“The Killer Elite” (1975)
Sandwiched between two idiosyncratic, brilliant films that were trashed on release for all the wrong reasons, there’s “The Killer Elite” which has been overlooked for all the right ones. It’s not that it’s a terrible film, although the racism and misogyny of its central characters is almost more objectionable than elsewhere because of how offhand and casual it feels. But “The Killer Elite,” which stars James Caan (who allegedly introduced Peckinpah to cocaine on set) and Robert Duvall as the old Peckinpah staple of a pair of male buddies (we can tell because they banter about prostitutes with vaginal infections) who find themselves on opposite sides of some code, is among his most listless works. This was possibly because reportedly most of it was directed by assistants after Peckinpah retreated to his trailer in a coke-addled paranoiac huff due to not being allowed to change the script to his liking (the first time that had happened since his debut film). The story of an “intelligence contractor” (Caan), for which read “hired muscle for a private firm employed to do off-the-books assignments for the government” whose partner (Duvall) double crosses him, feels desultory, and is not helped by how little screen time the “Godfather” duo actually shares. There’s a long digression as Caan recuperates, a montage where he learns martial arts, and then a quite dull plotline about a Chinese client who needs protection but whom wily old Duvall also has his sights on. The most fun is probably had by the invaluable Burt Young as Caan’s later sidekick, but even he and Monte Hellman on editing duty can’t inject much life into this rote story (turns out the corruption goes right to the top!). It feels like nobody making it really cared about “The Killer Elite,” so why should we? [C]
“Cross of Iron” (1977)
A despairingly nihilist film, again wrestled out of a difficult shoot marred by personality clashes, cost overruns and Peckinpah’s increasingly volatile behavior, his sole World War II movie is probably the preeminent neglected masterpiece in his catalogue. Set within a company of German soldiers during the beginning of the German retreat from Soviet Russia, the film is less about Nazi atrocity (aside from the visceral and chilling documentary footage that frames the opening and closing credits while a choir of children sing a naive folk song) or even Nazi-Soviet aggression than it is about internal division in the armed forces, class conflict and the oppositional ideologies that men fighting and dying on ostensibly the same side can display. James Coburn, giving Peckinpah another of his best-ever performances, plays the rough-hewn Sergeant Steiner, who loathes the officer class, even the more “enlightened” variety, here represented by James Mason‘s Colonel Brandt and David Warner‘s decent but debilitatingly defeatist Captain Kiesler. They are joined by ruthlessly ambitious aristocrat Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell) whose sole aim is to win an Iron Cross, despite the fact that he is as craven and corrupt a soldier as Steiner is brave and respected. As engrossing as the story is, “Cross of Iron” is also formally brilliant, displaying some of Peckinpah’s most lucid filmmaking, from the crisp Kubrickian sequence in which a convalescing Steiner hallucinates a whole party on a deserted verandah, to the tortuously long battle sequences —it’s as visceral and authentic as anything he ever shot. Released to massive disinterest the same year as “Star Wars,” it’s Peckinpah’s last great film and is more known now for its influence on other titles, notably Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” But “Cross of Iron” is an infinitely cleverer, sharper and more scathing film, a dazzling, dazing critique of war and its mythmaking power over masculine identity. [A]
“Convoy” (1978)
There is basically no justice in this world, which is the only way to account for the fact that “Convoy,” by some 18-wheeler big-rig distance the absolute daftest of Peckinpah’s films, and the very least Peckinpah-esque, should be his most financially successful. Designed with some justification to cash in on the brief, inexplicable box office dominance of “Smokey and the Bandit” and the trucker culture in vogue in the U.S. for a short time, it stars a frequently shirtless Kris Kristofferson, a sultry, cropped-haired Ali McGraw and a fuming, gurning Ernest Borgnine in a story so slight it feels like a single, underdeveloped episode of a TV show, right down to those cheapie yellow opening credits (and credit sequences in Peckinpah films otherwise are almost invariably fascinating). That said, it’s certainly possible to see why the film could have been a hit: it’s a breezy anthem to blue-collar non-conformity with a couple of pretty decent stunt sequences, usually at the expense of Borgnine’s doggedly malevolent sheriff who wants to run The Duck (Kristofferson), Pig Pen (Burt Young), Spider Mike (Franklin Ajaye), Widow Woman (Madge Sinclair) and the rest of the ever-increasing convoy off the highway for no better reason than “I hate truckers.” And as ever with these last few films, there’s a reason it feels relatively anonymous; Peckinpah was on a steady decline in terms of his health and his worsening addictions, and much of the film was reportedly shot, uncredited, by his friend and regular star James Coburn. Word of Peckinpah’s disengagement got around (the budget doubling didn’t help either) and for the first time in his directorial career and with typical irony, he found himself unemployable in the immediate aftermath of the most successful film he’d ever make. [B-/C+]
“The Osterman Weekend” (1983)
It’s rare that a director makes such an atypical film for his finale, and that Peckinpah’s should be such an oddly ambitious tangle only makes it more singular. Based on a Robert Ludlum novel that reportedly Peckinpah himself had little love for (he needed the work after three fallow years) and stacked with a terrific cast (Rutger Hauer, John Hurt, Burt Lancaster, Dennis Hopper, Craig T. Nelson, Chris Sarandon), it’s the convoluted story of CIA agent Fassett (Hurt) trying to get a ring of suspected American Soviet agents (Hopper, Nelson, Sarandon) to defect at the behest of a superior (Lancaster) whom he’s unaware condoned the assassination of his wife. Fassett approaches the suspects’ old friend Tanner (Hauer), a firebrand TV interviewer with a shaky marriage to help turn them, but why this should also involve a massive closed circuit TV operation, the kidnap of Tanner’s wife and child and the faked decapitation of their dog is never adequately explained. Still, although you can almost palpably sense that Peckinpah’s ailing heart isn’t wholly in it, there are flashes of his erstwhile filmmaking brio beneath a nicely sleazy Lalo Schifrin score, though how much of that survived the re-edit after the first cut was deemed near-incomprehensible is hard to say. What truly sinks “The Osterman Weekend” is a surfeit of plot, for which Peckinpah, a master of the minimalist, lean, linear narrative, was just not well suited, and there’s a sense that his bandana-wearing wildman instincts are being throttled right down to deliver this indoorsy story of pallid men watching TV sets. With Peckinpah dying the following year, this film amounting to his swan song feels a bit like the ironic/tragic fulfillment of the prophecy of so many of his better titles —that the old, blunt-but-honest way of life must always cede to a kind of effete modernity with which it is ill-equipped to deal. [C+]
