Parallax View

You’ve read the essays, now see the films. My post-script to the Sam Peckinpah series is a survey of Peckinpah on DVD and Blu-ray, with notes on print and mastering quality and details on supplements (where applicable). And with so many of Peckinpah’s films released in compromised versions and later reconstructed or amended with restored [...]

[Originally published in Film Comment Volume 17 Number 1, January/February 1981] Where is Sam Peckinpah these days? Surrounded by family in Sausalito, or perhaps Mexico? Chumming it with the Montana Bloomsbury Group? Holed up in the cabin he built four or five miles from Warren Oates’ place, putting the final polish on the final draft [...]

[Originally published in Film Comment Volume 21 Number 2, April 1985] There is the grand truth …. He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they … cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979] Sam Peckinpah visited Seattle for several days in July, 1978, under the joint auspices of the Seattle Film Society and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On the evening of July 19 he appeared at the Seattle Concert Theatre to talk with an audience that [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981] Introduction by Richard T. Jameson Strother Martin thought the folks from the Seattle Film Society wanted to meet him just because he had done some jobs of work for Sam Peckinpah and they had had Sam to tea a year or so earlier. Not that that gave [...]

Law and order and grace and understanding are things that have to be taught. … People are born to survive. They have instincts that go back millions of years. Unfortunately, some of those instincts are based on violence. There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and [...]