Word: peckinpah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are two films which might have made this list if I have seen them Tokyo Story and The Rulong Class. And a couple of others should be cited as intelligent entertainment--Sam Peckinpah's Bonner, hampered slightly by unbelievable dialogue but far superior in his latest piece of backwork (The Getaway) and Slaughterhouse-Five George Roy Hill's skilled adaptation of Vonnegut's novel...
...starts at the movies. The furor over violence in movies reached its crescendo with A Clockwork Orange, but it started with Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, and no discussion of cinematic fascism is complete without Straw Dogs. At the beginning of the year came the realization, by Pauline Kael and others, that the movies had begun to pipe fascism into the mind of Joe Moviegoer. That the primitive, unquestionably macho preachings of Peckinpah and Kubrick, as well as the less subtle portrayal of Dirty Harry Kellerman by Don Siegel, depicted a cultural regression...
There's a paradox. You must watch these films with the simultaneous realization that you cannot withdraw from what you consider violence, (and here I'm speaking essentially of the Peckinpah films) because the violence that surrounds you daily exceeds your wildest sadistic dreams; and despite that knowledge, what you're watching on the screen is a fiction. It didn't happen. The movies are at once totally representative, And not representative...
...Wild Bunch. Both a celebration of the Old West and a lament for its passing. Sam Peckinpah wrote and directed this epic based on the exploits of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang. Set in South Texas at the turn of the century. Peckinpah uses Mexico as the last frontier for dying gunmen, who finally rise above themselves and fight for some ideal when a revolutionary member of the group is captured by a Mexican warlord with whom the riders did business. The situations are no less important than the action, which is violent. Well acted, beautifully directed and photographed...
Wild Bunch. Peckinpah's most influential film, and one of his best. Based on the exploits of the Hole in the Wall gang, it tells the story of the fading bandits last big putsch with unrestrained lyricism and biting ironies...