This Savage Art

BFI honors Peckinpah

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Yeah, sounds about right.

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Look at this poster¹, amazing.

Remakes are nothing new. They’re hardly worth commenting on because of their diluted nature and lack of adaptability to the modern world. They usually suffer from a studio’s feeble attempt to cash in on some hot young tv actor’s “hotness” and introduce a new generation to uh, something. I could care less. Just heap it onto the junk pile.

Invasion shares the same DNA of a fantastical story that can be told over and over again, generation after generation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) at its core dealt with the paranoia of one loosing one’s soul to the masses, mob rule’s style. The original was directed by Don Siegel, with a script co-written by Daniel Mainwaring and (uncredited) Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel “The Body Snatchers” (aka “Sleep No More”) by Jack Finney. Whether it was subversive in nature and Siegel was really commenting on Communism or McCarthyism it’s hard to say. Counting the current incarnation it has been remade three times.

In a game of connect the dots I’ll clumsily segue into the current abomination that is in the planning stages as we speak. The recent news of Rod Lurie’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs has officially sent me over the top. It’s not so much the news of a remake, I most likely won’t be seeing it because I hold the original in such high regard. Peckinpah’s craftily twisted film plays on the audiences perceptions of their own moral code. He took shit for it but he challenged the audience. I know that’s not the job of every single director out there, to challenge an audience, but he did, unapologetically. I guess what really gets to me and many who find the original version a great piece of American cinema is Lurie’s attitude towards it.

It’s an interesting film, isn’t it? But it was pretty much killed by a two-second moment on screen where his wife is being raped and she smiles. That was the end of that movie. You can be certain that she’s not going to be smiling in the rape in my film.

If you aren’t acquainted with the the 1971 film it stars Dustin Hoffman as a mild-mannered professor living in the English countryside with his attractive wife (Susan George). A gang of locals harasses them both, graphically rapes the wife and attacks their home. Hoffman fights back with great vengeance and furious anger. The scene is a much debated one. The rapist is an ex-boyfriend of the wife and at one point in this horrific event Susan George gives a half-smile² associating this rape with pleasure. At face value you can read this as the character asked for it and the bitch got what she deserved, that’s if you can pick your knuckles up off the ground long enough to scratch your head. Peckinpah turns an obvious playing-it-straight-to-the-audience moment into a layered, psychotically ambiguous deviation where the woman is manipulating the rapist to get herself out of this heinous situation intact. And that’s only one interpretation! The scene turns everything upside-down, my head exploded the first time I saw it. That’s art baby! Don’t misunderstand my issues with this remake. This isn’t about tampering with the precious work of some revered director, we all know nothing is sacred. This is about just getting it wrong so Rod Lurie, good luck with that. Maybe you should just decide for yourself.³

How long do you think it will be before some genius wants to make an American version of a Bergman or Antonioni film using it as a bargaining chip with an audience to gain some sort of respectability? Good luck with that too.

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Related: Rod Lurie clarifies, sort of. Mr. Lurie, the stage is yours.

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1. That striking movie poster above proudly hangs in my home studio. [↩]
2. Which is just as debatable. [↩]
3. If you live in New York and want to see Straw Dogs along with a collection of some great American films from the early 70’s check out The Museum of the Moving Image – Uneasy Riders: American Film In The Nixon Years, 1970-1974 – July 28-September 2, 2007. [↩]

Peckinpah is probably having a good laugh. So that’s The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs…hmmmm, don’t tell me, Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia is next?

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David Samuel Peckinpah. Born February 21, 1925. Died December 28th, 1984. A director with a reputation for creating mayhem on screen and off.

Always unpredictable and never tame, Peckinpah lived his life to make movies. Everything else was just filler. Today we celebrate this sometimes misunderstood, sometimes reviled loner auteur.

I’ll be adding links as I get them so please feel free to contribute through the weekend. Make sure you contact me with your link. A big thanks to everyone who contributes and visits.

Links:

Forager Blog: The Osterman Weekend

The High Hat | Nitrate: Sam Peckinpah

[This Savage Art]: Bloody Sam And Theme Explored

Cineaste: Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Western Collection Reviewed

The Hollywood Reporter: Risky Biz Blog: Happy Birthday Sam Peckinpah

Oggs’ Movie Thoughts: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

[This Savage Art]: Intoxicated With The Madness

Big Media Vandalism: “There’s nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that’s in it. Or you. Or me.”

Popularity: 28% [?]

After the holidays I had a meeting with a production company who had an office on the Lower East Side (more on this later). The two partners were looking for a writer to develop a screenplay and get their production slate moving by the latter half of 2007. When talking to one of the partners the first thing he mentioned was a film he liked and was inspired by. It was Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. Little did he know I spent the previous night watching Peckinpah’s nihilistic and twisted journey into the abyss. I think it won me some points, we’ll see.

(pull)“There ain’t nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that’s in it. Or you. Or me.“(/pull)

The films of Sam Peckinpah were volatile and messy like the world erupting around him and Garcia was no different. The story about a second rate piano player turned bounty hunter in Mexico was pure sleaze and chaos. Cut the head off of a man and use it to collect your ticket out of hell. Irony, there is none. This was Sam’s world. Unadulterated. Another loser trying to hold onto what little shred of dignity this world was allowing him. Bennie (played superbly by Warren Oates) didn’t have to look far for inspiration. During production he was staring it in the face every single day.

Out of all of his films this is the most autobiographical. It’s no surprise it is the only film he had final cut on. You are watching a man scrape and claw for his humanity and realize in the end all the money in the world won’t buy it. If Bennie is going out, he’s going out justified on his terms because that is all a man has. Peckinpah battled actors, producers and just about everyone who stepped foot on his set. All he wanted to do was get it right because he knew he had to leave it all behind one day. Creating chaos was a way to control. He pitted crew members against each other by questioning their manhood and brandished loaded weapons to the Academy Awards. When he made a film he went to hell and took everyone with him. He was a magnet for loyalty, something he held in high regard thematically in his films but probably abused from time to time off screen.

His joy and his torment were one in the same, directing. All his films were him and Sam was every film he made. I don’t think there is another director living or dead who actually personified every frame of the films they directed. He was a Hollywood legend and he suffered both physically and mentally because of it. It didn’t matter, what was on the screen was everything. That is with us forever.

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Everyone in Hollywood knew Sam Peckinpah as “Bloody Sam.” A title I’m sure most probably thought was well deserved. Some of his films were filled with slow motion agony cut against blood drenched chaos. Some weren’t. The truth is Peckinpah made some very thoughtful films using themes of family dysfunction and America’s inevitable loss of humanity to technology. No one saw them. Either way, February 21st marks his birthday so feel free to blog about the man, the myth, the legend. Contact me if you do and next Wednesday I’ll link to your post.

Popularity: 7% [?]