"You know, making The Wild Bunch, Sam had a bad case of the piles. Bloody. He wouldn't take the time to get it done, because I think he felt that they would fire him. So he stuck there. He'd climb up on the camera, and you could see all the way down the side of his leg this red, brown, dusty, bloody, stinkin', smellin', mess would drain out of him. But he fuckin' wouldn't quit. He'd get a shot in the ass for pain, or whatever, and that son of a bitch stuck up there every day." - Warren Oates.
David Samuel Peckinpah didn't just make films about outlaws - he was the biggest, most visionary badass Hollywood has ever seen. Born into a family of lawyers, on 21 February 1925 in Fresno, California, Peckinpah's life ought to have been one of quiet respectability. Instead, after serving in the Marine Corps and earning a master's degree from USC in 1950, he moved into TV direction.
Peckinpah soon found his spiritual home within the Western genre, writing and directing episodes of Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and other TV series. He made the leap to the big screen in a suitably dramatic manner: called to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1961 to direct Ride the High Country. Joseph Vogel, president of MGM, proclaimed it the worst picture ever made. But, when the film hit the screens, audiences were dazzled.
Columbia Pictures were taking notice and, in 1964, hired him to direct Major Dundee. The deal: Charlton Heston, a $3million budget, a three-hour flick, and a script about a Civil War major who runs down a renegade Apache in Mexico. Two days before the shooting began, $1million was cut from the budget, 15 days from the shooting schedule, and an hour from the running time.
Down in Mexico with a cast of hundreds, Peckinpah's behaviour turned bad. He so enraged his star that, at one point, Heston charged Peckinpah on his horse and tried to run him through with his sabre. Still, when the film began to run over schedule and budget and the men in suits came down to seize the footage, Heston returned his salary in order to let Sam finish.
In 1969, his greatest moment came. At a preview cinema in Kansas City, 30 people walked out of a screening, some of them vomiting. The film they had just seen was The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah's hauntingly resonant elegy to the Old West with its pioneering slo-mo bloodbath ending. The film earned Sam the tag of genius and stirred untold amounts of shit with the public. People actually came up to throw punches at him, they were so enraged by the violence. In Nigeria, The Wild Bunch was shown to government troops, who went crazy, shooting off their guns at the screen. They went off to battle the Biafrans, shouting that they wanted to die like the film's hero William Holden (made-up to look uncannily like Sam).
More controversy followed in 1970, when Peckinpah was handed Dustin Hoffman, big money and a book called The Siege of Trencher's Farm. The director said, if you read the book, you'd die gagging on your own vomit. He turned it into a cinematic masterclass on the necessity of killing. In December 1971, Straw Dogs was unleashed. Variety hailed it as "an orgy of unparalleled violence and nastiness". To this day, the BFI refuse to certificate it. Peckinpah responded that he regarded all men as violent, including himself and that violence must be expressed constructively.
For Sam's films are drenched in more than blood: they're rich in contradiction and certainty, honour and betrayal, redemption and revenge, aching sadness and sheer, unadulterated joy. Peckinpah's films weren't just about the way he thought life should be lived; they were about the way he did live.
His lifestyle consisted of equal parts brawling, bonking and boozing. He wore symbols of machismo like bandannas and mirror shades as if they were medals of honour. He sported the lasciviousness, psychosis and swagger of the men he made movies about, but he also possessed their keen work ethic, their high regard for loyalty and their appreciation of the positive affects of male camaraderie.
This desire to live the desperado lifestyle lead directly to the untimely undoing of Sam. His narcophilia having made him unhirable and hard to get along with, Peckinpah's exhausted heart finally gave out on 9 March 1984. But it was the very qualities that spirited Sam away that informed his cinema with a passion that you rarely see on the big screen. For a dose of Peckinpah's poetic melancholy, check out Slim Pickens' death scene in Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Shot in the guts, Pickens hobbles over to the banks of the Rio Bravo, looks one last time at his wife and then stares deep into the dying world.
Pickens 'dies' as Sam really did - an untamed spirit, defiantly out of time and place with the world around him.
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