Sam Peckinpah names his favourite western movies: “They’re always too long but they’re fun to watch”
As a filmmaker who emerged in the early 1960s and worked within the confines of the studio system, Sam Peckinpah was always going to end up directing his fair share of westerns, and cinema will be forever grateful that one of them went down in history as among the greatest ever made.
It may have been hugely controversial at the time of its release, but The Wild Bunch was a landmark moment not just for the western, but the medium as a whole. Utilising cutting-edge stylistic techniques that would go on to become massively influential, Peckinpah didn’t skimp on the violence, either.
The maverick auteur never met a boundary he didn’t want to push, and while there was plenty of outrage in 1969 when audiences were subjected to bloodlust the likes of which they’d never seen before, the impact made by The Wild Bunch reverberated through decades.
Not that it was his only dalliance with the Old West, far from it, in fact. Peckinpah’s first five features were all westerns, with The Deadly Companions, Ride the High Country, and Major Dundee coming before The Wild Bunch, and the more comedically-inclined The Ballad of Cable Hogue came immediately after.
In fact, eight of Peckinpah’s 14 films in total occupied the parameters of the genre, with the contemporary Junior Bonner being followed by the widely-acclaimed Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In short, he knew his way around those wide-open vistas like few others, but which examples stood out to him as ranking in the top tier?
Almost inevitably, Sergio Leone was the first name that came to mind. “I like Leone’s movies and I like him, they’re always too long but they’re fun to watch,” he said to Movietone News. “A marvellous man to talk to, and I think he does really interesting things.”
As also tends to be the case when anyone discusses the greatest westerns to ever come out of Hollywood, Howard Hawks and John Ford were spotlighted, too. “I really loved Red River until the ending; the phoney arrow in the chest, and the chick,” Peckinpah continued. “Ford did a great western with Fonda and Victor Mature, My Darling Clementine.”
Befitting the director’s wayward reputation, though, he couldn’t even remember what his number one western was even called. “I think it was a serial I saw one Saturday morning on TV in Fresno, California when I was 11,” he recalled. “Forget the name of it.”
Peckinpah was one of the most famous enigmas and outsiders during his career, so in a way it makes perfect sense that he knows exactly what the best western he’s ever seen is, he’s just got no recollection of how it was titled.
