TSPDT - Sam Peckinpah

Sam Peckinpah

TOP 100

Oddities and One-Shots

New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors

►501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

See Also

Budd Boetticher

Clint Eastwood

John Ford

Sam Fuller

Walter Hill

John Huston

Sergio Leone

Anthony Mann

Arthur Penn

Don Siegel

John Sturges

John Woo

Director / Screenwriter / Producer

1925 - 1984

Born February 21, Fresno, California, USA

Key Production Country: USA

Key Genres: Western, Revisionist Western, Action

Key Collaborators: Lucien Ballard (Cinematographer), Jerry Fielding (Composer), Ted Haworth (Production Designer), L.Q. Jones (Character Player), Warren Oates (Leading Character Player), Ben Johnson (Leading Character Player), Slim Pickens (Character Player), R.G. Armstrong (Character Player), James Coburn (Leading Player), David Warner (Leading Player)

Recommended: Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Getaway (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

Worth a Look: The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Straw Dogs (1971), The Killer Elite (1975), Cross of Iron (1977)

Links: [ IMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [ Film Reference ] [ The Films of Sam Peckinpah ] [ Last of the Desperadoes: Dueling with Sam Peckinpah ] [ The High Hat Feature ] [ Authors Den Article (2004) ]

Books: [ If They Move...Kill 'Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah ] [ Peckinpah: The Western Films - A Reconsideration ] [ Sam Peckinpah's Feature Films ] [ Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah ] [ Peckinpah: Portrait in Montag ] [ Entered His House Justified: The Making of the Films of Sam Peckinpah ] [ Justified Lives: Morality & Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah ] [ This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah ] [ Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies ] [ Peckinpah's Women: A Reappraisal of the Portrayal of Women in the Period Westerns of Sam Peckinpah ] [ The Films of Sam Peckinpah ]

DVD's: [ Amazon ]

1,000 Greatest Films: Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), Straw Dogs (1971), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)


	"His preoccupation with the omnipresence of violence and the ambivalence of morality made for complex characters, never sure of their identity or their moral standing. But there was nothing ambiguous about Peckinpah's own view of man as an ignoble beast, though many questioned his insistence that the gratuitous gore in his films was in truth an expression of the director's quest for a better world." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)

	"American director who has made some of the most exciting gun duels and action scenes ever put on screen. Nor was it all blood and thunder: the human spirit was never better celebrated than in some of Peckinpah's early work. Unfortunately, after The Wild Bunch, things did not develop quite as one would have hoped." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, 1999)

	"The more that emerges on Peckinpah the man, the clearer it is that he was in brazen pursuit of his own fantasies - and expecting others to pay for it. A very dangerous man, because he could be so damn good. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid makes Clint Eastwood look like a carpetbagger." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)

	"The dying of the American West has been the subject of his best efforts (Ride the High Country, 62; The Wild Bunch, 69; The Ballad of Cable Hogue, 70). Lately, however, he's taken to projects containing mindless violence, limp plots, and surface characters (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, 75; The Killer Elite, 75)." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)