The Sam Peckinpah Centenary 5 – The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Back to the Desert

After his last day of filming The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s life was very different than it was after his last meeting for The Cincinnati Kid. His offices at Warners-Seven Arts was abuzz with activity as he began work on his fifth film, The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Notices for Bunch were divided, but the film’s wallop and positive notices from discerning critics served to rehabilitate Sam among the Hollywood elite. Now people wanted to be in his orbit.

Joel Reisner was assigned to the inevitable Oscar campaign, but his work on Sam’s image went well beyond the Academy awards. Interviews, tours, lectures, retrospectives, appearances on talk shows: Reisner built Sam into an auteur (according to David Weddle, Columbia offered Peckinpah the chance to recut Dundee; he refused). Sam rebuilt himself, minimizing his comfortable, upper-middle-class upbringing and talking up his exploits with women and the bottle. He was dubbed ‘Bloody Sam’, the unfortunate and limiting sobriquet which followed him for the remainder of his career.

Even with all of the publicity, The Ballad of Cable Hogue was a more modest feature: the schedule was shorter, the budget smaller, the scope less ambitious. Phil Feldman returned as executive producer (Peckinpah received the producer credit) as did Lucien Ballard as cinematographer.

Warner, Peckinpah, and Robards on location

The picture’s events again occur in a desert, although Peckinpah selected a less remote location than those in Bunch: Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, which is located approximately 45 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The shooting schedule was established at 36 days.

The weather during those days was decidedly not the desert standard nor filming friendly. Overcast skies and thunderstorms caused the picture to lose shooting days. Peckinpah, who was hard on his films crews before being proclaimed a genius, began firing crew members. A total of 36 people were relieved of their production responsibilities. A shuttle service was maintained to transport the fired to Las Vegas and their replacements to the shoot.

Ultimately the film completed 19 days over schedule and close to $3 million over its original budget.

After filming completed, Sam returned to Warner Brothers to complete post-production on Bunch. He then left for Oahu, where Hogue was primarily edited.

The Wild Bunch was released while Peckinpah was in Hawaii and a situation occurred which poisoned the relationship between the director and Feldman. Cinema owners complained that the film was too long; meanwhile, Warner Brothers was sold again (losing the Seven Arts affiliation) and Peckinpah supporter Ken Hyman was dismissed as president. His replacement was a dollar-and-cents man named Ted Ashley. Ashley ordered 10 minutes cut from Bunch.

Feldman did not contact Peckinpah and determined the cuts himself.

Instructions were sent to the field. Sometimes they were followed precisely; sometimes they were not. This lead to the filmographic quagmire ultimately rectified by Warners releasing a director’s cut in the 2000s.

Peckinpah, not unexpectedly, viewed the situation as a betrayal. He and Feldman were barely on speaking terms while finishing Hogue.

…Drive-Ins

Neither man, however, was prepared for the new regime’s lack of interest in their production. (Jeff’s post includes Stella Stevens’ famous, and cutting, quote about WB’s handling of the picture.) Feldman and Peckinpah put aside their differences in an attempt to save the film, but to no avail. Warner Brothers released the film in lesser houses with little promotion. The reviews were again mostly good but box office receipts were not. The Ballad of Cable Hogue was a flop.

The flop certainly was not due to the movie’s cast. The stock company was present as usual: L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin were again partnered as dim-witted scoundrels while R.G. Armstrong and Slim Pickens re-appear after a one-film hiatus.

Jason Robards Jr had made his name as an actor (and won a Tony) in productions of Eugene O’Neill plays. He played the lead role in Noon Wine, the television production which began Peckinpah’s own long journey out of night. After playing Cable Hogue, Robards later won two consecutive Best Supporting Actor Oscars. With his craggy features and commanding voice, Robards was always a strong performer in Westerns, and so he is here.

Outside of this picture’s production, Robards and Peckinpah were friendly (they shared a taste for liquor) and Sam served as Robards’ best man during the civil ceremony for his fourth marriage.

Hogue was Peckinpah’s first picture since The Deadly Companions with a lead female character. Perhaps not surprisingly, that character is a former prostitute; Sam was not bashful regarding his appreciation for ‘the world’s oldest profession’. Before performing as as Hildy, Stella Stevens had worked in pictures for ten years, appearing alongside Elvis, Dean Martin (2 times), Glenn Ford (3 times), and French icon Jerry Lewis. (After performing in The Nutty Professor, is Stevens also an icon in France? We must defer to friend-of-the-blog Jean-Marie for that insight.) Although her other pictures perhaps had more star power, Stevens received some of the best notices of her career for her work in Hogue.

British actor David Warner played the final member of the film’s lead triumvirate, the libidinous Reverend Joshua Duncan Sloane. Warner’s career began on stage with Shakespearean roles; Peckinpah somehow became acquainted with the actor’s work and sent him the script for Hogue. A screening of Guns in the Afternoon/Ride the High Country sealed Warner’s interest. Hogue was his first American film and indeed his first trip to the USA, and that trip was a long one: Warner was reluctant to fly and made the trip from London to Las Vegas by train and boat, a journey of almost three weeks! A working actor for more than 50 years, Warner’s face was a familiar one in character roles while his distinctive tone graced all manner of voice-over work.

Despite the talent behind and in front of the camera for Hogue and the critical acclaim for both Bunch and Hogue, the new regime at Warner Brothers had no interest in continuing the relationship with Peckinpah: the director was too difficult and volatile, his movies over-budget and under-performing.

The newly-anointed auteur became a free agent again.

