Word: peckinpah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...director Sam Peckinpah and writer Jeb Rosebrook want us to learn more about Junior Bonner and through him. Bonner is the not inglorious hero of his film, both his attitude towards the world and his personal morality make him so. Bonner knows that most of Prescott is for shit, pure and simple; that most of the people never appreciated that Arizona morning, and hustle like carney hucksters to package the West which gives them their identity and heritage and sell it for a price--if it makes surviving easier. Junior can't settle for that mediocrity, can't stand...
BONNER REPEATS a line used by Peckinpah in 1970 to seal the fate of the love-making preacher in the comedy-romance. The Ballad of Cable Hogue: when a svelte rodeo groupie asks him why he's so reticent about making an emotional commitment, he says, "I'm just passing through." His life-fulfillment is limited to the peak experiences of the rodeo. He's just drifting, and if he sounds heroic and his acts seem attractive, that's our problem as well...
...really more in touch with his own dark spirituality? Here, as in Sam Peckinpah's recent Straw Dogs - another, artistically less successful movie about a test - the director's prodigious skill cannot conceal a rather shabby and cynical intellectual construct. In Deliver ance, man must become one with na ture in order to survive. But for Boorman and Dickey, becoming one apparently means becoming bestial. Deliverance comes not through a knowledge of nature's most primitive and powerful forces but through a capitulation to them...
Ride the High Country. Sam Peckinpah's superb second feature, one of the best American films of the '60's. Though elegiac in tone, the film recognizes the death of the frontier and of heroic values along with it. And some very modern psychological truths are introduced in incredible scenes at a mining camp, Sunday, noon, CHANNEL...
...Ballad of Cable Hogue. Writer-director Sam Peckinpah's best film, a bawdy tragicomedy which epitomizes his oldtimer's vision of the diminishing West and the downfall of the American individualists it bred. Lyrical. With Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. PUBLIX CINEMA. Ballad...