pat garrett and billy the kid. (d. peckinpah, w. rudy wurlitzer)

A strange, episodic masterpiece from Peckinpah. Two hours that rumble along towards a long-awaited climax, which is inevitably anti-climactic, and deliberately staged as such. One of the two protagonists has to die, this much is known, only the manner of their death will be revelatory. That Kristofferson’s Billy is killed in such an unheroic fashion speaks to the filmmaker’s sympathies. There is no glory in Pat Garrett’s victory. As in the case of The Getaway, Peckinpah is rooting for the outsider; the villains are the cattle barons who have seized the land and with whom Garrett has made an uneasy alliance. He has sold his soul, his wife tells him, and no matter how much James Coburn’s implacable countenance might try to hide this truth, he knows and we know that she’s right. The existential struggle that underpins their conflict is artfully related by a director whose subtlety is masked by the vigorous masculinity of his films. This is as insightful a deconstruction of the western myth as you could hope for, and its relevance  in an era of snake charming capitalists is as valid as ever.

A note on Dylan. His puckish performance counterpoints the machismo of the other characters. He isn’t just acting: he’s infiltrating his whole cryptic take on art into the performance. A character that goes by the name of Alias, who doesn’t use a gun, who instinctively sides with the outlaw. 

cross of iron. (d. peckinpah, w julius j. epstein, walter kelley, james hamilton)

Peckinpah’s films represent an apex macho worldview, which is so macho it permits the existence of weakness. Cross of Iron feels like it might be the apex of this apex. It takes a squadron who are perhaps in the worst situation any humans could possibly find themselves in, a German battalion on the Eastern front, (once again Crimea), as the front collapses. Peckinpah’s grand conceit, apparently financed by German money, is to have these doomed characters be German. The enemy becomes heroic, with the uber American, James Coburn, playing the fearless squadron leader. Steiner. Hence the characters are transformed into everymen, and the film lays bare the irreversible cruelty of war, no matter which side of the fence you belong to. The capacity of mankind to inflict suffering on mankind transcends historical divisions. The film itself struggles to hold up, with the director making the most of his tank and explosion budget, but its intentions feel entirely honourable. 

the getaway. (d. peckinpah, w. walter hill, jim thompson)

Peckinpah’s film feels like the sort of film they don’t make anymore. A serious movie, even though it’s all car chases and shoot-outs. Counter-cultural antiheroes. A complex relationship. Gender wars. Effortless charisma which the lead actors actually have to make an effort to ruffle.

McQueen and MacGraw exude a kind of Iconic cool which can only exist because the narrative and direction construct the parameters within which this iconic cool is allowed to flourish. One thinks of Tarantino’s use of Pitt, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and everything about that feels contrived or tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps Travolta and Jackson came closer to the real thing in Pulp Fiction, but there’s a sense that these kind of iconic figures don’t really fit into contemporary narratives. Certainly, the gender politics feel as though they belong to another era, no matter how much the film seeks to emphasise that MacGraw is just as tough as McQueen. Perhaps surprisingly in a film with this title, she is the one who does the majority of the driving. She kills bad guys too, and they are a team, even if she’s also the one who fucks up at one point, putting everything at risk. The fact that she has traded her body for McQueen’s Doc’s release is part of the unstable gender politics, but if we believe that fifty years later we have gone beyond that kind of deal, surely we are living in a fantasy world. The female body remains a token of exchange amongst powerful men, even if it’s now less acceptable to recognise this in the movies. The other day someone told me that so many of the movies that they are watching have a gay protagonist, either male or female, and this might be a way to circumvent uncomfortable truths.

However, there is perhaps another reason that the film, and it’s nerveless cool, feels so alien to today’s culture. McQueen’s Doc is a felon, a representative of the anti-establishment, and his crooked antagonists belong to the establishment. The film occurs in the hangover shadow of the Vietnam War, when faith in the system was at a low point in the USA. The counter-culture, for want of a better phrase, was seeking, in the company of Pynchon, Coppola, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith et al, another set of ethical paradigms to live by. In the intervening years, that counter-culture has been crushed, or at least co-opted, absorbed into the mainstream. It’s not so much that stepping outside the system is impossible, it’s that the moment someone goes there, their posture or pose is welcomed and monetised. So, like Pitt in Tarantino’s film, what’s left is a shell (or simulacrum) of the anti-establishment pose. By contrast McQueen and MacGraw inhabit a dirty hinterland, and are literally consigned to the rubbish dump; the only place their anti-systemic heroism can survive is across the border, in Mexico. 

bring me the head of alfredo garcia (w&d. peckinpah, w. dawson)

There are films that linger in the background, which might also be the sub-conscious. Half seen, once, on a black and white TV screen late at night in a cold Dunnington flat. Beyond remembrance. The title awaiting the day it catches up with you, nails you to the seat, and asks: what kept you so long?

The co-director is a big Peckinpah fan. I've watched Pat Garrett and Cross of Iron with him. He says Peckinpah's title sequences are worth the entrance fee alone. I'm more take it or leave it, respecting all the things for which the director is clearly to be respected, including his disreputability. However, Alfredo Garcia is another matter, a title so evocative that it conjures up films which could never be made, made out of myths which have been long since forgotten.

In other words, the film had no hope of living up to the hype my imagination had bestowed upon it. And yet... somehow, it does. Pull it off. More as a result of its rough edges than its perfection. (The quest for which dogs and demeans any film industry.) 

Once again Mexico plays its weird role in the Gringo psyche. The other side of the border, where lawlessness is the norm. Just like a McCarthy novel, the film opens in a seemingly timeless epoch, a girl sitting by a lake, approached by peones on horseback. Only when there's a brutal cut to a plane taking off do we realise this is the twentieth century. This Mexico is the place to go to lose your soul and see if there's anything left at the end. Warren Oates' character, Bennie, has already lived in Mexico City a number of years, his soul a thing of the past. Somehow the quest to locate and deliver a severed head offers him the chance of redemption. It comes as no surprise, however, that Peckinpah decided to change his ending, and ensure the pay-off that was always awaiting Bennie after his dance with the devil. A website informs that the thick shades Oates wears throughout belonged to Peckinpah: it's clear that the director of this film knew a thing or two about flirting with damnation.

But it doesn't seem entirely appropriate to talk too much about the film that exists, the one I saw on Saturday. I prefer to believe that the head Oates lugs around like a curse isn't Garcia's at all. Alfredo Garcia never existed. That head belongs to someone else, someone who's waiting to meet you, or me, at the end of some kind of line. The film's merely pointing us in the right direction. It's up to us to climb into the grave, get dirty, get thrown out of a dustcart with the love of our life, smelling of nothing like roses, get up, keep going, knowing it's only a question of time before we die in a hail of gunfire (if we're lucky) or from some other terminal conclusion. (Please, Bennie, not quietly in our sleep.) Who knows, if we're lucky, some avatar, seeking to save his or her soul, will come for our heads when we're gone, knowing they contain some kind of value which was never reckoned upon whilst they sat, proud but inane, on our shoulders.