Hardcore machismo and slow-motion violence became David Samuel Peckinpah’s movie signatures, although his occasional tender insights into the fears and weaknesses behind alpha-male brutality give a more accurate snapshot of the director’s tormented soul.
His uneven career was a catalogue of drink and drug abuse, bust-ups with studio bosses and abusive love-hate relations with women. But in public, the grizzled ex-Marine liked to hide behind his cartoon image as the hard-drinking, tough-talking Hemingway of cinema. “I'm like a good whore,” he used to bark. “I go where I'm kicked.”
A former protégé of Dirty Harry director Don Siegel, Peckinpah rose through the ranks as a TV writer and assistant on faceless B-features, mostly westerns. Indeed, it was a fiercely revisionist cowboy story that sealed his reputation in 1969, although The Wild Bunch was initially slammed for its nihilistic savagery. No wonder uber-pulp directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Alex Cox idolise the man nicknamed Bloody Sam.
Producers and actors who worked with the volatile maverick director never forgot the experience, and rarely repeated it. During a bust-up on their 1965 collaboration Major Dundee, Charlton Heston threatened the director with a cavalry sabre. James Coburn, who first worked with Peckinpah on Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, remembered him as the man "who pushed me over the abyss and then jumped in after me.”
Peckinpah enjoyed winding up liberal critics with taboo-trashing exercises in psycho-sexual sadism like Straw Dogs and The Getaway. But his softer side was also evident in more gentle dramas such as The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner. As the ‘70s progressed, however, he developed a serious cocaine habit, and his film shoots became purgatorial experience for those involved. Not least the boozing, brawling director himself, whose health and reputation began to suffer. When he died from heart failure in Mexico in 1984, aged just 59, he left behind a bruised and bloody legacy.