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February 23, 2010 (XXSam Peckinpah, R IDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962, 94 m
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Written by N.B. Stone Jr., Sam Peckinpah and Robert Creighton
Williams
Produced by Richard E. LyonsOriginal Music by George Bassman
Cinematography by Lucien Ballard
Film Editing by Frank Santillo
Randolph Scott...Gil Westrum
Joel McCrea...Steve Judd
Mariette Hartley...Elsa Knudsen
Ron Starr...Heck Longtree
Edgar Buchanan...Judge Tolliver
R.G. Armstrong...Joshua Knudsen
Jenie Jackson...Kate
James Drury...Billy HammondL.Q. Jones...Sylvus Hammond
John Anderson...Elder Hammond
John Davis Chandler...Jimmy HammondWarren Oates...Henry Hammond
SAM PECKINPAH (21 February 1925, Fresno, California, - 28December 1984, Inglewood, California, of a stroke) directed 28
films and tv series, some of which were The Osterman Weekend (1983), Convoy (1978), Cross of Iron (1977), The Killer Elite (1975), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Pat Garrett &
Billy the Kid (1973), The Getaway (1972), Junior Bonner (1972),
Straw Dogs (1971), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), The Wild
Bunch (1969), "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre" (1
episode, 1967), Major Dundee (1965), Ride the High Country
(1962), "Zane Grey Theater" (3 episodes, 1959-1960), "TheRifleman" (4 episodes, 1958-1959), and "Trackdown" (1957) TV
series (unknown episodes).
LUCIEN BALLARD (6 May 1908, Miami, Oklahoma -1 October
1988, Rancho Mirage, California, of a road accident) was the
cinematographer for 133 films and tv series, some of which were
My Kingdom For... (1985), Rabbit Test (1978), Mikey and Nicky
(1976), From Noon Till Three (1976), St. Ives (1976), Breakout
(1975), The Getaway (1972), Junior Bonner (1972), Elvis: That'sthe Way It Is (1970), The Hawaiians (1970), The Ballad of Cable
Hogue (1970), The Wild Bunch (1969), True Grit (1969), Will
Penny (1968), Nevada Smith (1966), The Sons of Katie Elder
(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 (196
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 Shado
(1937), The Devil's Playground (1937), and Crime and Punishm
(1935).
R ANDOLPH SCOTT (23 January 1898, Orange County, Virginia
March 1987, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, of heart andlung ailments) appeared in 105 films, some of which were Ride High Country (1962), Comanche Station (1960), Westbound (19 Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Decision at Sundown (1957), Sho
Out at Medicine Bend (1957), 7th Cavalry (1956), Seven Men fr
Now (1956), A Lawless Street (1955), Ten Wanted Men (1955),
Bounty Hunter (1954), The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953), The M
Behind the Gun (1953), Carson City (1952), Man in the Saddle
(1951) , Fort Worth (1951), Santa Fe (1951), Colt .45 (1950), Th
Nevadan (1950), The Doolins of Oklahoma (1949), Canadian
Pacific (1949), Return of the Bad Men (1948), Albuquerque (194
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Peckinpah—RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
Home, Sweet Homicide (1946), Badman's Territory (1946), Belle of
the Yukon (1944), 'Gung Ho!': The Story of Carlson's Makin Island
Raiders (1943), Bombardier (1943), Paris Calling (1941), Belle
Starr (1941), When the Daltons Rode (1940), Virginia City (1940),
Coast Guard (1939), Jesse James (1939), The Texans (1938),
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), The Last of the Mohicans
(1936), She (1935), The Last Round-Up (1934), The Thundering
Herd (1933), Hello, Everybody! (1933), and The Far Call (1929).
JOEL MCCREA (5 November 1905, South Pasadena, California - 20
October 1990, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, of
pulmonary complications) appeared in 93 films and tv series, someof which were Mustang Country (1976), Cry Blood, Apache (1970),
Sioux Nation (1970), Ride the High Country (1962), "Wichita
Town" (26 episodes, 1959-1960), The Gunfight at Dodge City
(1959), Fort Massacre (1958), Cattle Empire (1958), The Tall
Stranger (1957), The Oklahoman (1957), The First Texan (1956),Wichita (1955), Black Horse Canyon (1954), Border River (1954),
Lone Hand (1953), Rough Shoot (1953), The San Francisco Story
(1952), Colorado Territory (1949), Four Faces West (1948), The
Virginian (1946), Buffalo Bill (1944), Sullivan's Travels (1941),
Foreign Correspondent (1940), Union Pacific (1939), Wells Fargo (1937), Come and Get It (1936), These Three (1936), Rockabye
(1932), The Lost Squadron (1932), Kept Husbands (1931), The Jazz Age (1929), Freedom of the Press (1928), and Dead Man's Curve
(1928).
