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"Your idea of light comedy is to burn down a whorehouse" (Jack Pickford to Raoul Walsh). Sam Peckinpah facing the sands, the Book of Genesis in one hand and William Carlos Williams' "Venus Over the Desert" (or Ford's Tobacco Road) in the other. Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) is on the ground with lizards and rattlesnakes and on wry terms with the Lord, he's abandoned and parched when he stumbles onto a waterhole and promptly claims the miracle as his own. The site is a stagecoach route between the towns of Dead Dog and Gila, business is set up in this "cactus Eden" with the help of a lecherous preacher with a revolving collar (David Warner). His sanctuary accommodates the exiled blonde (Stella Stevens), still the damn fool is too wrapped up in vengeance and pride to hang on to her, the epoch-smashing automobile has the last word. "Sorta grabs ya by the short hairs, don't it?" A fable and a parable, a comic pendant to The Wild Bunch (L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin play virtually the same pair of scuttling peckerwoods), the calm between Peckinpah's tempests. The humor is at once lackadaisical and bellicose, zooms into cleavages and collapsing tents and the like, perhaps to paper over the fact that this is a sad tale—about the instability of relationships and the illusion of independence, the end of the West's fresh start and a filmmaker who sees himself as a cheerful sinner who can't help losing his oasis. "And loving?" "Gets mighty lonesome without it." Balzac for the verdant dress, Twain for the serene, open-air deathbed. Asked to write on a film that had moved him, Samuel Fuller picked this "sensitive, emotional, surgical job on an American desert hermit without familiar sagebrush stuffing." Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. With Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong, Peter Whitney, Susan O'Connell, and Gene Evans.
--- Fernando F. Croce |