David Vining's Blog, page 109

Clint Eastwood: A Statement of Purpose

Follow up one Western director for another. It makes sense!

I decided to look through Clin Eastwood’s body of work as a director for a specific reason. When the Discovery/WB merger completed, one of the earliest stories about the takeover was David Zaslav being really angry that WB had greenlit Eastwood’s most recent film, Cry Macho. It was reported that WB knew that the film wouldn’t make its money back, but they greenlit it anyway out of a sense of loyalty to Eastwood. I doubt it would ...

Sam Peckinpah: The Definitive Ranking

Peckinpah is hard whiskey, as a friend told me, and he was right.

His best films are uncompromising views at violence, masculinity, and friendship in an uncaring world. His worst films are victims of his later, much deeper descents into alcoholism and drug addiction. Sam Peckinpah’s work is hard-edged and rough, not the sort of thing for mass audiences who go to the movies for a good time. He did offer that once with the Steve McQueen vehicle The Getaway, but most of the rest are the sort...

The Osterman Weekend

The disaster that was the production of Convoy (it was financially successful, but not enough to save Peckinpah’s professional reputation) knocked him out of work for several years. Don Siegel, one of Peckinpah’s early mentors, needed some second unit work done on his film Jinxed!, and Peckinpah jumped at the opportunity, purely with the eye towards helping to recover his career from nothing. It worked. He did well, and he got a new opportunity to direct again in the adaptation of the Robert...

Convoy

The incoherence of late Peckinpah continues with this new effort to find a commercial hit. Based on the popular song and in an effort to replicate the financial success of Smokey and the Bandit, did eventually become financially successful, the most successful of Peckinpah’s career. However, the road was rough, so rough that actual authorship of the film is nearly impossible to assign. Given complete free reign of the production which led to it getting a month behind schedule (so bad that st...

Cross of Iron

With The Killer Elite, it felt like Sam Peckinpah had simply lost the ability to make a movie, not just a good movie, but a movie period. Unfocused, lethargic, and pretty uniformly unentertaining or enlightening, it was a once talented director simply lost in material he didn’t care about. Well, he turned things around by using German money (well, at least until the German money ran out) and filming in Yugoslavia to make a film about German soldiers on the Russian front as everything collaps...

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Well, that was a lot. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised considering the title. That being said, it seems odd to critique a film for having too much going on when that’s kind of the point, but I’m gonna do it anyway. There’s a lot of fun, entertaining, and even emotionally resonant stuff going on, but there’s also too much going on to allow the kind of focus on any one thing to have the kind of impact this could have had. Is it about mothers and daughters? Finding connection in the world? Find...

The Killer Elite

Having trashed his reputation across all of Hollywood, Sam Peckinpah could only return to Martin Baum and United Artists, this time on a much shorter leash than with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and work with a story based on an unremarkable novel (Monkey in the Middle by Robert Syd Hopkins). The end result feels like Peckinpah had simply no interest in the material, treating it completely unseriously while derailing the shoot to just have a good time with his core cast. I really get...

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

What an exploitative, trashy title, and what a sad, beautiful film behind it. Working with independent producer Martin Baum and his connections at United Artists, Sam Peckinpah was able to find funding for the script he had written with Gordon Dawson. Leaving Hollywood behind and filming in Mexico with a largely Mexican crew, he found a way to tell a new tale in a new setting (contemporary Mexico) and fill it with such melancholy at lost things. I thought that I had hit the peak of Peckinpah...

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Roughly mangled in editing by then president of MGM, James Aubrey, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was dismissed at the time as a lesser work of a filmmaker whose best days were well behind him. Sam Peckinpah’s newest western was supposed to be another The Wild Bunch, but the truncated form of the film that got released in theaters was too incoherent for audiences or critics. It lost money, and Peckinpah reportedly urinated on the screen during a screening. Several years later, the preview ver...

The Getaway

This is Sam Peckinpah completely selling out to Steve McQueen in order to find some kind of financial success, and it works. It’s not deep. It’s not moving. It is pretty consistently entertaining, though. This is a Steve McQueen vehicle first and foremost, and Peckinpah brings the professional quality to the action and direction something like this needs.

Doc McCoy (McQueen) gets rejected for parole in prison, so he tells his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw) to go to Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson) and...