Convoy

"I hate somebody else paying my dues."


Background
With 'Cross of Iron' roundly ignored at the box office and Peckinpah out of pocket to the tune of the $90,000 he put into the ailing production, it was imperative that he direct something commercial. That something was 'Convoy'. Its source material was a novelty song by one-hit-wonder C.W. McCall. Its target audience were the undiscerning cinema-goers who had made 'Smokey and the Bandit' such a hit and would go on to embrace 'The Cannonball Run' and its unholy trinity of car crashes, dumbass sheriffs and low-brow humour a few years later.

Peckinpah spent most of the shoot incapacitated. Various people pitched in to direct scenes, including James Coburn who had taken a position as second unit director in order to garner some behind-the-camera experience and Katy Haber, Peckinpah's partner at the time. When he did call the shots, he disregarded the script and had his cast ad-lib. As Weddle puts it in his biography, "simple, straightforward scenes ... turned into amorphous, convoluted and often incomprehensible improvisations". This technique, coupled with Peckinpah's frequent absences from the set, resulted in 'Convoy' wrapping almost a fortnight overschedule and a whopping $5 million overbudget - almost twice what it had been budgeted at. Peckinpah had shot nearly twice the amount of footage as on 'The Wild Bunch'. By the time he got to the editing room, he gave up. For the first time in his career, Peckinpah didn't find himself locked in a battle with producers over final cut and reductions to running time. He simply, without even completing a preview cut, turned the whole thing over to the studio and walked away.

None of this boded well for future projects, but all sins would doubtless have been forgiven after it took more than $46 million worldwide ... except for the stories that had filtered back to Tinseltown: stories of Peckinpah fucked up on booze and the Columbian marching powder, slumped in his director's chair or holed up in his trailer, the production at a standstill and the budget spiralling. It would be five years before he directed again.



Synopsis
Bunch of truckers. Poor little rich girl. Corrupt cop. Truck-stop fight. Convoy to the state line. Media coverage. Interstate police response. Political shenanigans. National Guard. River bridge. Truck vs tank. That's it, really.

Analysis
There's a diminishing aspect to Peckinpah's approach to commercial/director-for-hire projects:

'The Getaway' - demonstrates solid, professional craftsmanship.

'The Killer Elite' - stages entire film as satirical comment on the emptiness of the material.

'Convoy' - thinks "fuck it" and gets wasted.

It's an easy film to knock, is 'Convoy'. There's no depth to it. The narrative is thinner than rice paper and strictly by-the-numbers. The characters are cardboard cut-outs. The truckers are two-fisted, hard-ass types who go by ridiculous 'handles' (CB identities) like Rubber Duck, Pig Pen and Black Widow, and spout borderline incoherent dialogue such as "what's your twenty" and "back 'em down, we got a bear in a plain brown wrapper". (The latter, according to my Gibberish-to-English Dictionary, translates as "slow down, there's a police officer in an unmarked car.") The action consists of big rigs ploughing through buildings and roadblocks and police cars getting trashed. The soundtrack is an endless variation on McCall's jangly, drawly hit single. What works quite well as a three-minute slice of vinyl rapidly becomes the aural equivalent of bastinado when expanded to fill huge tranches of narrative-free footage of trucks rolling through desolate landscapes.

There's some small pleasure in ticking off some of the Peckinpah Irregulars: Kris Kristofferson notches up his third appearance for Sam as Rubber Duck, the bearded, muscle-rippling truck driver who leads the convoy; Rubber Duck has a healthy disrespect for authority and a disinclination to wearing a shirt. This must be what appeals to poor little rich girl Melissa (Ali MacGraw, making it a second Peckinpah role after 'The Getaway') - she certainly wastes no time checking out his sleeper cab. Elsewhere, Ernest Borgnine and Burt Young also notch up their second go-around for Peckinpah. The performances, though, range from hammy (Borgnine) to comatose (Kristofferson) to just plain bad (MacGraw).

All things considered, it would be easy to call 'Convoy' Sam Peckinpah's worst film, end the review here and slouch off for a drink. But there's still something about the film that fixes it thematically in Peckinpah's ouevre. Maybe it's the whole truckers as modern day cowboys thing. Get behind that and you can go off on a spurious tangent that allows you to compare the corrupt synergy of law (Borgnine's bribe-taking cop 'Dirty' Lyle) and politics (Seymour Cassel's showboating governor) with the conspiracy behind the Kid's death in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'; that allows you to connect Rubber Duck's suicidal attempt to ram a tank with his truck to Billy's decision to return to Fort Sumner in defiance of Chisum and Governor Wallace; that allows you to liken the truckers' rescue of Spider Mike from a racist attack by the cops to the vengeful beating the Reverend Dahlstrom administers after one of the volunteers is racially harrassed in 'Major Dundee'; that allows you to bracket Rubber Duck and his leadership of the convoy with Pike Bishop and the Bunch and Sergeant Steiner and his platoon.