R.G. ARMSTRONG (7 April 1917, Birmingham, Alabama -)
appeared in 182 films and tv series, some of which were TheWaking (2001), Purgatory (1999), "Millennium" (5 episodes, 1997-
1998), The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), "Cybill" (1 episode,
1995), "Walker, Texas Ranger" (1 episode, 1994), "L.A. Law" (2
episodes, 1992-1993), Dick Tracy (1990), "Matlock" (2 episodes,
1989), "War and Remembrance" (2 episodes, 1988-1989),
Bulletproof (1988), "Trapper John, M.D." (6 episodes, 1981-1985), Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), "Dynasty" (3 episodes, 1982),
Hammett (1982), Reds (1981), The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper (1981),
Raggedy Man (1981), Where the Buffalo Roam (1980), The Last
Ride of the Dalton Gang (1979), Heaven Can Wait (1978), Stay
Hungry (1976), Race with the Devil (1975), "Cannon" (2 episodes,1971-1973), Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), The Great
Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), "Disneyland" (4 episodes, 1959-
1972), "Hawaii Five-O" (2 episodes, 1969-1970), The Great White
Hope (1970), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), "Gunsmoke" (5
episodes, 1961-1967), "The F.B.I." (3 episodes, 1965-1967),
"Bonanza" (3 episodes, 1959-1966), "The Fugitive" (3 episodes,
1963-1965), "Rawhide" (4 episodes, 1959-1965), Major Dundee
(1965), "Perry Mason" (3 episodes, 1958-1962), Ride the HighCountry (1962), "Cheyenne" (2 episodes, 1960-1961), "Maverick"
(2 episodes, 1959-1960), The Fugitive Kind (1959), "Have Gun -
Will Travel" (2 episodes, 1958), From Hell to Texas (1958), A
Face in the Crowd (1957), and Garden of Eden (1954).
JAMES DRURY (18 April 1934, New York City, New York - )
appeared in 70 films and tv series, some of which were Hell to Pay
(2005), The Virginian (2000), "Walker, Texas Ranger" (3 episodes,
1993), "Firehouse" (13 episodes, 1974), "The Virginian" (249
episodes, 1962-1971), The Young Warriors (1967), "Perry Mason"(1 episode, 1961), "Rawhide" (3 episodes, 1959-1961), "The
Rifleman" (2 episodes, 1958-1961), "Gunsmoke" (4 episodes, 1955-
1961), "Cheyenne" (1 episode, 1959), "Have Gun - Will Travel" (1
episode, 1959), "The Texan" (1 episode, 1958), "Broken Arrow"
episode, 1958), Forbidden Planet (1956), and The Tender Trap
(1955).
L.Q. JONES (19 August 1927, Beaumont, Texas -) appeared in 15
films and tv series, some of which were A Prairie HomeCompanion (2006), Route 666 (2001), The Mask of Zorro
(1998),The Patriot (1998), In Cold Blood (1996), Casino (1995)
The Legend of Grizzly Adams (1990), Bulletproof (1988), "TheYellow Rose" (10 episodes, 1983-1984), Lone Wolf McQuade
(1983), The Beast Within (1982), "Charlie's Angels" (4 episodes1976-1980), "The Incredible Hulk" (1 episode, 1979), "McCloud
(1 episode, 1977), Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), White Line Fev
(1975), Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), "Alias Smith and Jon
(3 episodes, 1971-1972), "Gunsmoke" (7 episodes, 1963-1972),
"The Virginian" (25 episodes, 1963-1971), The Ballad of Cable
Hogue (1970), The Wild Bunch (1969), Hang 'Em High (1968),
"The Big Valley" (5 episodes, 1966-1968), "Rawhide" (5 episod
1963-1965), Major Dundee (1965), "Wagon Train" (5 episodes,1959-1964), "Laramie" (7 episodes, 1959-1963), Ride the High
Country (1962), "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp" (1 episod
1961), Cimarron (1960), Warlock (1959), "Cheyenne" (3 episod1955), Target Zero (1955), and Battle Cry (1955).
WARREN OATES (5 July 1928, Depoy, Kentucky - 3 April 1982Los Angeles, California, of a heart attack) appeared in 122 films
and tv series, some of which were "Tales of the Unexpected" (1
episode, 1985), Tough Enough (1983), Blue Thunder (1983), Th
Border (1982), Stripes (1981), "East of Eden" (1981), 1941 (197The Brink's Job/China 9, Liberty 37 (1978), The African Queen
(1977), 92 in the Shade (1975), Race with the Devil (1975), Ran
Deluxe (1975), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Th
White Dawn (1974), Badlands (1973), Dillinger (1973), The Hir
Hand (1971), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Wild Bunch (1969
"Gunsmoke" (10 episodes, 1958-1967), In the Heat of the Night(1967), Welcome to Hard Times (1967), The Shooting (1967), "T
Virginian" (4 episodes, 1963-1966), Major Dundee (1965), Ride High Country (1962), "Wanted: Dead or Alive" (5 episodes, 195
1961), "Have Gun - Will Travel"(2 episodes, 1958-1960), The R
and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), "Wagon Train" (1 episode,
1959), and "The United States Steel Hour" (1 episode, 1956).
MARIETTE HARTLEY (21 June 1940, Weston, Connecticut - )
appeared in 119 films and tv series, some of which were The InnCircle (2009), "The Cleaner" (1 episode, 2009), "Law & Order:
Special Victims Unit" (5 episodes, 2003-2009), "Grey's Anatom
(1 episode, 2008), Baggage (2003), "One Life to Live" (1968)
(unknown episodes, 2001), Snitch (1996), "Courthouse" (1episode), "Murder, She Wrote" (1 episode, 1992), Encino Man
(1992), "The Love Boat" (2 episodes, 1983), The Love Tapes
(1980), "M*A*S*H" (1 episode, 1979), "Columbo" (2 episodes,
1974-1977), "Little House on the Prairie" (1 episode, 1976),"Gunsmoke" (5 episodes, 1963-1974), The Magnificent Seven R
(1972), "Bonanza" (4 episodes, 1965-1971), Marooned (1969),
"Star Trek" (1 episode, 1969), "Peyton Place" 30 episodes, 1965
1966), "The Virginian" (2 episodes, 1964), Marnie (1964), "The
Twilight Zone" (1 episode, 1964), Drums of Africa (1963), and R
the High Country (1962).
