Bring Me the Head of Sam Peckinpah / INLAND EMPIRE
One cinema visit this week marked with a *. Maybe another season of a director’s work next week, maybe not.
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
For the record, this was the 1988 Turner Preview version of the film. If The Wild Bunch (1969) was the funeral of the Western genre, then Pat Garrett is the burial. Working with a poetic script that occasionally doesn’t make a bit of sense and against the wishes of the then-head of the studio, James Aubrey, the film is suffused with a deep melancholy and sense of hopelessness. It is, as ever, the characters of Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch seen a little further down the road: the outlaw who’s sold out and become a sheriff, and the former friend he has to kill who’s stayed true to himself. There is no longer a place for these people in America, and they, along with every great character actor from the history of the genre, are to brushed aside by the money men who smell profit in the open range.
INLAND EMPIRE (2006) *
And so, final proof, if proof were needed, that Hollywood has got it completely wrong when it comes to film marketing. For every executive who’s sat in an office and complained that their pet audience of 13 year old boys has to have every plot point explained to them again and again as if they were simpletons, for every writer who’s put the studio’s spin on a good script and made it worse, for every up and coming director with a background in music videos and adverts who knows they’re weak on dealing with actors and having anything of any substance to say, here is this, the first film in five years from David Lynch, “a gob of spit in the face of art”. How could you preview this? Who would get past the first appearance of actors in rabbit costumes? Who would survive the first rumble of ambient sound paired with indecipherable, dimly lit images? What’s wrong with the quality of the images? Why are things out of focus? Why does one image follow from the next to the next to the next? Make it stop, make it stop, give me the summer of sequels instead!!
Possibly, INLAND EMPIRE is about this: a blonde actress receives a visit from a disturbed neighbour who predicts that she will get the part in her next film. The film is a remake of a Polish film which was never finished because something happened to the two actors during its making; there are rumours of a gypsy curse. At some stage, the same “something” starts to happen in the production of the remake, and after that, you’re on your own. While the film seems anchored in a concrete reality, it’s actually not. Roles slip in and out of the film, the reality of making the film, the Polish film, the reality of making the Polish film, watching David Lynch’s film, the very film you’re watching, where there’s an entire world both behind the projection booth and in front of the screen and behind the screen.
Like Mulholland Dr. (2001), this is a film about acting, about playing a role, about burying yourself in a part so deeply that you become someone else, but for a purpose, perhaps the purpose of lifting the curse, perhaps to die on screen and be reborn, perhaps to discover who you truly are and who you truly are not. If you’re bored with contemporary film, if you like a challenge, if you like the idea of something where the filmmaker wants you, the audience member, to bring something to the table as well, then this is the film for you, all three hours of it. If you give yourself up to it, those three hours will pass like a dream. This is the best film I’ve seen in three and a half years. People are going to be unravelling its mysteries for centuries.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
It seems that every actor who played a lead role in a Peckinpah film ended up playing Peckinpah himself. Hence, William Holden’s moustache in The Wild Bunch which made him look more like Sam. Hence, Warren Oates’ sunglasses in this film which do the same. Only seven minutes in do we discover that this film takes place in the present day as El Jefe dispatches his minions to do his dirty work for him. The parallels with Watergate are deliberately clumsy and completely intended; Peckinpah took Nixon’s betrayal of America personally and even dispatched a telegram to the White House to tell Nixon exactly what he thought of him. It’s a film about what you have to go through to make a film, about what part of your soul you have to rip out to deliver the severed head of a man you’ve never met to another man who wanted that act done.
The Killer Elite (1975)
Sam Peckinpah, meet cocaine, I think you two are going to get along very well. I was puzzled by the dialogue of this film that seemed to be taking the mick out of the script until I discovered courtesy of David Weddle’s biography of Peckinpah that Sam had directed his actors to improvise mocking lines as part of a deliberate strategy to belittle material that Sam had been shanghaied into directing and felt was beneath him. This is a really irritating thing to discover because this film has ninjas, swordfights, Uzis, shootouts, all cool Peckinpah stuff that Sam no longer felt he had any time for. Instead of approaching this material with the cool intent of his hero, Don Siegel (who would have done it a whole lot better), Sam was too busy getting high.
Cross of Iron (1977)
Financed by the legendary soft porn baron Wolf Hartwig (who gave us Schulmädchen-Report (1970) amongst many many others but was way out of his depth on this one), Peckinpah did have one great film left in him. It’s true that some scenes lack focus, but for the most part this is a scarifying account of modern warfare circa World War II on the Russian front from the viewpoint of the Germans, and one Corporal Steiner in particular. Every war film is an anti-war film, and this is no exception. Steiner no longer believes in any cause, no longer believes in the Iron Cross he’s been awarded, the Cross which the newly-posted Prussian patrician Captain Stransky covets so much. Steiner’s just trying to get through this with the lives of his men intact. But there are too many advancing Russians, and too many enemies on his own side as well. Peckinpah’s use of slow motion cut into fast motion reaches its apotheosis here in the horror of war. There’s no glorification of violence here, just mud and dirt and blood and shit and waste.
Convoy (1978)
What a waste. By this stage, Peckinpah’s addictions had got the better of him. Whole chunks of this movie were directed by James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson and Katherine Haber, Sam’s long suffering personal assistant. Sam was in his trailer with his drink and drugs, often too wasted to make it to the set. Does it show in the finished film? Oh yes. My heart sinks when I’m watching a film from the 70s and that yee-hah bluegrassy banjo and fiddle and boom-chicka beat starts up, because this is a car chase, this is fun y’all, we’re gonna have a good time tonight, yessirree. Deadly. Smokey and the Bandit (1977) was a big hit but it isn’t any good. Convoy was a big hit as well, the biggest of Sam’s career, and all it does is lie there on the screen like a dead dog begging you to like it.
The Osterman Weekend (1983)
Perhaps starting the film with the death of a naked woman wasn’t the best choice to make. It seemed to turn people off right up front, and it would have been much better to introduce this material later in the film, when some more time has been invested in developing the characters and laying out the situation. And in fact this actually happens: at one point John Hurt’s character explains his motivation for targeting Rutger Hauer’s friends and he plays the tape that starts the film. I wonder if Sam knew this, but we’ll never know, he was taken off the picture and never allowed to finish what he’d started.
Sam Peckinpah died a year after the release of his final film. He was 59, but he looked two decades older.
David Lynch is 61, has practiced Transcendental Meditation since the 1970s, and has just made the best film of his career.