Perhaps we should get the “Bloody Sam” persona out of the way first. Somehow when we think of Peckinpah our minds always turn to The Wild Bunch, arguably the first Western to go full bore in its reappraisal of frontier narratives with an accumulating body count in the hundreds and its notorious prolonged slow-motion shoot-outs. Or for its fusion of violence and sheer voyeurism, there’s 1974’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a picture which never misses the chance to treat a woman badly, where bared breasts are the rule and normal décor the exception, and whose reviews at the time of its release went beyond dislike into something approaching revulsion, with descriptions like grotesque, sadistic, horrific, and obscene the consensus. Or for that matter there was The Getaway (1972), whose plot found a husband-and-wife gang, played by the real-life couple Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, masterminding a bank heist, with added sex, infidelity, betrayal, and a climactic shoot-out that made Bonnie and Clyde look like My Fair Lady: literally rivers of blood.
But all this, impressively sanguinary as it was, would pale by comparison to the truly jarring scene in 1971’s Straw Dogs in which a character played by the young actress Susan George was subjected to a graphic rape. “I did zoom along in the script to find out where I had to take my clothes off, and saw that this was quite different from any script I had ever read before,” George remarked, a notable understatement to describe a film that the British censors banned in its uncut version for the next thirty years.
Curiously enough, all these actors, and many others besides, would continue to express an exasperated affection for their director, whatever indignities he heaped upon them. As James Coburn, veteran of three Peckinpah campaigns, as he called them, once told me, “The thing about Sam was that he forced you to do your best work. He may have been a nasty bastard, but it was all in the name of the film. You didn’t just phone it in. It had to come from some place within you.”