But as soon as you've categorised 'Convoy' as essentially (though definitely not quintessentially) a Peckinpah movie, the thorny question arises: how much of 'Convoy' can Peckinpah actually be credited with?

'Convoy' is the least of Peckinpah's movies, the project he brought the least involvement and least enthusiasm to, and yet there is so much about it - even if these things are trace elements rather than leitmotifs - that makes it indubitably a Sam Peckinpah film. And you know what the crazy thing is? A 105-minute, C&W-scored, truck-porn movie aimed squarely at the hick shitkicker market shouldn't be as troublesome as this to get a handle on.

The Killer Elite

"Lay me seven to five, I’ll take the little guy."

Background
In what was starting to become a pattern, Peckinpah responded to the box office failure of a small, personal picture (‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’) by latching onto a commercial assignment. He had conjured massive returns and a storming comeback for Steve McQueen with ‘The Getaway’ after ‘Junior Bonner’ flopped, and still made what was obviously a Peckinpah film. ‘The Killer Elite’ was different beast to ‘The Getaway’, though.

Adapted by Marc Norman and Sterling Silliphant from Robert Rostand’s novel ‘Monkey in the Middle’ (thank God they changed the title!), this overplotted tale of CIA shenanigans and internal power struggles had a high profile cast – headlined by James Caan and Robert Duvall – and box office potential written all over it. Unfortunately, nothing in the material interested Peckinpah and his approach to the project was the antithesis of his dedicated professionalism on ‘The Getaway’. It didn’t help that Peckinpah developed a cocaine habit on set. The drug superseded alcohol as his addiction of choice.

‘The Killer Elite’ enjoyed a successful opening weekend before audience interest dropped off in the wake appalling reviews. Nonetheless, it did enough business that Peckinpah was offered two big-budget studio productions, both anticipated to be blockbusters: ‘Superman’ (which was) and the Dino de Laurentis produced ‘King Kong’ remake (which wasn’t). Peckinpah passed on both of them to make ‘Cross of Iron’.

Synopsis
ComTeg is a shadowy covert-ops outfit, that may or may not be CIA-approved, run by Arthur Hill (Cap Collis) and Lawrence Weyburn (Gig Young). Agents Mike Locken (James Caan) and George Hansen (Robert Duvall) are assigned to babysit Russian diplomat Vorodny (Helmut Dantine) at a remote safehouse. It’s here that Hansen goes renegade, killing Vorodny and disabling Locken by shooting him in the leg. Hansen then goes underground. Locken’s recovery is slow and painful. ComTeg earmark him for a desk job, which adds insult to his quite literal injuries. Then Weyburn, apparently operating independently of Collis, offers Locken a field assignment protecting Yuen Chung (Mako), a Japanese statesman who is openly opposed to San Francisco based Triad boss Negato Toku, with the caveat that the operation could well bring him back into conflict with Hansen. Weyburn encourages Locken to put his own team together. Eager for a chance to settle the score with Hansen, Locken agrees. But is he being manipulated? Is there a bigger picture here than the Chung/Toku and Locken/Hansen antagonism?

Analysis
I’ve just wasted five minutes and 180 words on the above synopsis. If Peckinpah’s nakedly evident contempt for ‘The Killer Elite’ – which almost seems to permeate the very celluloid – is anything to go by, he had even less time for it. The opening credits sequence is a case in point. Against an uncontextualised soundtrack of children singing (the concept of children as witnesses to the very worst the adult world has to offer is the only signature Peckinpah trope that makes an appearance in ‘The Killer Elite’), Peckinpah assembles a montage so risibly cliched in its imagery and po-faced in execution that in can only be an exercise in parody. The camerawork is shadowy, the editing urgent, the children's voices swiftly replaced by an overly melodramatic score. A masonry drill burrows into brickwork, fetching up plaster and brick dust. Plastic explosive is tamped into the hole. A cable drum spools detonating cord. Sticks of dynamite are affixed to some pipework. Someone sets a timer. Someone else pours gasoline over a concrete floor. Replacing Jerry Fielding's score with the ‘Pink Panther’ theme is all it would take to make the joke explicit rather than implicit.

