Troubled Genius
February 21, 2025 marks one hundred years since director Sam Peckinpah was born. Peckinpah is a fascinating character: a filmmaker of overriding vision, a maverick who fought with producers and studios who attempted to subvert that vision, a tyrant and occasional bully on set, a substance abuser, a writer of brilliant dialogue, a troubled genius who died relatively young. The legend of the man could, perhaps, overwhelm the legacy of his work. And make no mistake, the Peckinpah filmography is uneven. But Peckinpah’s best films are excellent and several are generally acknowledged as all-time classics. Even his lesser films hold interest with memorable lines, characters, or scenes and intriguing, sometimes disturbing themes. For followers of our noble genre, Westerns are the core of Peckinpah’s legacy. One hundred years after he entered the world, and forty years after he left it, the passage of time has burnished the reputation of these films.
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Younger Sam
Peckinpah grew up in Fresno, California and spent significant time at his grandfather’s ranch in the foothills of the Sierras, during a time when the ways of the wild West were still part of living memory. This memory, and a persistent sense of melancholy as it gradually but steadily receded, informed his Westerns. Over time, so did an approach to the violence of firearms, often implied or downplayed in oaters before Peckinpah but graphically visual in his maturity.
For Jeff Arnold’s West, Sam’s centenary provides a fine opportunity.
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Older Sam
For those new to the blog, it was founded, naturally enough, by namesake Jeff Arnold. Jeff was the exclusive author of all content until May 2024. In June 2024, however, we – known here as RR and Bud – became co-administrators of the site. (For those interested, the About page summarizes the sad circumstances which led to the change in the site’s administration.)
Jeff was wide-ranging in his interest and prolific in his coverage of the West and Western film. Certainly no classic Western escaped his keyboard and his muse. For we two greenhorns following in Jeff’s boot prints, his blanket coverage has presented us with an intriguing balancing act: maintaining the interest of the site’s community of current readers, while simultaneously enticing the interest of new readers without falling prey to a rehash of ‘Western greatest hits’… unlike so many radio channels which play the same tired 100 or so songs.
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Artistic Sam
But, their director’s centenary really does provide an excellent reason to revisit and celebrate the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah. It’s a chance to collate Jeff’s thoughts on them, for Bud and RR to exchange theirs, and for you, the readers, to share yours as well.
This series of posts will canter through the Western films of Samuel Peckinpah, in order of release. (Due to their unfortunate inaccessibility, we will not delve into Peckinpah’s early years in Westerns for U.S. television). Thoughts, memories, and opinions are, as always, welcome in the Comments.
And so… on to Sam Peckinpah’s first, and probably least-celebrated, big-screen Western.
The Deadly Companions (Paramount, 1961)
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In The Deadly Companions, Brian Keith plays a Union soldier with a bad shoulder pursuing an unknown person for unknown reasons. While attempting to stop bandits, Keith accidentally shoots and kills the son of saloon girl Maureen O’Hara. The distraught O’Hara decides to bury the boy next to his late father; his grave is in a town now located in Apache territory. Keith insists on accompanying her, in spite of vigorous objections, and brings along two others, the ‘deadly companions’. Steve Cochrane has unsavory designs on O’Hara; Chill Wills cheats at cards, wants to enslave the local Indians, and is decidedly mad. A journey and, ultimately, a confrontation ensue.
Jeff’s take:
Jeff Arnold had strong feelings about actors who portrayed Westerners. He really liked Gary Cooper in the genre; he really did not like Broderick Crawford. He mostly liked Dorothy Malone in her 17 (!) Westerns; he mostly did not like Maureen O’Hara in her 9, despite her enduring friendship and multiple appearances with John Wayne. As it happens, Sam Peckinpah’s first cinematic Western not only starred Miss O’Hara; she had also acquired the rights to the source material AND her brother produced.
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Jeff, not unexpectedly, did not care for O’Hara’s work in the film: “really it’s a pity they couldn’t have got someone good”; he apparently was unaware that she was “they”. He also had a backhanded compliment for Brian Keith: he “could be very good occasionally… he is strong here”. All in all, he “quite like[d the movie] in its modest way”.
Bud’s take:
While Jeff aimed his vitriol for O’Hara, mine is reserved for her brother. He did not obtain the necessary copyright, so the film fell into the public domain. Even though my DVD claims to be a restored version (and does, in fairness, have the correct aspect ratio), the picture and sound quality are generally mediocre or worse. This quality does not, however, obscure Peckinpah’s visual sense, his love for Western landscapes; despite the absence of cinematographer Lucien Ballard (his go-to DP in the future), the film has some beautiful shots, particularly at the beginning and the end.