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PECKINPAH from World Film Directors, V. II, Ed. John
Wakeman. H.W. Wilson Co, NY 1988
American director and scenarist, was born in Fresno California, the
son of David Samuel Peckinpah and Fern Church. Peckinpah told
interviewers that he had a great-aunt with Paute Indian blood, but
he believed that his family name originated in the Friesland Islands
of the Netherlands.
Both the Peckinpahs and the Churches had migrated to theFresno area in the 1850s. His paternal grandfather had hauled borax
out of Death Valley, earning enough to buy timberland andestablish a sawmill in 1873 on Peckinpah Mountain in the Sierra
Nevada, subsequently selling out to buy a general store and way
station. His other grandfather,
Denver Samuel Church, had
come out west to work on an
uncle’s sheepfarm. He
qualified as a lawyer and set
up a practice in Fresno, then bought a cattle ranch in Crane
Valley, near Peckinpah
Mountain. Church becameDistrict Attorney of Fresno
County, then a Congressman,
and finally a Superior Court
judge. In 1914 Sam
Peckinpah’s father David went
to work on the Church ranch,
where he met and married
Fern. With his father-in-law’s backing, the cowboy qualified
as a lawyer and also went into
practice in Fresno.
Though they were raised in Fresno, Sam Peckinpah and his
older brother Denver spent long periods on the Church ranch.Peckinpah often referred to this as the happiest period of his life, a
kind of lost Eden. His grandfather Denver Church was an important
and perhaps crucial influence on him. An American individualist of
the old school, he opposed all kinds of government control. Though
a total abstainer himself, he voted in Congress against Prohibition
and later abandoned his political career because of his disapproval
of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Denver Church taughthis family that you hunted only for food, never wasted ammunition,
and respected the animals you killed.
His father David was also a man of principle, founder ofthe Fresno Humane Society and a lawyer who, during the
Depression, was always ready to accept payment in kind—or no
payment at all. He often said that he wanted only to feel that he
could “enter his house justified.” David Peckinpah also became a
Superior Court judge and so did Sam’s brother Denny. “Sitting
around a dining-room table talking about law and order, truth and
justice, on a Bible which was very big in our family, “I felt like an
outsider,” Peckinpah said, “and I started to question them. I guessI’m still questioning.”
Peckinpah attended primary school in Fresno and
developed an equal delight in movies and in books. At Fresno High
School he became a formidable member of the football team andalso laid the foundations of his reputation as a brawler and boozer.
His parents tried another school, and when this did nothing to
moderate his violent temper, sent him for his senior high school
year to San Rafael Military School. He did well academically but
also accumulated more demerits than anyone else in the school’s
history.
Graduating in 1943, Peckinpah enlisted in the Marines.
the summer of 1945 he was sent to China, where he saw virtuall
no action but fell in love with a Chinese girl and “began my stud
of Zen.” Back home in 1947, he enrolled at Fresno State College
There he met Marie Selland, a stage-struck student whom he
married the same year. She introduced him to the theatre and
Peckinah took to it immediately, switching his major to drama. Hgraduated with a B.A. in that subject in 1949, the year that his
daughter Sharon was born, and went on for post-graduate work athe University of Southern California. For a master’s thesis he
wrote an adaptation of a one-act play by his idol Tennessee
Williams, and filmed it (to his re
the movie was destroyed).
Peckinpah began his
career as a director-producer in
residence at the Huntington Park
Civic Theatre. After a year and ahalf he decided to try television
making a modest start at KLAC
in Los Angeles as a stagehand, propman, and floor-sweeper. He
lasted two years there and then,
the first but by no means the las
time, lost his job after a row wit
studio executive. However, he h
managed to put together some sh
films in his time at KLAC, and o
the strength of these was hired bCBS in 1953 as an assistant edit
That short-lived assignment end
when he failed to report for wor
while his wife was in labor with their second child, Kristen.
His first sortie into the film industry followed. He sat fothree days in Walter Wanger’s waiting room at Allied Artists, an
in the end Wanger gave him a job as third assistant casting direc
(or gopher). His first assignment was on Don Siegel’s Riot in Ce
Block 11 (1954). He and Siegal liked one another, and Peckinpa
worked as “dialogue director”—in fact mostly as Siegal’s person
assistant—on Private Hell (1954), An Annapolis Story (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Crime in the Streets(1956). Peckinpah also played a bit part in Invasion of the BodySnatchers and did some rewriting of one or two scenes. He learn
a lot from Siegel, whom he called his patron and also worked asdialogue director on some of Jacques Tourneur’s films for Allied
Artists in 1955-1956.
At that time Peckinpah was beginning a new career as a
television writer. It was Siegal who prodded him in this direction
when he loaned him a batch of scripts submitted to the CBS
Gunsmoke series. Using these as models, Peckinpah wrote some
scripts of his own that were accepted. Ten episodes of Gunsmok
produced in 1955-1956 were written by Peckinpah. most of themadaptations of Gunsmoke radio scripts. He went on to write for
other western series and in 1957 sold his first script for a feature
film. This was The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, based on t
book by Charles Neider that itself derived from Pat Garrett’s Th
Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. Much altered by other hands, it
eventually surfaced as Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks.