Throughout the montage, the credits appear in notably small lettering. Even on the big screen it must have had audiences squinting; on DVD it’s barely legible. It’s as if Peckinpah is seeking to spare the blushes of everyone involved in the making of such a soulless and formulaic movie. And that goes doubly for Peckinpah himself. Apart from having his name removed entirely, it’s hard to see how he could have distanced himself any further. Consider his "directed by" credit:

Yep, that’s right. The words "directed by", all on their ownsome, then seven cuts - seven fucking cuts - then his name, again on its ownsome, as if Peckinpah were saying "Who? Me? Direct this?"* And before you there’s any risk of the cinema-goers of 1975 putting two and two together and realising that, yes, actually this was directed by the man who made ‘The Wild Bunch’, he cuts from those tiny letters lost on a dark screen to a completely gratuitous display of pyrotechnics (why do Locken and co. blow up the building exactly? fucked if I know). Is he trying to burn away his association with the film? Quite probably. For most of the remainder of the running time he simply rubbishes the very movie he’s calling the shots on. The astounding thing is that everyone else seems to be in on it.

Caan and Burt Young (playing Locken’s wheelman) share as many embarrassed glances as they do facetious asides. Arthur Hill and Gig Young mumble their way through supposedly intense scenes as if they’re just killing time waiting for the pubs to open (which, in all likelihood, their director probably was). Duvall punctures an early scene by braying with manic laughter, as if he’d set eyes on the script for the first time. The kung-fu, ninja and swordplay scenes are staged almost comedically. The gunplay and slo-mo are incorporated so deliberately and inelegantly you’d think you were watching a send-up of a Peckinpah movie that just happened to be directed by Peckinpah himself. Then there’s the dialogue. Denied rewrite duties on the script, Peckinpah encouraged his cast to ad-lib sarcastic dialogue which accounts for James Caan and Burt Young’s tension-deflating banter during the climatic swordfight between Chung and Toku ("lay me seven to five," Caan grunts as the oriental antagonists lock swords, "I’ll take the little guy").

If this makes ‘The Killer Elite’ sound like it’s as funny as canister of laughing gas, to a certain degree it is. The very fact that Peckinpah elected to take the piss out of the material is what makes ‘The Killer Elite’ highly watchable. The action scenes, though bordering on parodic, are effective. Excellent use is made of locations, particularly Locken’s recruitment of Miller (Bo Hopkins) while the latter is clay pigeon shooting over the Golden Gate Bridge! Likewise, the climatic scene at a maritime "graveyard" for decomissioned naval vessels is atmospheric and memorable. Philip Lathrop’s cinematography makes good use of ’Scope and his compositions are good. The film as a whole is never less than entertaining.

And yet, for me, ‘The Killer Elite’ is a dispiriting. It heralds the last decade of Peckinpah’s life as a filmmaker - a decade in which he made, with the exception of ‘Cross of Iron’, the least interesting, least personal and most generic films of his career. It offers precious few of the Peckinpah Irregulars in keynote roles (Bo Hopkins returns from ‘The Wild Bunch’ and ‘The Getaway’ and Gig Young from ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ and that’s your lot. It links into none of the themes and concerns that define him as at artist (even ‘Convoy’ can be viewed as a contemporary western, truckers replacing cowboys, while there’s a small case to be made for ‘The Osterman Weekend’ as a critique on the intrusive/destructive influence of technology and the small screen as the bastardisation of cinema). True, it’s not the sprawling, incoherent, narratively pointless mess that ‘Convoy’ is. At the very least, it tells a story - albeit an overplotted and not particularly engaging one. But that’s not the point. The point is that ‘The Killer Elite’ was the first time Sam Peckinpah directed a film and didn’t give a shit. That’s what’s so depressing.


*I’ve wracked my brains, conferred with other cineastes and interrogated the internet and I can’t come up with any other film where the director cuts himself loose from his own credit.

Once Upon a Time in America

When Joe at This Distracted Globe put the call out for contributors to his Class of 1984 blog-a-thon, I'd just picked up the 2-disc edition of 'Once Upon a Time in America' for a song. It had been a while - quite a while - since I'd seen it. I'd pretty much forgotten most of the narrative beyond the scenes in the anti-heroes' childhood. I figured Joe's blog-a-thon was the perfect opportunity to re-approach Sergio Leone's swansong. I had plenty of time to watch the film, marshall my thoughts and prepare an article.

