Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage
by: Garner Simmons

Softcover. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 260 pages, b&w photos. There have been very few directors in the history of Hollywood who have ever had as hard a time as Sam Peckinpah did. In a career that lasted only from 1961 to his death near the end of 1984, the man known (rather errantly) as Bloody Sam made only fourteen films--not exactly a large volume work. Despite this, however, and despite (or perhaps because of) his penchant for raising hell with studio heads and producers, Peckinpah was a never-a-dull-moment director. And when he wasn't doing that, he made himself a target for critics, both inside and outside of Hollywood, with his graphic and complex approaches to violence (his 1969 Western epic THE WILD BUNCH), while at the same time also numbering among his films two, largely non-violent gems in THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE and JUNIOR BONNER that prove that the man was able to show sides of the human experience that didn't involve bullets or bloodshed.