Peckinpah directed his first television film early in 195
an episode of Broken Arrow called “The Knife Fighter.” His
television career took another step forward when he reworked an
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Peckinpah—RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
original script rejected by Gunsmoke and sold it to Dick Powell at
Four Star Productions. This was “The Sharpshooter,” screened
during the spring of 1958. A story about a boy growing up in the
California foothills of the Sierra Nevada, it drew on Peckinpah’s
own youthful experiences and was enthusiastically received. It
became the pilot for a successful new series, The Rifleman,
beginning in the fall of 1958. Peckinpah directed four episodes of
the show himself but left it in 1959, saying that the producers had
“perverted it into pap.”Late that year, Peckinpah became producer of The
Westerner , an NBC-TV series that grew out of another pilot he hadwritten and directed for Dick Powell. The series starred Brian Keith
as Dave Blessingame, a self-sufficient drifter. Peckinpah, who
directed five of the half-hour episodes, co-wrote four of them, and
launched the series with one for which he had performed both
functions. This was “Jeff,” a story (as Peckinpah said) “about a guy
who goes to take this young whore, who he knew as a kid, home.”
“Jeff” received ecstatic reviews…“The half-hour had only one flaw,
a couple of descents into violence that didn’t help the story at all.”The Westerner went on to receive a Producers Guild nomination as
Best Filmed Series, but was canceled after only thirteen shows—
stifled by affiliate anxieties about its “adult” subject matter and bythe viewing public’s sudden and mysterious hankering after hour-
long shows.
Peckinpah’s first feature followed in 1961, The Deadly
Companions, scripted by A.S. Fleischman from his novel Yellowleg
and produced for Pathé-America-Carousel by Charles B.
FitzSimons. Peckinpah was hired at the request of Brian Keith of
The Westerner , who stars opposite FitzSimons’ sister, Maureen
O’Hara….Peckinpah had altogether less control over his firstfeature than he had anticipated and was not much pleased with the
film. However, it performed adequately at the box office and
brought him some good personal notices. Indeed, as Doug
McKinney says, this “psychological Western” was an impressive
debut, placed resolutely in a Peckinpah landscape, allowing for thecontrivances of the script in delivering a film of angular, subdued
tensions, somewhat skewed within the confines of the genre.”
Moreover, this “story of a quest for redemption and identity”
provides “an auspicious introduction to themes Peckinpah will
explore more fully in later films.”
In 1961 the Pckinpahs had a third child, Matthew, who
later appeared in several of his father’s films; the marriage endedthe same year. After another brief stint in television, Peckinpah was
hired by MGM to direct Ride the High Country (1962; in Britain
called Guns in the Afternoon), a modestly budgeted Western from ascript that Peckinpah heavily revised. The project became caught up
in a front-office power struggle at MGM that resulted in Peckinpah
being banned from the studio during postproduction. He had by
then made his first cut, however, and the editing was completed
more or less in accordance with his intentions.
Ride the High Country was shot by Peckinpah’s favorite
cinematographer, Lucien Ballard, in Cinemascope and in the
autumnal colors that set the film’s elegiac mood. Its opening creditsroll over vistas of the American wilderness wilderness—mountains,
forests, rivers—all magnificently beautiful and totally empty. From
there we switch to the crowded California town of Hornitos at the
turn of the century. Hornitos is in carnival, and we see huckstersselling mementos of the vanished frontier and a race between a
camel and a horse—that emblem of the old West—which the camel
wins.
Riding into town (and almost run down by an early
automobile), Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) finds his old friend Gil
Westrum (Randolph Scott) running a crooked rifle range, dresse
up like Buffalo Bill. Both men have outlived their jobs as frontie
lawmen—Hornitos has uniformed policemen. Judd clings to the
values but Westrum has sold out in the interests of survival and h
acquired an equally unprincipled young sidekick, Heck Longtree
(Ron Starr). Judd secures for all three of them a job transporting
gold from the Coarse Gold mining camp. On their way they stop
the farmhouse of Joshua Knudsen (R.G. Armstrong), a
sanctimonious tyrant whose puritanism masks incestuous desireshis motherless daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley).
Coarse Gold is in a state of lawlessness close to anarchy
dominated by five brutish brothers, the Hammonds, against who
the drunken Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan) is helpless. To esc
her father, Elsa Knudsen comes to Coarse Gold and marries Bill
Hammond (James Drury) in a grotesque ceremony in a brother-
saloon. After it, two of Billy’s brothers try to rape Elsa, but are
restrained by Judd and Longtree. “Cutting between the attempte
rape of Elsa and scenes of brawling in the saloon…,” wrote Tere
Butler, “Peckinpah for the first time in his work uses a montagetechnique to create the impression of energy exploding.”
The Hammonds break into Joshua Knudsen’s house and
murder him. Westrum relieves
Judge Tolliver of Elsa’s marriage lines, freeing her from her
misguided union. He is a more humane man than the rigorouslylaw-abiding Judd (who is given the line originally spoken by
Peckinpah’s own father: “All I want is to enter my house justifie
But Westrum has been corrupted by materialism, and he now
violates their friendship by making a bid for the gold he is suppo
to protect. Judd wins out in this encounter, but is forced to reass
his old certainties when Elsa questions her own dead father’s
equally rigid morality.Having escaped from Judd, Westrum returns to help him
a final confrontation with the Hammonds at the Knudsen
farmhouse. The Hammonds are wiped out and Judd is mortallywounded. In their final reconciliation, Westrum undertakes to
deliver the gold to its rightful owners; Elsa and the reformed
Longtree pair off. “According to the conventions of the Western
as Butler says, “Gil Westrum, in his capacity as a good-bad guy,
should have been the character to die as a means of atoning for h
disrespect of the law…. Westrum’s survival constitutes the mov
final refutation of the Manicheanism of the Western….For
Peckinpah, Westrum’s claim to human dignity lies not in whethehe can uphold the law but in whether he can respond to Judd’s cr
for friendship.”
