The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (322 page)

Throughout Peckinpah’s work there is the theme of violently talented men hired for a job that is loaded with compromise, corruption, and double-cross. They strive to perform with honor, before recognizing the inevitable logic of self-destruction. The theme was invariably dressed up as a Western—classical and modern: the air was sultry with analogy, yet Peckinpah also pioneered the fruitful history of 1881 to about 1918.
The Wild Bunch
trade guns to Mapache as a prelude to stunning slaughter. Pat Garrett contracts to eliminate an old friend, knowing in his bones that he and the Kid have lived too late on the business-ready frontier. Deke Thornton must track down the old bunch to save his life. The hero of
Alfredo Garcia
must deliver that head, and wonder how he can keep his soul. Those contracts are jobs, yet they are also arrangements with death—ways of getting there, ways of breaking out. They are also metaphors for the eating of shit required in making a picture. Peckinpah was a romantic—and most of all when thinking about himself. Thus, these Westerns are parables about life in Hollywood.

I said “wrestled” earlier, and I meant it. There’s hardly a better director I find so problematic. That gloomy self-romance is so humorless. People laugh at fate in Peckinpah films, yet they have a dogged, drunken humorlessness by which you have to worship Peckinpah’s fatalism—or quit. The celebration of bloodletting is monotonous as well as beautiful; it became its own code and cliché, and the slow-mo gaze it summoned up was only proof of an addiction to booze, drugs, brutality, and arrogance. The style was cripplingly self-important. But it is beautiful, for Peckinpah knew more about composition, editing, and sound than anyone that narrow had a right to. And there are times—in
Pat Garrett
above all—where the beauty redeems the boorish attitudes and, like a flooding river, breaks their banks. Moreover, it was in looking that Peckinpah seemed most open or uncertain; he looked to see—whereas Ford looked to discover what he knew already.

That is why
Pat Garrett
is one of the great American films, entrancing, perplexing, and—may I add—growing: only recently, a letterboxed videotape came my way with a long, bitter scene between Garrett and his wife that changes my sense of the film (yet again). For there are versions of
Pat Garrett
, and there is a Peckinpah cult that delivers Sam’s real or deepest wishes long after his death. Why not? So many of his films were butchered, adding confusion to plot lines that are often cryptic and episodic.

Then there is the matter of women. Peckinpah on screen was a merciless misogynist. His women are bitches, whores, whore-saints, sluts, betrayers, native madonnas—they are also riveting, for Peckinpah’s eye extended to women, and sometimes he must have charmed actresses into the indignities they suffered. But these women are so silent, so passive, so fit for male paranoia. Only one is central—in
Straw Dogs
—a revolting film of grinding menace, stilted, and very uneasy in England.

Again, the hatred he disclosed was finally a proof of how enclosed and protected the alleged adventurer was. Time and again, Peckinpah is loathsome.

The final films deteriorate terribly, leaving us to suppose the wreck Peckinpah had become, the victim of his addictions, unable to find fresh subjects. Nevertheless, we are left with a handful of films that have not gone stale—
The Wild Bunch, Cable Hogue, Pat Garrett
, and
Alfredo Garcia
. I omit the two Steve McQueen pictures, though they both work. McQueen was not quite a Peckinpah actor—the director preferred, and did wonders with, ensembles. McQueen was too impregnable, and not quite open to delusion: that may be why Peckinpah’s
The Getaway
stops well short of the terror in Jim Thompson’s novel.

So we have four films, all in the haze of Mexico and the Southwest, tales of self-extinction worthy of Borges, yet true to the history of the American West, and crammed with the best stock company ever put on American film: Holden, Borgnine, Ryan, Strother Martin, L. Q. Jones, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton, Richard Bright, Slim Pickens … the list goes on (and ignores women).

The more that emerges on Peckinpah the man, the clearer it is that he was in brazen pursuit of his own fantasies—and expecting others to pay for it. A very dangerous man, because he could be so damn good.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
makes Clint Eastwood look like a carpetbagger.

