Sam Peckinpah: A Retrospective

When I told Mark Andrew Edwards that I was going to tackle the filmography of Sam Peckinpah, he replied, "That's strong whiskey." I think that may have been a bit of an understatement. This is the man who brought the culturally significant bloodbath at the end of his revisionist Western The Wild Bunch, who filmed the sexual…

Advertisement

Sam Peckinpah: The Definitive Ranking

Peckinpah is hard whiskey, as a friend told me, and he was right. His best films are uncompromising views at violence, masculinity, and friendship in an uncaring world. His worst films are victims of his later, much deeper descents into alcoholism and drug addiction. Sam Peckinpah's work is hard-edged and rough, not the sort of…

The Osterman Weekend

#14 in my ranking of Sam Peckinpah's filmography. The disaster that was the production of Convoy (it was financially successful, but not enough to save Peckinpah's professional reputation) knocked him out of work for several years. Don Siegel, one of Peckinpah's early mentors, needed some second unit work done on his film Jinxed!, and Peckinpah…

Convoy

#12 in my ranking of Sam Peckinpah's filmography. The incoherence of late Peckinpah continues with this new effort to find a commercial hit. Based on the popular song and in an effort to replicate the financial success of Smokey and the Bandit, did eventually become financially successful, the most successful of Peckinpah's career. However, the…

Cross of Iron

#9 in my ranking of Sam Peckinpah's filmography. With The Killer Elite, it felt like Sam Peckinpah had simply lost the ability to make a movie, not just a good movie, but a movie period. Unfocused, lethargic, and pretty uniformly unentertaining or enlightening, it was a once talented director simply lost in material he didn't…