Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah. MichaelBliss, editor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

Abstract

Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Michael Bliss, editor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.Sam Peckinpah clawed his way into movie history as a multileveled visual poet, an instinctive trailblazer, and the last great filmmaker to bring direct knowledge of the Old West to the Western genre. With that sentence that opens his essay on page 69 about the adaptation of The Siege at Trencher's Farm into Straw Dogs, critic Michael Sragow pretty well nails Sam Peckinpah. Editor Michael Bliss (who teaches English at Virginia Tech) has assembled some gifted specialists for this collection, including several who have written books on the director, such as his Virginia Tech colleague Stephen Prince (Savage Cinema, 1998), author and film editor Paul Seydor (Peckinpah: The Western Films, 1980), biographer Garner Simmons, and Bliss himself.Consequently, nine essays here celebrate a director who was cantankerous and maybe not so well suited for Hollywood filmmaking; yet this maverick still managed to make fourteen films, many of them arguably great, but most of them, excepting The Wild Bunch, perhaps, now generally forgotten. Even so, no one made better or more honest and realistic Westerns. Editor Bliss fails to provide a clear biographical introduction or even a needed filmography, apparently assuming that anyone who comes to this book will know and have seen the body of work, but that was a mistake that his editors should have noticed and rectified. Peckinpah has now been dead for a quarter century, after all, and Bliss really needs to remind youngsters who Peckinpah was and why his work should matter. His stunted Introduction runs only to five pages. Had he taken it to twenty-five pages, he could have easily provided a biographical sketch instead of a banal extrapolation of contents to come.The Wild Bunch tested the limits of screen violence but seemed almost tame in comparison with Straw Dogs, adapted from a trite novel made brilliant, according to critic Michael Sragow. Bliss himself covers Wild Bunch, but even more space is given to Peckinpah's last Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in essays by Stephen Prince and Paul Seydor, an academic turned film editor, who attempted to re-edit and restore the film. But what Seydor calls the contentious afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Prince considers an ethical dilemma in film restoration, reflecting on the cutting and re-cutting of the film while Peckinpah himself was locked out of the cutting room. …