Sam Peckinpah

When the AFI top 100 movies are mentioned, a lot of adjectives could come to mind: great, prestigious, accomplished, old, stuffy. Yet, one adjective that very few people would go to is “badass.” I mean, it’s hard to put Swing Time or The Sound of Music into that category. Still…

We Can Work It Out — directed by Sam Peckinpah; starring Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Ben Johnson, Al Lettieri, Sally Struthers To witness Steve McQueen in his prime, kicking ass like it’s personal — and God help you if it ever was — is to experience nothing less than the action-movie equivalent of Monica Bellucci’s tits…

No One Here Gets Out Alive — directed by Sam Peckinpah; starring Warren Oates, Isela Vega, Robert Webber, Gig Young, Helmut Dantine After being screwed in the ass by various producers and powers-that-were for thirteen-odd years, Sam Peckinpah simply made lubing up a part of his morning routine. So along comes producer Martin Baum, with the backing…

(My original review of Straw Dogs can be found here.) I’ve wandered high and I’ve wandered low. Sailed over peaks and scraped valleys. Consulted both oracles and fools. And yet, closure eludes me. Something still eats away at my soul, gnaws away at my very being even as I type…

I Am Just a Monkey Man and I’m Glad You Are a Monkey Woman, Too, Babe — directed by Sam Peckinpah; starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna Unruly child that it was, the New Hollywood movement of the late-Vietnam-to-Watergate era thought it could spend eternity tear-assing through the lobby of staid Mainstream Cinema, overturning plants and setting off cherry bombs without so much as…

My normal routine with these blogs is to perform something of a formal and thematic analysis of a work of art that has grabbed my attention and discussing it in relation to its aesthetic or historic context, with film being the primary interest. Within that broad venture, I’ve found that…

A feverish Neo-Western featuring an aces Warren Oates performance returns to Blu-ray — After Alfredo Garcia impregnates and abandons the daughter of a wealthy crime lord, El Jefe places a million-dollar bounty on Garcia’s head, sending the Mexican underground scrambling after him. Swept up in the chase is Bennie (Warren Oates, whose Peckinpah-borrowed sunglasses are almost glued to his eye sockets), who plays…