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.

Passion & Poetry: The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah

Many thanks to Mike Siegel for sharing with me a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the making of 'Passion & Poetry: The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah', and for the stills that accompany this article.

The title 'Passion & Poetry' is an excellent encapsulation of Peckinpah's approach to filmmaking and his visual/emotional achievements in the field. It applies equally well to writer/director Mike Siegel and his passionate commitment to bringing his documentary on Peckinpah's life and work to the screen. The phrase "labour of love" is often bandied about - it's almost a cliche - but in Mike's case it's a statement of fact.

The project had its roots in a retrospective of Peckinpah's work in Padua, Italy, which Mike organised in 2000. The festival ran for 10 days and was attended by actors and crew members from Peckinpah's films - including James Coburn, R.G. Armstrong (who was 82 years old at the time!), Ali MacGraw, Susan George and 'Wild Bunch' co-writer Walon Green - as well as members of Peckinpah's family. Their reminiscences provided a wealth of first-hand testimony on Peckinpah's life and work: his turbulent life, the struggles to make films his way. Mike determined that his next project would be an in-depth documentary about Sam Peckinpah, drawing from the memories and experiences of those who knew him closely.

There was one immediate problem: financing. Mike had only made one film, had no real cachet in the industry, and was wary of wasting precious time trying to find backers or distributors. In true guerilla filmmaking style, he decided just to make the thing and finance it himself. For most people, this would entail back loans, scrounging from family members and a lifetime of bad debt and ruined credit rating. Mike took a different approach: he started selling off his expansive collection of movie posters and lobby cards. " 'Passion and Poetry' might be the first bigger film that was totally funded through sales at eBay," says Mike.

It took two years to raise enough funds for a working budget, including equipment and travel costs. Fellow filmmaker Patrick Gleason and former close friend and associate of Peckinpah Katy Haber came on board. With their help, Mike undertook a five week shoot in Mexico and Los Angeles. Shooting in Mexico was particularly interesting: Mike intended on the documentary to begin and end at the now abandoned hacienda which serves as General Mapache's headquarters in 'The Wild Bunch'. There was just one problem: actually locating it! Via an internet forum, Mike made contact with a septuagenarian originally from Texas who lived close to the location; he volunteered his services as Mike's guide.

With the location shooting completed, Mike continued filming interviews with Peckinpah collaborators during 2003 - 2004. It was during this period that Mike was approach to compile a photo-book based on the materials he'd accumulated on Peckinpah. Boasting over 1,000 pictures and running to nearly 600 pages, 'Passion and Poetry - Sam Peckinpah in Pictures' was published in late 2003. Editing work on the documentary took place during in 2004 and the film has screened at festivals around the world and secured a DVD release in the five years since then.

Contributors to the documentary include actors James Coburn, Ernest Borgnine, Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw, Senta Berger, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong, Isela Vega, David Warner and Bo Hopkins; critics and film historians Garner Simmons and David Weddle; friends and associates Chalo Gonzalez, Gordon Dawson, Katy Haber, Dan Melnick and Martin Lewis; Peckinpah's sister Fern Lea Peter, and his daughter Lupita Peckinpah.

Mike's persistence in securing the participation of Borgnine and Jones is almost legendary. Borgnine had responded to Mike's many calls by protesting that he probably wouldn't remember much; when Mike called him from the Mexico location of 'The Wild Bunch', it prompted such wonderful stories from Borgnine that the long-anticipated interview was finally arranged. Arriving at Borgnine's home, the legendary actor opened the door and announced, "Hi, I'm Ernie Borgnine," and Mike responded, "Hi, I'm the pain in the ass," prompting good-natured laughter from the actor and a friendship that continues to this day.Mike had communicated with L.Q. Jones by letter and phone, but the actor repeatedly refused to appear on camera without being paid. It wasn't going to happen; Mike's budget had already been eaten up by equipment costs and travel. Mike made one more call to Jones and, getting his answerphone, left a message calling him a horse thief! Jones threw in the towel and agreed to an interview.

Ultimately, Mike's two-hour film 'Passion & Poetry - The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah' was the product of over 30 hours of footage; enough that Mike was able to craft two entirely new documentaries, one for the Sony DVD release of 'Major Dundee' and one for the EuroVideo German release of 'Straw Dogs'.

The DVD of 'Passion & Poetry - The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah' is available here. It is the work of a man as passionate about Sam Peckinpah as Sam Peckinpah was about cinema.

