Word: peckinpah
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Well, given an auteur who's also a good director, he will manage to come up with as good an explication of his films as most critics; possibly, because of his fine eve for visuals, a better one. He does champion such out-of-current mood directors as Peckinpah and Renoir; he is generally concerned with instituting fashion according to his own "impassioned" integrity rather than merely following the fashionable (though his recent 2001 recantation was curious indeed). With such developments as his labeling of Fellini as the "Busby Berkeley of metaphysics," and a latent inclination towards admirable historical research...
...year's western in which Marshal Cogburn observes that "ya can't serve papers on a rat." Perhaps the President's interpretation of Chisum ought to be balanced by the message of an earlier western. No film has understood itself or its kind better than Sam Peckinpah's classic, Ride the High Country (1962), where youth meets frontier man rendered obsolete by the encroaching century. Says one character: "My father says there's only right and wrong, good and evil, nothing in between. It isn't that simple...
Cable dies as must have been preordained: a motorcar starts rolling down a sandhill and the frontiersman, dealing with the machine as if it were an unruly stallion, is run down by progress. It is a measure of Peckinpah's great skill that he makes such a mechanical symbolic device not only work but seem perfectly fitting and inevitable...
Lickerish Cleric. Not all of Peckinpah's devices work so well. An engraved face on a $5 bill waggles its eyes suggestively and needlessly as Cable ponders spending the money on Hildy. But such isolated faults seem insignificant alongside Peckinpah's larger virtues. Even his rambling lends the story a leisurely lyricism rare in films today...
...actors all perform immaculately. Jason Robards gives the screen performance of his life. Stella Stevens is cynical and wistful with equal facility, and David Warner is wonderfully funny and moving as the lickerish cleric. Together with Peckinpah's usual stock company of Martin and Jones, they make the old desert as real and recent as yesterday. With this film, Peckinpah unmistakably becomes the successor to John Ford, not only as a director of westerns but as an American film artist...