Arthur Penn
, b. Philadelphia, 1922
1958:
The Left-Handed Gun
. 1962:
The Miracle Worker
. 1965:
Mickey One
. 1966:
The Chase
. 1967:
Bonnie and Clyde
. 1969:
Alice’s Restaurant
. 1970:
Little Big Man
. 1973: “The Highest,” episode from
Visions of Eight
(d). 1975:
Night Moves
. 1976:
The Missouri Breaks
. 1981:
Four Friends
. 1985:
Target
. 1987:
Dead of Winter
. 1989:
Penn and Teller Get Killed
. 1993:
The Portrait
(TV). 1996:
Inside
(TV).

What has happened with Arthur Penn? In the last twenty years, he has been nearly a nonentity. In the fifteen years before that, he was one of the best directors in America, and the filmmaker with the most acute sense of what the audience dreamed and feared. Can talent and instinct like that fade? Does a filmmaker weary of his own ordeal? Was Penn always more reliant on collaboration than I had allowed?

In the late seventies I said there was a cultivated perfection in his work that smacked of limits. Cinema is restricted by emphatic, exclusive meanings, and always encouraged by divergent, suggestive styles. It is contradictory that a director so committed to spontaneity and physical immediacy should seem to be striving for a solitary rightness. In Penn, meticulousness is sometimes alien to vitality. The best films by Nicholas Ray show how violence can be intrinsic, not illustrated by form but embodied in it, so that the whole shape and imagery of
In a Lonely Place
or
Rebel Without a Cause
seem vibrant with danger. In Penn’s case, it is the premeditated, beautiful significance of violence, and the thorough schematic approach to it, that sometimes jar.

The Left-Handed Gun, The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde
, and
Little Big Man
are commentaries on the conflict between law and violence in America and on the disillusion with corrupt government, racial disharmony, and the military machine. It is still not fully appreciated how the attractiveness of
Bonnie and Clyde
led the viewer toward political and social nihilism. Just as Penn presents Billy the Kid and Helen Keller as dynamic life forces unable to deal with the treacherous or crass world, so the link in
Bonnie and Clyde
between sexual satisfaction and outlawry is explicit. The death roll of the central characters is their final passion, a giving up of all hope of social order or justice. The world around Bonnie and Clyde is unremittingly hostile, and Penn depicts it with reciprocal animosity. The same foreboding haunts
The Chase
, where a small town proves unworthy of a noble sheriff and is seen as the breeding ground of the spasm violence in which Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald in a police station. That comparison, like the orgasmic use of slow motion at the end of
Bonnie and Clyde
, is as calculated as the way in
Little Big Man
the Indians are called the “human beings” and the massacre of Jack Crabbe’s family resembles My Lai.

On paper, such devices only seem to prove the schematic bones of Penn’s style. What usually transcends such objections is the way he fixes on people and the way they speak, move, listen, and breathe. In terms of camerawork, Penn’s films are measured. The impression of sensual experience comes principally from the sympathy he has with actors and the charge he gives them. Rather in the manner of Kazan, Penn redeems his own emphatic attitudes by taking flight with his actors.

It is therefore relevant that he came to films from TV and the theatre. After war service, he studied at the Actors’ Studio and with Michael Chekhov in Los Angeles. By 1951 he was in TV as a floor manager and playwright. He wrote three plays before turning to direction. His TV work includes
The Miracle Worker
, which he later produced on Broadway, with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. His stage productions have also included
Two for the See-Saw, Toys in the Attic, All the Way Home
, and
Wait Until Dark
.

His first film, made at Warners rather against the grain of studio orthodoxy, was from a play by Gore Vidal, scripted by Leslie Stevens. Its substitution of a modern American youth for the mythical Billy the Kid is largely due to Paul Newman’s ambitious performance and the clear-cut psychological case history in the script. Like many Penn films, it is clinical allegory dressed up in period clothes. It also thrives on the restrictions Penn felt at Warners. It is so visually inventive that the deliberation hardly shows. There is a capturing of the psychology in the imagery—Billy planning a kill on a steamy window—a very moving tragic progression and specific moments of great tension.

