Word: peckinpah
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...Peckinpah Memorial Prize, named after the late, occasionally great director (The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country), is awarded -- on an erratic basis, naturally -- to filmmakers whose works include the following elements...
...winner is . . . Walter Hill (once a Peckinpah writer) for Extreme Prejudice, which stars Nick Nolte as a modern-day Texas Ranger; Powers Boothe as his old buddy, now a master dope smuggler and chatty amoralist; Maria Conchita Alonso as the woman they both love; and a wild bunch from the CIA or somewhere. Their task is to supply the movie with a little mystery and a lot of obscurantist firepower, enough to drown out conventional logic's objections to a vast silliness...
Kleiler still programs the Rear Window himself, maintaining his commitment to local film, but also branching out to include obscure and cult features ranging from Russ Meyer films to little seen works of major directors like Sam Peckinpah. To keep in touch with the demands of his audience, Kleiler uses suggestion boxes. Still, he consciously steers clear of the films offerred in ordinary repertory series. "I've tried to ensure that the Rear Window, as primitive as it is, have different conditions than the usual moviehouse. We try to maintain a certain funkiness...
Director Richardson is a long way from his old terrain of kitchen sinks (A Taste of Honey) and drawing rooms (Tom Jones). He allows a few implausibilities and submits the viewer to one winsome muchacho too many. But this is still a successful invasion of Peckinpah County, where bogus high life and a quick ugly death too often intersect. The film's mercuric feeling is heightened by Ric Waite's supple zooms, pans and tracking shots, and by the whining chords of Ry Cooder's music. As for Nicholson, he shows again that he can embody...
...making an antiwar film with Seven Samurai as well; he tacked on a coda where the survivors bitterly realized that their fellow samurai had died for nothing. But we go back to that film for the kinetic charge of the battle scenes, for the lyrical action. Like Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch, Kurosawa inadvertently ended up affirming the violence he set out to condemn. Now, he has made a true anti-war film, with all the horror of battle and none of the thrill...