"A walk thing": creating The Wild Bunch's most iconic moment

Pike Bishop (William Holden) pulls his boots on in the dingy room of a whore young enough to be his daughter - hell, his granddaughter. The girl washes herself lethargically while her baby cries, unattended, in a crib nearby. Pike's face is twisted in self-disgust. He's thinking back to what he and the Bunch saw on their return to Agua Verde: their comrade Angel (Jaime Sanchez) being dragged along behind General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez)'s automobile, beaten and bloodied.

Pike tosses some coins on a table and exits the room. Next door, the Gorch brothers, Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates), have been similarly engaged. "Let's go," Pike barks. A look passes between them. Understanding registers on Tector's face. Lyle blinks, momentarily uncertain, then his whiskery features harden. "Why not?" he replies.

Outside, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) is sitting against the brothel wall, whittling a stick. Whittling is probably the wrong word - he's going at it with a knife like it was Mapache himself. It was Dutch who was with Angel when Mapache's men captured him. Dutch who rode away and left him to his fate, there being no other course of action. Dutch more than any of them hurts at Mapache's torture of Angel. Dutch doesn't even attempt to assuage himself in the arms of whores; he simply sits and hacks away with his knife and waits.

When Pike and the Gorch brothers emerge, he and Dutch lock eyes. No word is spoken. Words aren't needed. Dutch slowly gets to his feet. He knows what's going to happen next. He's been willing it. He wants it.

The four men walk purposefully over to where their horses are hitched. They pull rifles out of saddle rolls, check pistols, thumb rounds into chambers.

It was at this point - as far as the script was concerned - that the action abruptly cut to the Bunch's arrival at the courtyard where Mapache and his dissolute revolutionaries are drinking and entertaining women. This, as far as the crew were aware, would be the next the thing they shot.

Peckinpah had other ideas.

Biographer David Weddle describes it best:

Assistant director Cliff Coleman ... began issuing marching orders for the next set-up ... but Peckinpah stopped him. "No, no, Cliff, wait ... I want to do a walk thing first."

"What do you mean, 'a walk thing'?"

Peckinpah growled something unintelligible, then began lining up Holden, Borgnine, Oates and Johnson to make a long walk through the outlying buildings with shotguns cradled in their arms ... Sam set up a group of drunken Mexican soldiers, playing guitars and singing, for the group to walk past. Coleman began layering in other extras ... "And all of a sudden, Jesus Christ," says Coleman, "the music's going and the camera's rolling and these fucking guys started to walk and everybody's going 'Wow, it's the real thing!' Nobody knew what Sam was going to do or what he wanted to do. Before you knew it, it built and it built and it built and it built until it became that scene."

A walk thing. An inspired piece of improvisation. Iconography in motion.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Wild Bunch

"When you side with a man, you stay with him - and if you can't do that, you're like some animal. You're finished. We're finished!"




Background
The slow road out of his years in the wilderness following the 'Major Dundee' catastrophe and his firing from 'The Cincinnati Kid' began with his adaptation of 'Noon Wine' for the TV drama show 'ABC Stage 67'. Netting him Writers' Guild and Directors' Guild nominations and his best notices since 'Ride the High Country', he found himself in demand again. Head of production at Seven Arts, Kenneth Hyman was on a roll after the staggering success of 'The Dirty Dozen' and was looking to develop another action movie vehicle for Lee Marvin under the auspices of Warner Brothers. The project he had in mind was called 'The Diamond Story' and Peckinpah didn't think much of the script. Nonetheless, Hyman appointed producer Phil Feldman to work with Peckinpah. Neither of them cared much for 'The Diamond Story' and their attention was soon drawn to a couple of other scripts: 'The Wild Bunch' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue'.


It's entirely possible that Hyman would have called time on their extracurricular activities and ordered Peckinpah to knuckle down to 'The Diamond Story' but for one factor. 20th Century Fox had just paid half a million (an unprecedented amount for a script at that time) to William Goldman for 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' and handed the reins to George Roy Hill. Industry buzz was high. There was probably no better time to make a western. Feldman saw 'The Wild Bunch' as a challenge to 'Butch and Sundance' at the box office. He was convinced it had blockbuster written all over it. 'The Diamond Story' was summarily abandoned and Feldman and Peckinpah threw themselves into 'The Wild Bunch'.


