Word: peckinpah
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...influence in Europe and Asia, Django got no Stateside release that I know about. In fact, few spaghetti Westerns beyond the Leones were released here. Americans stuck with the Duke through True Grit and patronized the anti-Westerns of Sam Peckinpah (notably The Wild Bunch) and Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, another snowy oater). And then, bang, the genre was dead. The setting, the pace, the moral stakes all seemed so very 19th century. When the Western is periodically revived, it's not from popular demand but from the antique obsessions of powerful filmmakers...
...least as much as it does the explicit expression of death (violence). And once upon a more adventurous time in movies, such a freedom of expression seemed imminent. In the late '60s and early '70s, as American directors like Arthur Penn (in Bonnie and Clyde) and Sam Peckinpah (in everything) pioneered the use of gaudy, picturesque images of violence, European directors like Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) and Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) made the screen a place where the intimacies of adult couples could be dramatized...
...Anderson and her pin-up siblings. As for Spillane's attention to the particulars of violence, it has pretty much taken over action films, including the most ambitious ones. It's in the acrobattles of Sin City and the blood-love of Quentin Tarantino. The crimson orgasms that Sam Peckinpah brought to the screen in The Wild Bunch, Spillane had put on the page 20 years earlier, and reaped much the same condemnation...
...PECKINPAH'S LEGENDARY WESTERNS COLLECTION...
...first scene in The Wild Bunch--a swarm of red ants devouring a scorpion as children giggle at the sport--could summarize Peckinpah's view of humanity. Something in this legendary auteur, who drank and crazied himself out of a brilliant career, said, "Life is awful. Ain't it fun to watch?" This DVD package spotlights two wild westerns (The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) and two mild ones (Ride the High Country and The Ballad of Cable Hogue), all paying tribute to colorful, mournful rogues whose time had passed. For Peckinpah, elegy was autobiography...