Real American Men Wanted

The journalist David Fricke observed that Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 retroactively transformed every one of the star-crossed Nirvana frontman’s songs into a suicide note. For decades before director Sam Peckinpah succumbed to a heart attack in 1984, at age 59, it was clear that every Peckinpah movie was a self-penned epitaph.Whether writ large in a cathartic act of violence, or finely etched into the weary face of a character forswearing any chance at redemption, every one of the 11 films comprising BAMCinematek’s retrospective, “Raising Hell: Sam Peckinpah” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music bears their director’s unmistakable signature. From personal treasures like the mauled 1973 masterpiece “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (8/29) to financially obligatory trash like his 1983 swan song “The Osterman Weekend” (8/28), each film in the series feels like the director’s last.“All I want,” says aging gunslinger Joel McCrea in 1962’s “Ride the High Country” (8/1), “is to enter my house justified. “Though only Peckinpah’s second feature, “Ride the High Country” is a keenly expressive eulogy to both frontier loner values and to the Western film itself.Working with cinematographer Lucien Ballard and the beginnings of a stock company of actors that would populate most of his subsequent films, Peckinpah married hard-won moral victories to rough landscapes with an intimacy and ease that belied High Country’s poverty-row budget and Peckinpah’s own lack of experience.As his maddeningly patchy career wore on, Bloody Sam, as he was known, was excoriated by studio managers for helming “runaway” productions — grueling location shoots conducted outside the influence of Hollywood moneymen and the jurisdiction of unions. At the same time, his name became synonymous with American film’s increasing reliance on graphic screen violence and prurience in the late ’60s and early ’70s.Peckinpah described his problematic 1971 masterpiece, “Straw Dogs” (8/15), as a portrait of “a bad marriage and the subtle incitement to violence.” But for many critics, the film’s graphic double rape and climactic 18-minute farmhouse siege — which employed pans of boiling water, a fire poker, a shotgun, and an enormous steel trap to dispatch a gang of drunken provincial louts — pushed well beyond the bounds of subtlety.“Straw Dogs” was released within the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry,” and all three films were singled out as indications that morally responsible popular filmmaking was moving toward extinction. But unlike Kubrick and Siegel, Peckinpah took such criticism to heart, dashing off angry letters rebuking Life Magazine’s Richard Schickel and the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who had labeled the film “a fascist work of art” in her review.Of the army of critics who spilled ink on the subject of Peckinpah’s spilling blood, ironically it was Kael who best recognized the director’s unique gifts. In an appreciation of Peckinpah’s work, written many years after her scathing condemnation of “Straw Dogs,” Kael identified in Peckinpah, “a voluptuous film sense” that girded all of his films.Like many American filmmakers of his generation, Peckinpah revered the unshakable visual clarity and flowing editorial tempos of John Ford, George Stevens, Alfred Hitchcock, Max Ophuls, and Akira Kurosawa. In spite of acute alcoholism and a talent for career self-sabotage, Peckinpah evolved something formally novel and intoxicatingly personal out of the visual language of mid-20th century narrative picture making. He was a genius of montage — the fine art of braiding disparate segments of film together into a lucid whole. A Peckinpah action sequence can be as potent an experience as actual first-person emotion and thought. In just a few minutes, the opening credits of 1972’s “The Getaway” (8/7) economically and sympathetically place the film’s lead characters in a more realistic and specific narrative reality than most directors can muster over two hours.But not every aspect of his filmmaking was handled with such care. Women have a terrible time in the films of Peckinpah, whose vision of womanhood was both needy and damning. Peckinpah’s character was initially shaped by the rough hands of his self-educated father and the suffocating apron strings of the favored daughter of one of Fresno, Calif.’s most elite families. Cheap Freudianism though it may be, the gold-hearted whores of “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (8/8) and “Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” (8/22), and the emasculating she-devils of “Straw Dogs” and “Cross of Iron” (8/16) suggest a household where mom’s words trumped dad’s fists and ultimately left a permanent bruise.Peckinpah’s colleagues remember him variously as a bullying perfectionist willing to risk anyone and anything to achieve his cutting room goals, and as a soft-spoken storyteller so shy he had to get drunk in order to direct his cast with appropriate intimacy and candor. Whatever the truth of his short life, his relatively small body of work makes one thing clear: American film has produced few mainstream genre filmmakers who, for better or worse, could put their fear, anger, love, and pain on screen as expressively and engagingly as Sam Peckinpah did.From August 1–29 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (30 Lafayette Avenue between Ashland Place and St. Francis Street, 718-636-4100.)

Real American Men Wanted

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