Life, predictably, got in the way. Life, work, illness, the Third Annual Dirk-Fest, my wife's birthday and the Italian horror movie blog-a-thon over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies, to be exact. So now I find myself hammering out a few paragraphs at the eleventh hour, Ennio Morricone's melancholic score still in my ears and that last shot - that freeze-frame of Noodles (Robert de Niro) reclining in the opium den, a soporific smile on his face - still fixed in my mind. And I'm thinking that the film is less a gangster epic than a ghost story. I'm wondering if the trio of heavies who, in the bluntly brutal opening scenes, slap around Noodles's girlfriend Eve (Darlanne Fluegel) then severely beat his friend Fat Moe (Larry Rapp) before tracking him down to the opium den actually pull the hit on him and the next three and a quarter hours present a conflation of the old saw about one's life passing before one's eyes and a vision of the future had he lived. A future which is corrupt and rotten and inescapably defined by every violent act of the past.

I'm also wondering - when 1984 saw the release of so many mainstream crowd-pleasers - why I decided to pick a four-hour epic of such formalism, such measured pace and so steeped in loss and regret that it's less an organic development of the grungily operatic spaghetti westerns that made Leone's name than the closest cinema has given us to a gangster movie as if made by Ingmar Bergman.

I had forgotten just how melancholy 'Once Upon a Time in America' is. That the scenes set in the late 1910s, which document the youthful Noodles and his friends' collective loss of innocence, are the cheeriest in the movie kind of says it all. We see Noodles (Scott Tiler), Max (Rusty Jacobs), Cockeye (Adrian Curran), Patsy (Brian Bloom) and Dominic (Noah Moazezi) commit arson, robbery and blackmail, throw in their lot with an older group of bootleggers, take a beating from a rival gang leader, and - sealing their fates into adulthood - one of their number being murdered and another going to jail after a revenge killing ... and Leone imbues every bit of it with nostalgia. Kids still half a decade off shaving roll drunks, backtalk cops and pursue sexual favours from a neighbourhood girl for the price of a cream cake ... and there's a palpable sense of yearning that this brief tenement-set idyll is so soon to end. Noodles gets it bad for Fat Moe (Mike Monetti)'s svelte sister Deborah (Jennifer Connelly) and when he muses, with all the braggadoccio of a lad who'd never dare tell his mates that he hasn't got laid yet, "She wants something from me and one of these days I'm going to give it to her", it's almost comical.

There's nothing funny, though, about Noodles' attempt to romance the adult Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern). When he doesn't get what he wants, he takes it by force. By now it's the early 1930s and Max (James Woods) fancies himself as the gang's de facto leader. Max's compulsion to leave the small time prompts an uneasy partnership with Mob guy Frankie Minoldi (Joe Pesci) and his low-class associate Joe (Burt Young), who tips them to a diamond heist. Frankie gives them additional orders and the job takes a darker turn. Prohibition is coming to an end and when Noodles jokes that "we're out of work", Max doesn't see the funny side. Max gets increasingly involved with the Mob's political machinations, providing protection for union boss Jimmy O'Donnell (Treat Williams). He also plots a suicidal heist on the federal reserve. Then Max's girlfriend Carol (Tuesday Weld) implores Noodles to an urgent course of action rather than see Max gunned down.

Noodles' decision effectively explodes the narrative, and even Noodles himself isn't fully cognizant of the repercussions. Not until the film's third timeline - 1968 - where the past comes back to haunt Noodles in a way he could never have anticipated, and I find myself back at the 'Once Upon a Time in America' as ghost story reading. For all the iconography - the hats and suits and cars and tommy guns and molls in flapper dresses - the film is decidedly atypical of the genre. The final hour plays out absent of anything approaching an action scene. The curiously muted finale - replete with enough pregnant pauses and unspoken implications to fill a dozen Harold Pinter productions - builds to an image of two old guys (one wearing a tux, one a fedora) and a garbage truck, its pulping mechanism churning away, that just plain fucking disturbs me.

But we're talking of a film where the most poetic scene has a boy standing on a toilet to peek through a removed brick into an adjoining room at a girl practicing her ballet recital; where the chronology of a petty theft and its aftermath is timed on the very pocket watch that was stolen; where the saddest, truest, most insightful moment is of a boy sitting on a stairwell unable to resist eating the cream cake he's spent his only money on, even though he knows what he can barter it for and how badly he wants it.

'Once Upon a Time in America' is a gangster film in imagery only; it's really about the loss of innocence, very early on in the game, and how the best we can hope for thereafter is narcotic oblivion or a quick death.