Jeff’s Take

I …have a soft spot for The Ballad of Cable Hogue. I find it elegiac and wistful, and not at all the ‘usual’ Western. Though I don’t care much for David Warner’s performance, I very much like that of Robards and Stevens. And I love the arid scenery and setting.

Bud’s Take

When describing Sam Peckinpah’s filmography, ‘whimsical’ is not, perhaps, a word at top of mind. But The Ballad of Cable Hogue does have moments of whimsy, which seems strange for a film about a man left for dead, a salacious preacher, and an ex-prostitute.

It also has moments of comedy…  or attempts at comedy. Unlike his other cinematic chops, Sam’s comedic instincts seem less than stellar. The various scenes with speeded-up film just don’t work. And this viewer did not share the guffaws of various townsfolk watching Hogue dodge a hail of objects thrown by a wrathful Hildy.

Strother Martin’s reedy, singsong choruses of “Cable is yella” are more enjoyable than the drippy song over the opening credits. Or, Butterfly Mornings for that matter. One almost longs for The Major Dundee March.

Even so, the film has strengths.

Kudos to the person responsible for dirt continuity

As previously mentioned, Sam was denied any rewrite privileges with The Deadly Companions. His contributions to screenplays had therefore not included substantial parts for female characters: Teresa in Dundee seems like a studio-mandated love interest; Elsah in Ride is more integral to the plot but still a cog moving its gears (although in fairness, Senta Berger and Mariette Hartley do much to overcome the limited development of their characters). Hogue was his first chance at a woman as a lead character.

Despite multiple leering close-ups of areas other than her face, Stella Stevens must have appreciated the opportunity to stretch herself. Hildy is no bland love interest. And certainly no nun (as in her previous film), I am no Stevens devotee but her role in Hogue is certainly a good one.

Robards is predictably excellent as the scruffy, lovelorn, and revenge-obsessed Hogue; his one-sided conversations with a lizard and the Almighty in the film’s first act are particularly well done.

Ah, the lizard. Once again, Peckinpah indulges his penchant for killing animals onscreen. During this production, at least, this penchant was subject to a strong protest: Sam’s daughter and her boyfriend campaigned for the lizard’s life. Their campaign made Peckinpah uncomfortable but failed to save the hapless reptile.

Unlike Jeff, I like David Warner as Reverend Sloane. Mostly because of his gawky yet lascivious presence; partly because of lingering affection for his turn in another genre film, although an altogether different genre: a time-traveling Jack the Ripper (!) in Time After Time.

A distrust of technological advances is a theme in Peckinpah’s Westerns, with the automobile symbolizing those advances. Hogue culminates a three-film arc in which mechanized vehicles play an increasingly sinister role: in Ride, Steve Judd receives askance stares from the occupants of a horseless carriage; in Bunch, Mapache’s car is an instrument of torture for Angel; in Hogue, an auto is a deadly weapon.

Taken as a whole, I find The Ballad of Cable Hogue an entertaining watch, worth the invested time to experience its performances. Perhaps more importantly, it is whimsical, but still meditative, and shows that Sam Peckinpah was not confined by the ‘Bloody Sam’ label.

RR’s Take

This was one of the few Peckinpah films I had not got ‘round to seeing until Bud and I embarked on this current adventure. Viewing it for the first time, shortly after revisiting the sprawling complexities of Major Dundee and the ground-breaking violence of The Wild Bunch, its warmer and simpler character-driven quality made it a refreshing palate-cleanser – like drinking a cool glass of water the morning after several rounds of delicious but rich, heavy cocktails. All the same, I found it a mixed bag and wouldn’t place it among Sam’s best films.

On the credit site, first and foremost is the acting. Robards is just wonderful, Stella Stevens (I too am not overly familiar with her career and mainly knew her from The Nutty Professor) is almost as terrific essaying one of the few truly interesting-in-her-own-right female roles in Sam’s whole body of work, and like Bud and unlike Jeff I enjoyed David Warner’s performance too, finding his eulogy to Cable (and the way Peckinpah transitions the narrative into it) a particularly moving climax.

DP Ballard is at the top of his game, too, beautifully capturing the desert in all its moods and imbuing the film with a visual lyricism that lingers in the mind. And it’s fascinating to see Sam’s core theme – men living on borrowed time, and beyond their times, trying to redeem themselves in their final act – played out as a gentle, and at times rather bawdy, tragi-comedy.

Ballard at the top of his game

Peckinpah, tongue perhaps slightly in cheek, described it as a blend of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play The Flies with the Keystone Kops!

I can’t speak with any authority about the former but I agree with Bud that some of the would be Keystone freneticism feels forced and dated, and also don’t find the comedic and melancholic sides of the films blend too seamlessly, while overall the film has a languid pace very typical of the early 1970s (see our post on Dennis Hopper vehicle Kid Blue for instance). This type of film, driven more by atmosphere than plot, can be pleasant to hang out in, if you’re in the right mood, but generally isn’t gripping enough to take a film to Grade A status.

And then there’s those somewhat painfully substandard background songs… All in all, this was a nice change of pace, and intriguing and fun viewing, but not a movie I’m likely to return to very often.

‘Sam Peckinpah’ on Facebook As mentioned previously, this Facebook page is an excellent source of information and images on Peckinpah and films, actors, and associates; several images in this post are gratefully sourced from the page.

Also, Jeff Arnold’s West recently became a member of the Classic Movie Blog Association! Please visit the CMBA home page to find and read the fine blogs of our fellow members.

Sources:

Siegel, Mike: David Warner Interview excerpt from Passion & Poetry: The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah

Weddle, David: “ If They Move… Kill ‘Em!”