The production was suitably epic. Peckinpah, predictably, went overbudget. He exposed 330,000 feet of film, printing most of it so that he'd have an amorphous mass of material from which to work in the editing room. There were over 1,200 camera set-ups. Feldman didn't question any of Peckinpah's techniques. Their relationship was so good that their next project, 'The Ballad of the Cable Hogue', went into pre-production while editing work was still being completed on 'The Wild Bunch'. Things very quickly and irreversibly soured between them. While Peckinpah was scouting locations for 'Hogue', Feldman - pressured by the studio to bring 'The Wild Bunch' down to a two hour cut - caved in and, behind Peckinpah's back, snipped twenty minutes out. This was the last straw for Peckinpah - who already considered the 140 minute cut a compromise from his original three and a half hour version - and, true to form, kicked off very publically against Feldman and Warner Brothers, ending his association with both.

Synopsis

Grizzled outlaws Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) and the bunch ride into the town of Starbuck. Disguised as US army personnel, they storm into a railroad office and steal the payroll at gunpoint. Outside, under the nominal command of Pike's former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a posse of bounty hunters are lying in wait for them. Deke entered into a bargain with railroad boss Harrigan (Albert Dekker) whereby he's bought his way out of jail in return for hunting down the bunch. A vicious shoot-out occurs and some of the bunch are killed. The surviving members head back to their rendezvous with Sykes (Edmond O'Brien) and divide the loot - only to realise they've been had. The money bags they risked their lives for are filled with washers. With Deke and the bounty hunters on their trail, they cross into Mexico where they stay briefly at youngest gang member Angel (Jaime Sanchez)'s village. The place is decimated; Angel's father has been killed by despotic Mexican general Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) while his girlfriend has gone off and whored herself at Mapache's hacienda. The bunch fetch up at Agua Verde where a rash decision on Angel's part precipitates an uneasy alliance with Mapache, who is being advised by a high ranking officer of the Imperial German army. The bunch are soon contracted by Mapache to rob a munitions train. The robbery is well-planned and executed, but they still have to face Mapache's treachery, the pursuing bounty hunters and the realisation of their own failings.

Analysis

Broadly speaking, the key themes of Peckinpah's work are:

1) Times change, yet Peckinpah's heroes - men of a certain era, men of a certain mindset - would rather die than change with them.

2) Technology encroaches, its results only ever destructive.
3) Loyalty, honour and codes of conduct are thrown into harsh relief - and tested sorely - by the inherently compromised morality of his protagonists.

4) How men behave, interact, are defined by their actions and - sometimes - redeem themselves.

Just as broadly speaking, the most recurrent visual motifs in his films are: mirrors (as early as the 'The Deadly Companions' there's a shot of a gunslinger pumping a bullet into his own reflection, an image revisited with shattering clarity of purpose in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'), children bearing witness to or emulating the worst of adult behaviour (in almost every film: here it's a bunch of giggling children watching red ants swarm over a scorpion before heaping kindling over insects and arachnid alike and burning the lot), and automobiles as avatars for the death of the Old West (first glimpsed almost running Steve Judd over in 'Ride the High Country' and later a threat to Cable Hogue's business in Peckinpah's 'Wild Bunch' follow-up).

Not only are all of these present in 'The Wild Bunch' - along with his stylistic trademarks of slo-mo and freeze frames - but they synthesize perfectly into a vital, intense and immediate statement of who Peckinpah was as an artist, as a filmmaker and as a man. Re-reading these last few paragraphs, I've used the word "men" a lot, and probably opened myself up to the kind of criticism that dogged Peckinpah throughout his life and is still applied by commentators unable (or unwilling) to look into his films with the depth they demand. It's such an easy thing to do to label Peckinpah "macho", to say that he made films about men that were shot through (pardon the pun) with an aesthetic of violence. It's easy to say that because - on an incredibly superficial level - it's true. But Peckinpah, for all the gunfire and the blood squibs, was a director of anti-violence. What gives his films their psychological complexity - and what continues to render his work difficult for some people - is that he incorporated the anti-violence, the bloody and infinitely painful messiness of it, into a powerfully realised iconography that challenged the audiences' reactions. Michael Haneke works towards a similar end - but without the acutely observed degree of characterisation that makes even the most minor characters in a Peckinpah movie spring to life, and with a coolly cerebral European approach that establishes an intellectual distance between the screen and the audience - and scoops critical plaudits.

