Nihilistic, anarchic, repugnant: Sam Peckinpah's 10 best films – ranked!

The Guardian

20-02-2025

After making his name as a director of westerns, Sam Peckinpah was given his first shot at making a major studio film – an epic about a tyrannical cavalry officer (Charlton Heston) leading an expedition into Mexico. The production set a template for later Peckinpah films – heavy drinking, personality clashes, battles with the suits, and a final cut not matching the director's vision. Major Dundee was a victim of its chaotic ambition and it's easy to see why it flopped on release: even in the 2005 restored version, it is hopelessly unfocused, taking in Dundee's Moby-Dick-like mission to track down an Apache chief, the dynamics of the US civil war, encounters with the French army and an unconvincing romantic interlude. But it's interestingly flawed, a sort of dry run for The Wild Bunch, and Richard Harris is entertaining as Benjamin Tyreen, the Irishman who leads the Confederate prisoners in Dundee's ragtag army.
Peckinpah swapped the wild west for the West Country for this still potent experiment in nastiness, later banned from home release in the UK until 2002 because of its controversial rape scene. Dustin Hoffman and Susan George play the middle-class couple who move to her old village only to be tormented by the leering locals and provoked into an orgy of bloodletting. It's a product of a very specific time, when film-makers were newly free to explore the nature of violence and question the limits of liberalism – other examples being A Clockwork Orange and Dirty Harry. While influential on action cinema and prescient in its unpicking of bourgeois unease, it is ultimately gruelling and unenlightening – and a grim caricature of Cornwall.
The second of two back-to-back films Peckinpah made with Steve McQueen, this riveting thriller is very much a vehicle for its star, who had approval over the final cut and recruited Quincy Jones to provide a jazzy score to replace the work of regular Peckinpah collaborator Jerry Fielding. McQueen and Ali MacGraw – who began an affair on set and later married – play Doc and Carol McCoy, a dour latter-day Bonnie and Clyde on the run in Texas after a heist unravels. Peckinpah handles the tense action sequences with consummate professionalism but of all the films in his 1969-74 golden stretch, it's the least personal or thought-provoking.
Peckinpah's talent for shooting action scenes made him a natural fit for directing a war film; his only foray into the genre, told unusually from the German perspective, had the misfortune to be released at the same time as Star Wars and has been overlooked ever since. Amid the carnage of the eastern front in 1943, contemptuous platoon leader Steiner (James Coburn) clashes with his arrogant aristocratic superior Stransky (Maximilian Schell). Nazism is little discussed and arguably downplayed (the only enthusiastic party member suffers a hideous punishment); this is essentially a searing portrait of a band of Brüder operating under the extreme duress of brutal warfare, and as such, it's less orthodox than it first seems. It proved to be his last decent film, he made just two more – the banal trucker comedy Convoy (1978) and the turgid thriller The Osterman Weekend (1983) – and then, in a curious coda, directed two music videos for Julian Lennon before his death at the age of 59.
Nihilistic, anarchic, repugnant: this is Peckinpah unbound, let loose without studio interference on a low budget in Mexico, and it's not pretty. And yet this agonising ordeal of self-destruction is utterly compelling and at times pitch-black funny. Warren Oates channels Peckinpah himself as Bennie, a washed-up, shades-wearing piano player turned bounty hunter searching for the grisly proof that a man who impregnated a crime lord's daughter is dead. Bennie won't give up on his macabre quest despite his life disintegrating around him; like many Peckinpah characters, he is going down in a blaze of something, but it's not going to be glory.
There are enough brilliant moments in this bewitching but sometimes bewildering western to convince you there is a masterpiece struggling to emerge from the various edits that have surfaced since MGM took the film off Peckinpah's hands at the end of a deeply troubled production. Coburn gives a career-best performance as Pat Garrett, the sheriff hired by Big Cattle to bring down his old buddy, unrepentant outlaw Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson). Peckinpah assembled a fantastic ensemble cast of western legends but there are just too many characters, many of whom are gunned down quickly. Bob Dylan is distracting as Billy's sidekick Alias, but he also provides the spellbinding soundtrack (featuring Knockin' on Heaven's Door) that helps create the film's lyrical mood.
This nuanced, understated family drama demonstrates how versatile 'Bloody Sam' could be: there's nothing more violent here than a comic bar-room brawl. A wistful Steve McQueen plays Junior 'JR' Bonner, an ageing rodeo rider unable or unwilling to move with the times – a classic western archetype in a contemporary setting – unlike his vulgar entrepreneur brother Curly (Joe Don Baker). Ida Lupino gives an outstandingly intelligent performance as Junior's mother, and the film provides a documentary-like snapshot of Prescott, Arizona, in the summer of 1971. It's a great shame it flopped, and that Peckinpah didn't make more films like it. As the director himself put it: 'I made a film where nobody got shot and nobody went to see it.'
Jason Robards, so often a fine supporting actor, takes centre stage in an inventive, eccentric and unpredictable tale of a man left for dead in the Arizona desert, only to strike water and set up a successful way station. Robards makes magnificent sense of Cable Hogue's contradictions, there's touching support from Stella Stevens as the obligatory golden-hearted sex worker, and David Warner's randy preacher is funny, alarming and sometimes profound. Not everything works – the Benny Hill-style fast motion sequences haven't aged well – but at its best this is a wise and humane film that comes to a strange but quietly astonishing conclusion.
After working in TV and making a solid debut with The Deadly Companions (1961), Peckinpah really hit his stride with his second film, a supremely assured western that tapped into the elegiac strain that became his hallmark in the genre. Veteran icons Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are the uneasily paired old friends tasked with transporting gold down from a rough mining town, scene of a disturbingly riotous wedding. 'All I want is to enter my house justified,' intones McCrea's Steve Judd, laying down a marker for all those Peckinpah protagonists trying to make it through a broken world with a modicum of integrity. There is vivid cinematography by Lucien Ballard, in his first of five collaborations with Peckinpah.
After failing with Major Dundee and then getting fired from The Cincinnati Kid, Peckinpah found himself in the wilderness, his reputation partly restored by the deeply moving TV drama Noon Wine. But the zeitgeist of the late 1960s – the war in Vietnam, political assassinations and the collapse of screen censorship – suited Peckinpah's temperament and appetite for pushing boundaries. When he got his chance to return to a big screen project, he produced his masterpiece, a western that called time on the genre while inaugurating a new era of cinema.
The Wild Bunch became notorious for the unprecedentedly bloody gun battles that bookend the film; viewed today, the violence hardly seems excessive or gratuitous, more of a corrective to the hundreds of films that had airbrushed the harsh realities of the west. It is also superbly choreographed, thanks to Lou Lombardo's pioneering and hugely influential editing techniques: rapid cutting and varied frame rates, including those slow-motion death spasms that became a Peckinpah staple. What is just as striking is how unpleasant so many of the characters are: the eponymous bunch are reprehensible outlaws, indifferent to the collateral damage their exploits cause, trailed by a loutish posse and locked in a fatal embrace with a brutish Mexican general. Yet somehow we root for the ruthless, brooding Pike Bishop (a sensationally good William Holden) and his comrades as their options narrow and they search for some kind of morality and meaning in the dying days of the old west.