As many critics have pointed out, Ride the High Countr
a film about the changing Western as well as about the changingWest, and the casting of those old cowboy heroes McCrea and S
emphasizes this; Scott’s role in particular—his last—is an almos
shocking assault on his screen image as a man of iron integrity.
Peckinpah learned a lot in the making of this film, especially (as
said) fromLucien Ballard, who introduced him to the crane shot
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Peckinpah—RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
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
style—the use of very short shots, only a few frames long, to
capture rapid and violent action.
For Doug McKinney, Peckinpah’s eye for detail adds
immeasurably to the movie’s 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 SteveJudd…. Coarse Gold, Kate’s 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 Peckinpah’s
growing mastery of mise en scène in the final shootout, when Judd
and Westrum, walking steadily into the guns of the Hammonds—
two against five—are filmed from an increasingly low angle until
they loom as “heroes of mythic proportions.”
Because of the front-office conflict in which the film had
become embroiled, it was released by MGM as the bottom half of a
double bill. To the studio’s embarrassment, it was enthusiastically
reviewed and became one of the year’s “sleepers.” Newsweek called
it the best picture of 1962, and the following year it won several
European awards, including the grand prix at the Belgian
International Film Festival. Some regard it now not only as one ofthe finest examples of the genre, but as Peckinpah’s best film, free
of his obsession with violence. However, Richard T. Jameson in Film Comment (January-February 1981) suggests that “those whonostalgically prefer it to the more stylistically adventurous, and
temperamentally contentious, works that followed must have an
aversion to voluptuous kinesis.”
Peckinpah returned for a time to television, producing and
directing two hour-long films for The Dick Powell Theatre. These
were Pericles on 31 st Street (1962), based on a story by Harry Mark
Petrakis (Peckinpah collaborated on the script) and The Losers
(1963), an adventure-comedy modeled on The Westerner andstarring Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn. Highly successful and
frequently rerun, it was almost taken up as a series with Peckinpah
as producer. This project collapsed with the death of Dick Powell,
and Peckinpah then joined Walt Disney Productions as a writer-director. He left after a disagreement with a producer, and in the
late summer of 1963 was hired by the independent producer Jerry
Bresler to direct Major Dundee (1965), released through Columbia.
Adapted from a story by Harry Julian Fink, Major Dundee
is a cavalry Western starring Charlton Heston as an autocratic
Southerner who has chosen to fight for the Union during the Civ
War, a stubborn but deeply divided man clinging to vague notion
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 a
after filming….According to the director he left the film at a len
of about two and a half hours. It was cut by Columbia to a releas
length of 134 minutes. Whole scenes were excised, wrecking the
movie’s logic and rhythm. There is much to admire in whatremains, but the result as a whole has been described by Jim Kit
as “one of Hollywood’s 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 al
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 directThe Cincinatti Kid at MGM, Peckinpah began work in October
1964. He and the producer disagreed, and he was fired after fourdays of shooting, the film being completed by Norman Jewison.
The release of the truncated Major Dundee in April 1965 renewe
gossip about Pekcinpah’s intractability, and he was effectively blacklisted throughout the industry, his career apparently at an e
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
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 ArPeckinpah 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 dev
by the stuntman Roy Sickner, about the last days of the West’s l
gang of aging outlaws. It was shot by Lucien Ballard in Panavis70 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 company—Warren Oates, Be
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 Gentn
and Diane Birdsall described this long orgy of killing as “theunparalleled montage event of cinema history. It is both ‘son of
Potemkin’ and light years beyond it. It is the most exhausting ree
film ever created—not merely a cluster of quick cuts. . . but a
cascading avalanche of comprehension. The destruction of
Mapache’s stronghold (and, of course, the Bunch along with it)
inevitable as it is exhilarating.”
. . .The film ends with a shot of the Bunch laughing, cu
from an earlier sequence. “By ending with these killers as theylaugh, 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 realistidepiction of violence, “the way blood spurts practically across a
room, provoked an outburst of almost hysterical vituperation fro
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, h
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had not made a film about the Vietnam war, the director said: “The
Western is a universal frame within which it is possible to commenton 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 Peckinpah’s 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 Peckinpah’s “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 outthat The Wild Bunch continues Peckinpah’s refutation of the
Western’s “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-interestand 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 TerenceButler 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 Bunch’s “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. Themovie was shot in Nevada’s 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 Trencher’s Farm.
Peckinpah had other projects in mind but these fell through.
Melnick then offered his own first-draft adaptation of the novel
along with financing through ABC Pictures. Peckinpah sat down
with David Zelig Goodman to try to make something out of a
“lousy book with one good action sequence.” The result, which
bears very little relationship to the original novel was Straw Dog
(1971)….
