The Essentials: Sam Peckinpah’s Best Films

“Junior Bonner” (1972)
Displaying his softer side far more successfully than in the bawdy ‘Cable Hogue,’ Peckinpah’s follow-up to his most controversial film “Straw Dogs” is maybe the only one of his oeuvre that you could call “sweet.” Steve McQueenplays Junior, a rodeo rider who’s already crested his career and for whom all subsequent victories will essentially just be blips on the long slide down the other side. Peckinpah takes unusual care with themes of family and the bittersweet nature of homecoming, and gets some of his most straightforwardly sympathetic performances as a result. McQueen plays the stubbornly goodnatured Junior with real knock-me-down-I’ll-get-right-up-again charm, while Robert Preston as Ace, Junior’s womanizing dreamer Dad, and Ida Lupino as his practical, long-suffering mother, are superb, despite both being only 12 years older than McQueen. But it’s notable for being a gentler perspective on the demise of the frontier lifestyle, in which acknowledgment of the hardscrabble nature of that old life does not preclude a real feeling of nostalgia at its passing and the end of its archaic code. One particular scene between Ace and Junior, when they get drunk together in a deserted railway station, makes that manifest: Peckinpah is saddened that modernity and corporate capitalism are swamping the rugged individualism represented by the rodeo lifestyle, but is archly aware of the limitations of that lifestyle too. Still, the rodeo scenes are shot with characteristic energy, and at times the obvious use of stunt doubles and odd angles, in addition to trademark slo-mo and freeze frames, makes these sequences feel almost abstract, impressionist montages designed more to represent a philosophy than tell a story. After all, the future is a bucking bronco that even the strongest of us can only ride for so long before being thrown. [B]