For those of you who aren’t aware, Garner Simmons wrote a book on Sam Peckinpah called Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage. Check it out.

If you are looking for an artistic forebear of Peckinpah, you might consider the Italian master of chiaroscuro, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Exceptionally gifted, Caravaggio was said to have bragged that if he could see it, he could paint it. And his dramatically realistic canvases bear that out. A brawler who whored and fought with friends and foes alike, he had to flee Rome after murdering a man in street fight. Yet he continued to paint wherever he went. His gifts as an artist are marked by his vision of life with all its flaws — man’s human failings locked in mortal combat with his better angels. Finally, 1610, with the promise of a Papal pardon, he gathered together a number of canvases that he hoped would re-establish his reputation and booked passage to Rome. The ship dropped anchor at Palo just north of Rome and Caravaggio went ashore. But instead of sending his paintings ashore after him, the ship’s captain raised anchor and sailed on leaving him behind. Enraged and determined to recover his paintings, Caravaggio recklessly pursued the ship to Port’Ercole on foot more than 50 miles to the north. But in traveling across the sweltering marshes, he contracted a fever. Upon reaching Port’Ercole, he collapsed and died at the age 38. However, his paintings luminously live on. And it was said that when Caravaggio died, the best of him survived.

The same may be said of Sam Peckinpah. For regardless of what you may think of him or the way he lived his life, he sacrificed everything for his art. It is, indeed, the intense body of work he left behind that still beguiles us. Like Caravaggio, he was able to stare into the crucible of human existence and there find and reveal the likeness of man’s tortured soul.