Word: peckinpah
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...Peckinpah is not making any easy comment about frontiers closing in and man losing his roots in nature and primal passions. He's pushed those themes to their furthest extremes before. Peckinpah here, for the first time, is able to treat all his characters without romanticization, with respectful distance, not close-up passion. He has come to a more nature viewpoint. What he decries is a country that can't prepare its men for the world they grow up in, stunting in youth the lives of those men and the face of the land they desecrate and the structures they...
...mother, at least, breaks out on her own in a levelheaded fashion, planting vegetables for herself and keeping boarders until Curly buys her townhouse too. But it's more realistic, more consistent within the film, and more hopeful for Peckinpah's future that the director does not allow the traditional American "back to the garden" virtues which he celebrated in Cable Hogue to be successful. The modern world is not the Old West (which in itself was not precisely the Lockean state of nature that Peckinpah has sometimes made it out to be). There...
...looking for it. One of the most heartening things about Junior Bonner is the growth it shows in its director. Peckinpah looks honestly at the world with a view he could only extend into grotesquerie in Straw Dogs. He knows this Arizona territory, and thus is in such a position of strength that he can love the fools without killing them. Working from that base, if he can now move toward American subjects set in more pertinent modern points farther east and west, he might become one of the first American filmmakers to inform or enrage his audiences...
...railroad station heightened by the handy entrance of a train--stick out like Irish bulls in a full corral. There is interplay between Ace (Robert Preston) and Mrs. Bonner which says more about responsibility in male-female relationships (and with the slightest means) than I would ever have thought Peckinpah capable of. "All you are is dreams and sweet talk," says the woman. "And I sweetened the dreams as well, if you remember," says Ace. Ida Lupino, magnificent as the wife, hardens her look though there are tears in her eyes, and slaps his face. "I sure as hell deserved...
There are flaws in the film, as there are in every Peckinpah production, but they are mostly due to Jeb Rosebrook's dialogue. Ace's language is sometimes that of a 19th century vaudevillian, and if God only knows what rodeo groupies talk like, it must be something different than what is said here. But there is enough full achieved in this film--with the aid of photographer Lucien Ballard, composer Jerry Fielding, and the setting and people of Prescott (where the first pro rodeo was held in 1888)-to reaffirm my faith in Sam Peckinpah as the first American...