Word: peckinpah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only that violence is suddenly more explicit--it is certainly that--but now it is also expertly crafted. Roman Polanski is simply too technically proficient to be dismissed as a dealer in shock value. Sam Peckinpah is not just fascinated by violence, he is good...
...chilling for its apparent dispassion. Yet Rydell and the screenwriters seem to be congratulating them on their new-found machismo. The Cowboys is no investigation of the inherent evil of the young, like Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica. Nor does it have the awful irony of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (TIME, Dec. 20), in which heroism turned into savagery. Here savagery is seen as heroism...
...local objection has been raised against the "politics" of the film, as revealed by the portrait of the workers. An accusing cry of crypto-fascism, to be exact. Peckinpah, of course, probably couldn't care less about what passes for political discussion in Cambridge. (It is unfortunate that few good grumbles about "chicken-shit radicals and jack-ass judges" were clipped by ABC Pictures). He knows, as few political acceptables do, that when you hit rock-bottom in certain societies the only thing that cheers you up is someone else's funeral...
...Peckinpah is honest with his working-men. He even suggests that the final bloodbath would not have come about had they been integrated into a satisfying town-life: When the sheriff is accidentally murdered, triggering off the final slaughter, even the more intelligent of the group feel, well, that's it, we're all goners, accomplices to the drunk who killed the sheriff. Law to them is something incomprehensible, to be avoided at all costs. And they are cut off from any unifying social impulse which would make them answer to something beyond the law of the jungle...
Straw Dogs won't gratify those who've looked to Peckinpah in the past for the gnaried experience and hard-headed appraisal of American life which so rarely make it to the movies. It displays more skill, in all technical departments, than the subject matter deserves: The fact that Peckinpah can manipulate photography, cutting, setting, staging, acting like the Bergman of Shame and Anna matters not, if, in the final analysis, he can't fully express his soul. If Peckinpah wants to stick with his violent obsessions, he should light into the institutions most permeated. He should also be "cruel...