Peckinpah made no secret of the fact that he was much
influenced in Straw Dogs by the thesis advanced by Robert Ardrin The Territorial Imperative —that human behavior is much clo
than is usually recognized to animal behavior, and that a key facin both is the possession and defense of territory. The film’s title
comes from Lao Tse: “Heaven and earth are ruthless and treat th
myriad creatures as straw dogs” (used as substitutes for real anim
in Chinese sacrificial rites): “the sage is ruthless and treats the
people as straw dogs.” David [Dustin Hoffman] becomes a “sag
when he recognizes the truth of this adage. Or, as Peckinpah said
a much-quoted Playboy interview (August 1972), “an intellectua
who embodies his intellect in action, that’s a real human being.”Released at the end of 1971, Straw Dogs revived and
redoubled the uproar created by The Wild Bunch. It was hailed b
some as a masterpiece, vilified by others as an endorsement ofviolence and as a sexist tract. Pauline Kael called it “the first
American film that is a fascist work of art.” Others insist that the
movie does not endorse violence, but only asserts that it is an
element in human nature which must be dealt with, not simply
denied. Peckinpah was still editing the film when Martin Baum,
president of ABC Pictures, invited him to direct Junior Bonner
(1972), from an original script by Jeb Rosenbrook. Lucien Balla
shot the film in Todd-AO 35 during the annual rodeo in PrescottArizona. Many of Peckinpah’s films are elegiac studies of the ol
West in transition to the new. Junior Bonner , his first contempor
Western, wryly illustrates the outcome….An atypically gentle
movie for both Peckinpah and McQueen, Junior Bonner was a
commercial failure….Peckinpah’s next assignment was The Getaway (1972),
produced by First Artists, a partnership set up by Steve McQuee
and other stars. The script, based on a novel by Jim Thompson, w
by Walter Hill. Peckinpah had Ballard as his cameraman, but
McQueen scrapped Jerry Fielding’s score, substituting one by
Quincy Jones….The Getaway was a major box-office success,
grossing $25 million. Contemporary reviewers also like the filmthe whole, though some complained that Peckinpah was panderi
to the current fashion for outlaw heroes. Molly Haskell found th
picture “a lot more fun and less pretentious than Straw Dogs andThe Wild Bunch,” and its violence, “not having to sustain the
burden of Peckinpah’s atavistic anthropology, is less hateful.” …
For a Peckinpah project, the filming of The Getaway ha
been relatively free of disputes. Not so Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid (1973), “a Gordon Carroll-Sam Peckinpah Production”
financed and distributed by MGM. An original script by Rudolp
Wurlitzer, the film was shot on location in and around Durango,
Mexico, during a ferocious flu epidemic and under conditions of“open warfare” between the director and the president of MGM,
James Aubrey. John Coquillon, who had shot Straw Dogs, was t
cinematographer, and the music was supplied by Bob Dylan, wh
also appeared in the film as Alias, a former printer who joins Bilgang.
Billy the Kid, an outlaw whom the dime novels turned
a legend in his own brief lifetime, was shot dead in 1881 by She
Pat Garrett, once his friend. Beginning with the silents, at least a
score of movies have dealt in various terms with this incident. In
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hands of Wurlitzer and Peckinpah, the story becomes another elegy
for lost frontier values, and one with something of the inevitability
of Greek tragedy. Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is one of Peckinph’s
survivors. The cattle barons and the politicians want a west in
which their money talks louder than guns and Garrett knows they
will win. He accepts election as sheriff and sets out to hunt down
his former friend and protegé Billy (Kris Kristofferson), whose
ways make him an embarrassment to the money-men….MGM cut
seventeen minutes from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid , excisingwhole scenes and characters. The most serious of these mutilations
was the removal of framing scenes showing the murder of PatGarrett in 1908 by the so-called Santa Fe Ring, representing the
same powerful and corrupt interests on whose behalf he had killed
Billy. As originally conceived, the movie would have been a
flashback composed of Garrett’s dying memories….In spite of
mutilations (for which Peckinpah sued the studio), the film had its
fervent admirers….
The screenplay of Peckinpah’s next film, Bring Me the
Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), is credited to Gordon Dawson andthe director, from an original story by Frank Kowalski and
Peckinpah….Peckinpah said: “I did Alfredo Garcia and I did it
exactly the way I wanted to. Good or bad, like it or not, that was myfilm.” Most contemporary reviewers disliked it intensely, and the
film was censored in Germany and Sweden. Later critics have
responded very differently….
In his 1972 Playboy interview, Peckinpah said that “a
director has to deal with a whole world absolutely teeming with
mediocrities, jackals, hangers-
on, and just plain killers….The
saying is that they can kill you but not eat you. That’s
nonsense. I’ve had them eating
on me while I was still walking
around….”
As J.-P. Coursodonsays, Sam Peckinpah is
“undoubtedly the most
controversial American director
since Orson Welles.” Dismissed
by some as a failed prodigy
and/or a fascist, he is regarded
by others as a major artist who“reinvented the shape of the cinema.” Robert Wood calls him the
heir of John Ford, his values, like Ford’s “embodied in the myth of
the Old West, with its emphasis on manhood andindependence...but he follows through the implications of such a
commitment (clung to in the context of contemporary America)
with a ruthlessness of which Ford (ultimately a more complex
artist) was incapable.”
from Peckinpah A Portrait in Montage. Garner Simmons.
University of Texas Press, Austin, 1982.
“An incurable romantic who has been married five times to three
women, and who frequently has fallen in love with prostitutes on a
“pay-as-you-go” basis, Peckinpah summed up the end of his first
marriage: “You clothe the object of your own needs in thevestments of your own desires. When you wake up to the fact that it
just ain’t there, that’s when you’ve got to go.”
Ride the High Country
“Good fight...I enjoyed it.”
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. Wh
he turned it down, the rumor continues, it was offered to Burt
Kennedy, Boetticher’s scriptwriter, who had recently directed hi
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 thatPeckinpah got the job on his own merit.
Richard Lyons, the film’s producer, recalled: “I’ve hearseveral stories through the years that a number of other directors
were considered for Ride the High Country, but that’s a lot of cr
I was the producer, and I’d know. The way Sam got the picture w
that he and I were both at the William Morris Agency in those d
and Silvia Hirsch, who was with the agency, heard that I was
looking for a director for this Western and asked me if I’d ever
heard of Sam Peckinpah. I said no and she convinced me to look
a couple of the segments of The Westerner that Sam had directedSo I did, and they really impressed me.