Peckinpah made films about men, but he wasn't afraid to show their failings. Pike fucks up: it's his complacency which leads to Deke's arrest which in turn leads to his deal with Harrigan; backstory reveals that it was his complacency in his affair with a married woman that got her killed; and it's his complacency in dealing with the handover of munitions to Mapache following the train robbery that sees Angel - already antagonistic towards Mapache - sent with Dutch to trade the last batch of rifles. Mapache accuses Angel of stealing a case of rifles and takes him prisoner. A grim, guilt-ridden Dutch rides out of Agua Verde alone, leaving Angel to his rival's brutal ministrations. At least two of these mistakes lead to a testing of the friendship between Pike and Dutch. Take their altercation after Deke's men open fire on a defenceless Sykes:

Dutch: Damn that Deke Thornton to hell!

Pike: What would you do in his place? He gave his word.

Dutch: Gave his word to a railroad!

Pike: It's his word!

Dutch: That ain't what counts - it's who you give it to!

This mirrors an earlier contretemps between a disgusted Thornton, surveying the aftermath of the protracted gunfight in Starbuck, and a brutally pragmatic Harrigan:

Thornton: Tell me, Mr Harrigan, how does it feel gettin' paid for it? Gettin' paid to sit back and hire your killings with the law's arms around you? How does it feel to be so goddamn right?

Harrigan: Good.

Thornton: You dirty son of a bitch!

Peckinpah said of 'The Wild Bunch': "I wasn't trying to make an epic, I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. 'The Wild Bunch' is simply about what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is that you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." When Peckinpah says "simple story", he means simple in terms of its plot. Psychologically and subtextually, it's fucking complex. He's right: his characters are killers; remorseless ones and not scared of death themselves. Suspecting that Mapache's second-in-command Herrara (Alfonso Arau) will attempt to shanghai the munitions from them off the robbery, they rig up the wagon with dynamite and call Herrara's bluff by light the fuse. He backs down, but the scene is played out with such steely resolve that there's no doubt Pike and co. would rather blow themselves to hell than back down. When they reach the end of the line, it's not just because Thornton's men have kept them trapped in Agua Verde. When they - SPOILER ALERT - go out in a hail of bullets after a protracted gun battle against vastly stronger numbers, it's not just because of what happened to Angel. They have reached the end of the line in that they have outlived their times; the world has moved on and there is no place for them in the new scheme of things. 'The Wild Bunch' is Peckinpah's first western to be set in the twentieth century, not the 1860s. 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', set in the early 1900s, continued the theme while the prologue to 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' sees Garrett as a bitter old man in 1909 before flashing back to the main body of the action in 1881. 'The Wild Bunch', though, is Peckinpah's most explicit j' accuse of the social, political and technological upheavals that destroyed the Old West and buried the frontier spirit. 'The Wild Bunch' takes place in 1913.

"These days are closing fast," Pike muses, early on, "we gotta start thinking beyond our guns." The point is rammed home when the Bunch encounter Mapache's automobile. They summarily label it an "ugly damned thing", only for Sykes (ironically the oldest of the group) to prove the most cognizant of changing technology: "I hear they got one of those things up north that can fly." Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson) mocks him: "You damned old fool, that's a balloon." Pike sets the record straight: "No, the old man's right. They've got motors, wings, go sixty miles in less than an hour. Gonna use them in the war, they say." One year before the Great War, the atrocity that - to quote Wilfred Owen - "slew ... half the seed of Europe one by one." Pike Bishop and the Bunch in this world? Hell no, they'd rather die first, a decision borne out when the one remaining survivor of the Bunch, Sykes, throws in his lot with the men from Angel's village. "Ain't the way it used to be," he muses, in a line which pretty much sums up Peckinpah's worldview and his directorial ethos, "but it'll do." But - and this is the masterstroke - before these kiilers, these bad men, reach the end of the line, Peckinpah gives them their humanity. The sojourn in Angel's village allows us to see them variously relaxing, larking about and reminiscing. When Pike, midway through a reflective conversation with the village elder, breaks off to watch the Tector and Lyle (Warren Oates) playing a game of cat's cradle with one of the village girls, laughing innocently and exhibiting none of their usual lasciviousness towards anyone female, he remarks "Now that I find hard to believe." In a line that is key to any heartfelt appreciation of the film, the elder replies: "Not so hard. We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all."

We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all. I'll put that line up against all the criticism that's ever been levelled at Peckinpah that he was nothing but a director of violence. Paul Seydor states in his magnificent book 'The Westerner Films - A Reconsideration' that is "impossible not to recognize in [Peckinpah] the wounded romantic, the tragic idealist, the agonizer believer". And it is impossible, in my opinion, to watch 'The Wild Bunch' and not be utterly convinced that, in his finest moments as a filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah entered his house justified.