The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Yet another belated addition to our list of prominent directors perused by the blog is Sam Peckinpah. Instead of analyzing his more character-defining classics (Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs), our first review will be his more low-key, light-hearted The Ballad of Cable Hogue, pretty much as far from a Peckinpah film as one could imagine - at least at a glance.

Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) is a grizzled prospector left for dead in the middle of the Arizona desert by, Bowen (Strother Martin) and Taggart (L.Q. Jones). After several days' wandering, he accidentally finds a mudhole which he digs out to find a spring of fresh water. Cable gets the idea to build a stagecoach stop in the parched desert, . In the process he meets a wandering preacher (David Warner) and falls in love. All the while, however, he is awaiting the inevitable return of his old partners, hoping to gain revenge.

With Ballad of Cable Hogue, Peckinpah moves drastically away. Most of Peckinpah's Westerns are a curious mixture of the nihilistic violence and cynicism introduced in the Western genre by films like Vera Cruz and The Magnificent Seven (and of course Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns), and yet also maintain a large degree of John Ford-inspired sentimentality and nostalgia for the good old days. Here Peckinpah whole-heartedly embraces Ford's sentimentality, musing on the death of the West in a lyrical fable. The film's violence is muted and virtually non-existant; the most gruesome scene is the shooting of a Gila Monster in the film's opening, and the human body count is remarkably low (especially considering this film came directly after The Wild Bunch). Though set up as a story of revenge, it's also a gentle, nostalgic musing about a man who found water where it wasn't and made an unlikely name for himself - and also, how the Old West was killed (literally in this case) by the closing of the frontier and the advancement of technology. That Peckinpah is able to tell this story without resorting to his usual tricks of bloody showdowns and overwrought machismo is quite admirable - it's a pity that this side of Peckinpah (along with his creativity) would disappear amidst the haze of booze, drugs and women that would soon overtake him.

The primary criticism that can be levelled at the film is that it is rather sluggish in pacing. The film's storyline is interesting but never quite takes off in its own right; the film is interesting for its characters, writing and technical aspects, but the slow pace and simplistic narrative hurt the film at times (as a few very out-of-place cartoonish elements, including a winking dollar bill and use of slapstick fast-motion in several scenes). Peckinpah defuses the traditional, expected resolution to the revenge story with anti-climax, which is fine, but subsequently provides an overwritten, badly drawn-out and heavily sentimental conclusion that strikes a false note. The film isn't fatally harmed by these problems, but it does prevent the movie from reaching the level of Peckinpah's masterpieces.

Peckinpah's direction is top-notch; more restrained than usual, he eschews his usual style to mostly positive results. The film isn't necessarily identifiable stylistically as a Peckinpah film, but then it isn't necessarily supposed to. Lucien Ballard provides beautiful landscapes of the Arizona desert, and Jerry Goldsmith's score is subtle and effective. The film's handful of songs (especially "Butterfly Mornings") mostly fit into the story and, unlike Bob Dylan's intrusive, obnoxiously twanging score for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, generally enhances the story.

The cast is wonderful. Jason Robards is a bit hammy at times, but he's very well-suited for the part, bringing a combination of humor and tragic gravity to Hogue. (It's hard watching this film to not think of his previous year's turn as the romantic outlaw Cheyenne in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West - another favorite we must address in the near-future.) Stella Stevens is superb; beautiful, feisty, and very much an independent woman, she is about as far from Peckinpah's wonton sex object stereotypes (at least those provided by his critics) as one could get, and her chemistry with Robards is wonderful. David Warner is hysterical as the drunken, lecherous priest who becomes Hogue's best friend. Farther down the cast list are solid Peckinpah regulars Slim Pickens, Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones, and, strangely not playing a preacher, R.G. Armstrong.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue is a bit slight (and slow) for its own good, but it's a pleasant-enough film worthy of at least a work. At the very least, it shows a very different side of Peckinpah than most of his work.

Rating: 7/10 - Recommended