“Now you have to understand that this picture was to b
made at Metro and they were very class conscious. I mean they jdidn’t even consider hiring television directors. But I called Sol
Siegel who was head of production at the studio at the time and
him that I had this director who’d worked in television, and Id se
four segments that he’d done and I thought they were outstandin
Well, Siegel was coming in over the weekend and said he’d have
look at one. So he came in, and
we ran one, and then he did ju
what I’d done. He said, ‘You gany more?’ So we looked at th
all, and when we finished Sieg
turned to me and said, ‘Hire
him.’”
Ride the High Countrwas Rick Lyons’s first major
picture as a producer. ...Lyons
was hired to produce a small
budget Western—roughly
$800,000—primarily for relea
in European markets to offset
expensive productions, whichwere then being made by Fox, like Lewis Milestone’s Mutiny on Bounty starring Marlon Brando. The story Lyons finally decided
film dealt with two over-the-hill gunfighters who get one lastchance at glory when they are hired to escort a fold shipment fro
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 th
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 wo
look twice as good. He is a very talented fella.”McCrea’s co-star, Randolph Scott, retired from the mot
picture business following completion of his work on Ride the H
Country, leaving behind a distinguished career. He is now a priv
businessman in Southern California and declines to give intervieor “talk about old movies.” In a phone conversation, he did,
however, make the following statement about his experience wit
Peckinpah: “Sam, in my estimation, is one of the top directors—
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
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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 Peckinpah’s luck took over….MGM
employed a full-time staff of cutters under the direction of Margaret
Booth, MGM’s editor-in-chief, who had begun her career as an
editor working for D.W. Griffith before MGM had even beenformed. As a consequence, MGM could easily have decided to take
the film as shot and turn it over to Booth for routine editing by astaff editor with minimal interference from Peckinpah on the
“director’s 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 fourteenweeks, Santillo taught him how to edit.”…
[Santillo:] The thing that’s really difficult in cutting for
Sam is that he shoots a lot of film, but it’s 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. Sam’s footage is just the opposite. And Sam knows
every inch of that film. You’ll almost be finished with a picture, andSam will look at it, and he’ll say there was such and such a shot and
to cut it in. And Sam doesn’t care how long it takes. You’ve got to
find it because it is essential to Sam’s 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 atthe end of the film. Margaret Booth had seen the dailies and said:
‘This is the worst footage I’ve ever seen. It’s 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 they’re standing there in the open. It’s ridiculous!’
“At any rate, I had done montage for Metro for years, and
during the Second World War I had worked for the military censorsat the Pentagon. We’d get the footage shot by the Army, and we’d
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 inthe picture, Sam was upset because he didn’t 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 thescreen], 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 I’d cut them too short
already.“So we went to the screening room and looked at what I’d
cut, and after the sequence was over Sam looked at me, smiled, and
said, ‘You know, you’re 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 g
me credit for teaching him how to ‘flash cut’ like that.”…
A Time review: “This story could have been sheer
slumgullion, but under Sam Peckinpah’s tasteful direction, it is a
minor chef d’oeuvre among westerns.”
As a consequence of all this, the film began to be
discussed as a possible dark horse nomination for an Academy
Award in two categories, best direction and best original
screenplay. When Peckinpah learned of this, he called both Metrand the Academy and told them flatly not to bother, “If this film
nominated for best screenplay without my name on it as writer, I
will sue every one of you!” Ride the High Country received nonominations for an Academy Award that year.
Released for foreign distribution in 1963, the film, calle
by a variety of names abroad (most notably by its working title,
Guns in the Afternoon) won the Belgium International Film Fest
Grand Prix (beating out Federico Fellini’s 8 ! among others),
Mexico’s Diosa de Plata (Silver Goddess) for Best Foreign Film
well as high praise from France’s Le Conseil des Dix.
More important to Peckinpah, however, was the personvictory bound to this film. His sister, Fern Lea, recalls: “we wen
see Ride the High Country at a sneak preview, and when it was
over, I went into the ladies’ room and cried and cried because th
character played by Joel McCrea reminded me so much of myfather who had just died the year before. My father liked to quot
the Bible and could. The line ‘All I want to do is enter my hous
justified’ was a saying I often heard my father say.” This was
Peckinpah’s tribute to “the Boss.”
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Peckinpah’s real vindication as a director, however, came
for his former employer, Sol Siegel, who upon seeing the film in a
theater wrote Sam a letter that began, “Who the fuck do you think
you are...John Ford?”
Sam Peckinpah’s Feature Films. Bernard F. Dukore. University
of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1999.
Documentation on Peckinpah’s uncredited revisions ofscreenplays is abundant. “The producer Richard Lyons, and the
head of the MGM studio at that time, Sol Siegel, brought me in torewrite the N.B. Stone script [of Ride the High Country] and shoot
the picture,” says Peckinpah, for example, “and they gave me a free
hand.” According to Lyon and Joel McCrea, who played Steve
Judd, Peckinpah rewrote some 80 percent of the dialogue,
reconceived the characters of the two old westerners, and had Judd
rather than the other old-timer die at the end; furthermore,
Peckinpah’s copy of the original shooting script, which he gave to a
typist, authenticates how massive his revisions were….According to cinematographer Lucien Ballard, Peckinpah
“must have rewritten half of The Ballad of Cable Hogue while
shooting it,” and Stella Stevens, who played Hildy, maintains thatonce she signed to do the film he reconceived the role for her;
Marshall Fine flatly states that Peckinpah and Gordon Dawson
“rewrote the script, though they didn’t receive credit.” Jeb
Rosebrook, the screenwriter of credit for Junior Bonner , admits the
director “helped me a great deal” in revising the script and calls him
“a master rewrite man.”...