The film also features the first instance of a less endearing Peckinpah trope: an (apparent) disregard for lower animals, as a snake is shot, and its corpse dangled, on-screen.
I found the movie to be episodic and difficult to follow. The lone Apache who constantly harassed Keith and O’Hara was puzzling; was he a member of the Apache tribe whose territory Keith and O’Hara were crossing? A lone operator after Keith, O’Hara, or both? Or something else? Spoiler alert, the warrior is dispatched and this viewer was never quite sure of his motivation.
Brian Keith’s burly presence brings a low-key, measured masculinity to his character. Which he did consistently whether wearing cowboy duds or a suit, at least in my experience with his large- and small-screen work.
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As for Maureen O’Hara, for whom the word ‘statuesque’ was seemingly invented: with her imposing cheekbones and Pre-Raphaelite hair, I generally find a sense of the patrician, a certain haughtiness, in her on-screen presence. This quality (whether real or in my imagination) adds a dimension to her role as a woman in severely reduced circumstances, working as a saloon girl. The characterization is uneven (as is the film) but the writing is the reason for this viewer, not O’Hara’s performance.
As for Jeff’s dismissive assessment of the opening and closing song, sung by O’Hara “in her second-rate operetta voice”: I own her 1959 RCA Victor record. I keep it for the lovely album cover.
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RR’s take:
I enter into our Sam-a-thon as a reasonably seasoned but far-below expert-level afficionado: for a filmmaker with such a small output Sam Peckinpah’s had a mind-boggling number of books written about him but I haven’t read any of them, and although I’d seen most of Peckinpah’s movies previously, including most of his Westerns, there’s a few I’d never caught up with – and these include The Deadly Companions.
My copy (a second hand old UK DVD release) sounds like it was better than Bud’s: we’re not talking Criterion quality but more than adequate sound and picture for what I’d say this is: an interesting minor diversion. In fact, I’d suggest the best way to watch it is by removing your auteur goggles first and trying to place yourself in a cinema seat in 1961, before the rest of Peckinpah’s career happened. So what you’re seeing is nothing more – but also nothing less – than a low-budget independent Western, helmed by a promising TV director, with enough interesting ideas and enjoyable quirks to set it apart from the average oater; but also enough annoying flaws to stop you hurrying back for a second viewing.
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I found this to be a play in three acts and I reacted differently to each. First there’s the opening town-set sequence. I thought the film did a good job here, establishing characters, plot, place and mood in a low-key but pleasingly atmospheric and intriguing way. It put me in the mood for a solid B Western experience. But then came Act Two, set on the trail as Keith and co escort a reluctant O’Hara. At this point the film began to lose its grip on me, not helped by the music becoming increasingly intrusive and grating (the guitar-based score is Western muzak, basically – oater elevator sounds, you might say – liberally sprayed over the film almost regardless of what’s happening on screen at the time. I’d thought it worked quite well in the town scenes, adding to the ambience, but as the film goes on it just becomes irritating). I did enjoy the unusual, slightly perverse bit where a group of Indians play drunken games with a stagecoach they’d ransacked. It’s as if they’re giving us their own little movie-within-a-movie: almost a post-modern touch if that’s not too pretentious a remark (I can almost hear Jeff tut-tutting…). Anyway it’s one of several instances in which novel ideas lift this film out of the norm. But it’s only during the third act, set in a ghost town, that I really got back into the movie. The suspense ratchets up, the character backstories and conflicts reach their climaxes and Peckinpah handles the gunplay in unusual, interesting ways.
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Keith and Wills are great in this film, the other actors are all OK. DP William S Clothier does some good stuff, especially a few beautifully silhouetted night-time shots. And (I can hear Jeff’s tuts again), I’m a sucker for pretty much all western theme songs so I didn’t mind O’Hara’s warbling one bit! Having said that it’s best not to think of Deadly Companions too much in terms of later work, I couldn’t help putting those goggles back on again for the moment where Keith shoots at himself in a mirror, a powerful visualisation of his character’s inability to process his inner self-revulsion. The director would use this image of macho self-disgust much more powerfully in later pics.
I too suspect that Animals Were Harmed In The Making Of This Film. No doubt many of you reading this are not such sensitive souls as Bud and me, but the killing of living creatures onscreen is a recurring thing in Peckinpah’s films that I personally find off-putting. And it gets a whole lot worse in several of his later pictures! But those pictures themselves get ever better (that is, up until the point that the alcohol and cocaine ultimately ravaged his talents).
Stay with us for the journey.
(The pictures of Peckinpah above are from the Sam Peckinpah page on Facebook, which is an excellent follow for those who Facebook.)