The delay before
The Miracle Worker
may have reflected the trouble
Left-Handed Gun
had with large audiences and Penn’s decision to wait until a proper film could be made of a subject that he had made his own. All the more credit then that the film often seems nearly improvised. Using very long takes, Penn achieved an audience involvement in the confrontation of emotional teacher and wild child that is physically and morally draining. The sentimentality that lies in wait is avoided with the insistence that Annie and Helen are stubborn, private creatures, the one with a message of civilization, the other a savage. And it is crucial to Penn’s development that Helen’s education is not just deeply moving when it succeeds, but also aware of a natural solitariness that has been lost. Education is vindicated, but not whitewashed, because we see how far Annie teaches to soothe her own emotional wounds. Like the outsiders trapped in the car dump in
The Chase
, Annie and Helen are joined by their flaws. Penn’s romanticism is clear in his treatment of Helen as a noble savage restrained by culture. At a secondary level,
The Miracle Worker
is also a study of a suffocating Southern family. The two levels are connected in the conclusion to the dining-room battle—“the room’s a wreck, but her napkin’s folded.”

Mickey One
was a determined excursion into European existentialism, but still an intriguing commentary on an America beset by conspiracy. It was made after Penn had been fired from
The Train
by Burt Lancaster, and its Kafka treatment of Warren Beatty paranoid about “the organization” shows Penn’s brooding dismay at modern America, fearful of menace and waiting in vain for a word from the Lord. Thus it leads into
The Chase
more readily than might be expected. Once the sheriff of that film has abdicated, then the arena is left to outlaws and depraved citizens.

Some critics have remarked on the way scriptwriters David Newman and Robert Benton turned to Penn only after Truffaut and Godard had been unable to make
Bonnie and Clyde
, as if to underline the tragi-comedy of the script. It is more important that Warren Beatty took up the subject and asked Penn to direct it. As with Paul Newman, Duke, and Bancroft, Penn ignited Beatty and Faye Dunaway. The idea of their nobility would be untenable but for their cinematic vividness: Clyde’s shy limp, Bonnie’s glistening skin. In photographing the quick and the dead in people, Penn has few equals. Time and again he has coaxed more out of a player than is usual: not only with Beatty and Dunaway, but John Dehner, Hurd Hatfield, Victor Jory, Janice Rule, the unwholesome gallery from
The Chase
, Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Michael J. Pollard.

Alice’s Restaurant
is the most casual and perhaps the most fruitful of his films for his own future. Its ballad form is a once and only thing, and its direct use of fact and fiction is alien to Penn’s taste for allegory. But because it is open to improvisation, and in the shadow of the droll Arlo Guthrie, Penn’s formal intelligence stands back.
Little Big Man
concludes his great work; it goes past destruction, to resignation, and can hardly be advanced upon. Its perfection is that of an important theme thoroughly rendered. What will activate Penn now? Some ten years earlier, Preminger took on a run of major subjects, and was a tamer man thereafter. Penn is over seventy now. If he means to make more films, his need for precision and literal effects may seem handicaps.
Alice’s Restaurant
offers a way out of the dilemma in the successful use of informality. In addition, it suggests a theme touched on in
Mickey One
, of the entertainer “talking” to the world.

Night Moves
was made in the untrusting aftermath of assassinations and Watergate, and it tries to show personal failure at the heart of a larger national malaise. But it ends up a perplexing film noir, more unclear than disturbing, its allegory tangled with its anecdote.
The Missouri Breaks
is far more achieved and mature: using a conventional Western outline, Penn invests it with quirky history and a gang of originals. It is his most relaxed, digressive movie, with time for
Tristram Shandy
, urgent set pieces, an idiosyncratic girl, a running debate between order and freedom, and a Marlon Brando who manages to make every odd tangent believable and personal.

I would not back off on a word of the above. But then I must add that Penn’s last six films are as if made by someone else (apart from that moment in
Four Friends
when James Leo Herlihy goes crazy). What happened? Times changed. Penn may have lost touch with vital friends and audience tastes. The lesson is clear: auteurship is no protection—great directors can go cold.