If They Move... Kill 'Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah

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"What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969," critic Michael Sragow wrote in the New Yorker. "Its adrenaline rush of revelations seemed to explode the parameters of the screen." "If They Move . . . Kill 'Em" is the first major biography of David Samuel Peckinpah. Written by the film critic and historian David Weddle, this fascinating account does critical justice to an important body of cinema as it spins the tale of Peckinpah's dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved.
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Overview

"What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969," critic Michael Sragow wrote in the New Yorker. "Its adrenaline rush of revelations seemed to explode the parameters of the screen." "If They Move . . . Kill 'Em" is the first major biography of David Samuel Peckinpah. Written by the film critic and historian David Weddle, this fascinating account does critical justice to an important body of cinema as it spins the tale of Peckinpah's dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved. Sam Peckinpah was born into a clan of lumberjacks, cattle ranchers, and frontier lawyers. After a hitch with the marines, he made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features. In 1955 he began writing scripts for Gunsmoke; in less than a year he was one of the hottest writers in television, with two classic series, The Rifleman and The Westerner, to his credit. From there he went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a filmmaker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and political upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies, Peckinpah and his generation of directors - Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman - broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war, and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer energy, audacity, and originality, and no one cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah.

The first major biography of David Samuel Peckinpah, who began writing scripts for Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and The Westerner and went on to direct phenomenal films such as Riding the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
This biography portrays writer-director Peckinpah (1925-1984) as a gifted man at war with Hollywood, his four wives and himself. The signature of a Peckinpah film like The Wild Bunch or Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is an audaciously protracted, viscerally exciting brawl or shootout. The gravity of such carefully crafted sequences stems from their integration into psychologically nuanced narratives and from their moral ambiguity: in Peckinpah's world, even the ``best'' of men are capable of harrowing and unbidden acts of violence. Such a finely honed moral sense separates Peckinpah from his noisier imitators and speaks to his struggle to reconcile his aesthetic sensibility with the austere machismo he inherited from the unsentimental and self-reliant men in his family. Yet, as film critic and historian Weddle shows, the volatility of the filmmaker's temperament gets the upper hand, hastening his artistic and personal decline. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Known for violent action films such as The Wild Bunch (1969), Peckinpah was dismissed by many critics during his lifetime but is now receiving serious critical attention. The publisher bills this as "the first major biography" of the late writer-director, though many libraries already own Marshall Fine's Bloody Sam (LJ 11/1/91), as well as one or more critical studies. Fine's book is a rather conventional biography, with few surprises; Weddle offers a more vividly written mix of biography and analysis, though on occasion his writing style is too self-consciously hip. In both books, Peckinpah emerges as something of a stereotype: the hard-drinking, womanizing, yet inwardly sensitive hellraiser. Weddle's book is a good choice for libraries that don't already own Fine's book, but only large film collections really need both.-David C. Tucker, DeKalb County P.L., Decatur, Ga.
John Mort
A probing biography of the enfant terrible of 1960s' and 1970s' film-making. Weddle is sympathetic, portraying Peckinpah's tortured childhood and his deep fear of violence, but he doesn't shy from the director's worst characteristics: his drill sergeant's tactics on sets, his failure to give credit to those who worked with him, his endless affairs. After a ground-breaking career in television--including "Gunsmoke", "The Rifleman", "The Westerner", and the best adaptation ever of "Noon Wine", blessed by Katharine Anne Porter herself--Peckinpah's fortunes went down and up with feature films. "Ride the High Country" was a brilliant beginning, but Peckinpah earned the reputation of a drunken fool with his muddled, hopelessly overbudget "Major Dundee". He couldn't get work for three years afterwards, but ironically returned to almost the same Mexican settings for "The Wild Bunch", shot obsessively with an obsessive crew and then assembled in the editing room, where the director at last perfected his famous choreographed violence. "Straw Dogs", "Cable Hogue", "Junior Bonner", and Peckinpah's first major commercial hit, "The Getaway", followed before Peckinpah's alcoholism overtook his creative abilities. Weddle shows Peckinpah's fractured, lonely personal life in detail, but excels with his description of how the films were made; he seems to have interviewed everyone everywhere in depth. Robert Culp, Susan George, Charlton Heston, Dustin Hoffman, Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn, Jason Robards, L. Q. Jones, Sam Johnson, and Brian Keith all have a great deal to say about Peckinpah, most of it good; his wives, girlfriends, and children weigh in, too. Exhaustive and endlessly intriguing.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780802115461
  • Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • Publication date: 8/15/1994
  • Edition description: 1st ed
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 592
  • Product dimensions: 6.34 (w) x 9.31 (h) x 1.87 (d)

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