Cable Television

After he directed The Wild Bunch, a landmark of the violent Western genre, Sam Peckinpah stepped back and made The Ballad Of Cable Hogue (1970), which I recently caught on  TV.  It's a Western, yes, but a comedy with very little violence.  The film went way over budget and flopped, hurting his reputation in Hollywood--so he went to England to make another classic essay in violence, Straw Dogs.

The plot is not what you expect in a Western.  Jason Robards, as the title character, is left to die in the desert.  He discovers water, buys the land and develops the area as a stop for stagecoaches and others.  Meanwhile, he goes into town occasionally and romances a prostitute (Stella Stevens).  He also works with an itinerant preacher (David Warner) whose specialty is sex with his female flock.

The movie is fairly episodic though there is a vague structure, with Cable building up his place and waiting for the return of the former partners who left him for dead. There's a clear ending, though one that mostly comes out of nowhere.  It also has certain bad habits, maybe because comedy wasn't Peckinpah's forte.  He'll give the women's bodies leering close-ups, for instance, and he often resorts to fast motion for a comic pick-up.

But with all its problems, the film has aged well. It's charming, especially Jason Robards.  I can see why it wasn't a hit at the time, but I also think it's one of Peckinpah's best, better than a lot of his more notable titles.