Peckinpah “knew Aristotle’s Poetics cold,” says PaulSeydor. It “gave him the foundations for dramatic writing,” notes
David Weddle, “and he became a strong believer in the
philosopher’s theory that great drama provides an audience with a
catharsis through which they can purge their own pain, rage, and
fear.” Such contemporary French writings as Sartre’s No Exit andThe Flies, adds Weddle, also fascinated him….
Complexities mark characters in Ride the High Country.
Joshua Knudsen’s language and rules of conduct cue audiences to
consider him not only a harsh and inflexible religious fanatic, an
unyielding, moralistic despot who may have driven his wife, Hester
(probably named after the heroine of The Scarlet Letter ), to seekaffection elsewhere—that is, to commit adultery—but also a
tyrannical father….Although Peckinpah rewrote a great deal of
Richard E. Lyons’s screenplay, as Weddle points out, he “madeonly one structural change.” Yet this change “was crucial.” Weddle
says, “Instead of Westrum getting killed in the final gun battle, he
switched things around; Judd would die and Westrum would
survive. It was an inspired move, not only because it flew in the
face of the genre’s conventions (the villain must always die for his
sins), but because it threw the story’s theme into sharp focus. With
a few quick strokes of the pen, Peckinpah had made Westrum the
protagonist and the upstanding Judd the antagonist.”
WESTERNS ON U.S. TV, 1950-2000: Action in the Afternoon, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., T
Adventures of Champion, The Adventures of Cyclone Malone, T
Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, The Adventures of Jim BowThe Adventures of Kit Carson, The Adventures of Lariat Sam, T
Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, The Adventures of Spin and Marty,
Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, The Alaskans, Alias Smith andJones, Annie Oakley, Barbary Coast, Bat Masterson, Best of theWest, The Big Valley, Black Saddle, Bonanza, Boots and Saddle
Bordertown, Branded, BraveStarr (animation), Brave Eagle, Bre
Maverick, Broken Arrow, Bronco, Buckskin, Buffalo Bill Jr., Th
Californians, Casey Jones, Cheyenne, The Chisholms, The Cisco
Kid, Cimarron City, Cimarron Strip, Circus Boy, Colt .45, The
Cowboys, Custer, The Dakotas, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett,
Deadwood, Death Valley Days, The Deputy, Destry, Dick PoweZane Grey Theater, Dirty Sally, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,
Dundee and the Culhane, Dusty's Trail, Empire, Father Murphy,
Four Feather Falls (puppet show), Frontier, Frontier Circus, Fron
Doctor, Frontier Justice, F Troop, The Gabby Hayes Show, The
Gene Autry Show, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,
Gunslinger, Guns of Paradise (originally, Paradise), The Guns oWill Sonnett, Gunsmoke, Harts of the West, Have Gun – Will
Travel, Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans, Hec Ramsey, H
Come the Brides, The High Chaparral, Hondo, Hopalong Cassid
Hotel de Paree, How the West Was Won, Into the West, The Iro
Horse, Jefferson Drum, Judge Roy Bean, Johnny Ringo, Kung F
Lancer, Laramie, Laredo, Law of the Plainsman, Lawman, TheLazarus Man, Legacy, Legend, The Legend of Jesse James, The
Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Little House on the Prairie, The
Lone Ranger, The Loner, Lonesome Dove, Lonesome Dove - Th
Outlaw Years, Mackenzie's Raiders, The Magnificent Seven, AMan Called Shenandoah, The Man From Blackhawk, Man With
a Gun, The Marshal of Gunsight Pass, Maverick, The Monroes,
Friend Flicka, Nichols, Northwest Passage, The Oregon Trail, TOutcasts, Outlaws, Overland Trail, Paradise (later Guns of
Paradise), Pistols 'n' Petticoats, Ponderosa, Pony Express, The
Quest, The Range Rider, Rango, Rawhide, The Rebel, Red Ryde
Redigo, The Restless Gun, The Rifleman, Riverboat, The RoadWest, The Rough Riders, The Rounders, The Roy Rogers Show
The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show, Saber Rider and the Star
Sheriffs, Sara, Shane, Sheriff of Cochise, Shotgun Slade, Sky Ki
Stagecoach West, State Trooper, Steve Donovan, Western Mars
Stoney Burke, Sugarfoot, Tales of the Texas Rangers, Tales ofWells Fargo, The Tall Man, Tate, Temple Houston, Tombstone
Territory, Trackdown, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, 26 Me
Two Faces West, Union Pacific, The Virginian, Wagon Train,
Wanted: Dead or Alive, The Westerner, Whiplash, WhisperingSmith, Wichita Town, The Wide Country, The Wild Wild West,
Wildside, Wrangler, Yancy Derringer, Young Maverick, The
Young Pioneers, The Young Riders, Zorro.
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Peckinpah—RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY—
COMING UP IN THE SPRING 2010 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XX:
Mar 2 Costa-Gavras Z 1969
Mar 16 Peter Yates, The Friends of Eddie Coyle 1973Mar 23 John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence 1974
Mar 30 Stanley Kubrick, The Shining 1980
Apr 6 Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot 1981Apr 13 Federico Fellini, Ginger & Fred , 1985Apr 20 Michael Mann, Collateral 2004
CONTACTS:
...email Diane Christian: [email protected]
…email Bruce Jackson [email protected]
...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected]
....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/
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
Michael Lee Jackson & Warren Oates, 1976