption and materialism of the modern world. Many of his characters are attempting to live up to their expectations of themselves even as the world they live in demands that they compromise their values. This is most explicitly stated in the famous exchange from Ride the High Country in which Joel McCrea states that "All I want is to enter my house justified." Many believe that this line is taken directly from a common expression used by Judge Denver Peckinpah, the director's grandfather.
This theme is most evident in Peckinpah's Westerns. Unlike most Western directors, Peckinpah tended to concentrate on the early 20th century rather than the 19th, and his films portray characters who still believe in the values of the Old West being swept away by the new, industrial America.
This persistent theme has led many critics to view Peckinpah's films as essentially tragic. That is, his characters are portrayed as being prisoners of their fates and their own failings who nonetheless seek redemption and meaning in an absurd and violent world. The theme of longing for redemption, justification, and honor in a dishonorable existence permeates almost all of Peckinpah's work and has helped to elevate his reputation from that of a skilled director of action films to one of the greatest cinematic artists of his era.
Influence
Peckinpah's influence on modern cinema is enormous and pervasive, perhaps greater than any of his contemporaries. However, this influence is also often shallow and purely aesthetic in nature, ignoring some of Peckinpah's greatest strengths in favor of pure imitation of his stylish approach to cinematic violence.
There can be no doubt that Peckinpah single handedly created the modern action film and the modern approach to action sequences. His signature combination of slow-motion, fast editing, and the deliberate distension of time has become the standard depiction of violence and action in post-Peckinpavian cinema. The approach to action in movies can be divided between before Peckinpah and after Peckinpah. While films before The Wild Bunch had used smilar techniques, especially Bonnie and Clyde and The Seven Samurai, Peckinpah was the first to use them as a distinct style rather than as specific setpieces. Directors such as Martin Scorsese have acknowledged Peckinpah's direct influence on their approach to film violence.
Peckinpah's themes have also been influential on other filmmakers and other Western films. Clint Eastwood's films The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven also take up Peckinpah's themes of the dangers of revenge, the nature of human violence, and men seeking to be honorable in dishonorable surroundings. The theme of the passing of the West into history and the destruction of the Western way of life by modern industrialism has also been taken up by many post-Peckinpah Westerns.
In many ways, Peckinpah's greatest legacy lies in his aggressive breaking of taboos. He allowed a new freedom to emerge in cinema, not only in the depiction of violence, but also in editing styles, narrative choices, and the willingness to portray unsympathetic or tragic characters and stories. His notorious reputation has often overshadowed the depth of his influence on modern film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Peckinpah
