Watching The Getaway recently reaffirmed for me what a great artist Sam Peckinpah was. Somehow I had missed this film over the years, discouraged from watching it by its highly uneven reputation, and the fact that I find Ali McGraw to be a black hole who tends to pull a movie into oblivion. The film didn’t change my opinon of La McGraw, and in fact her vacuity pulls her co-star Steve McQueen badly into its orbit. In Peckinpah’s preceding film, Junior Bonner, McQueen was at his best and seems well in the groove of Peckinpah’s male characters, their brutality an expression of their sensitivity. Here he seems like the Steve McQueen of the unwatchably glib The Thomas Crown Affair.
But everything about the film besides its lead actors is beautiful. The fact that it works as a crime thriller in a relatively uncomplicated way is a bonus, because, though it is not among his great works, it is fully haunted by the ghosts that make Peckinpah’s work so revelatory. Peckinpah at his best treats subjects that are at the centre of American storytelling (the frontier, masculinity, violence) with a grace, depth and poetry that exceeds even Hawks and Ford (maybe that’s just a generational thing, though; too bad no one of my generation managed to surpass Peckinpah).
So excited was I by this, that I immediately ordered a copy of The Osterman Weekend, Sam’s last film, which I saw at Toronto’s Imperial 6 Cinemas on its initial release in 1983, and remembered as borderline unwatchable. But if The Getaway was this good, perhaps I had just missed the point on Osterman (at the time I had yet to see The Wild Bunch or Ride the High Country or Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, now three of my favourite American films, only Straw Dogs and at much too young an age [14]).
I have this theory: that films from the 70’s have gotten better, and films from the 80’s have gotten worse. It’s remarkable how few exceptions there seem to be. Sadly, The Osterman Weekend is not one of them. Not only was it is as bad as I remembered, knowing Peckinpah’s work makes its badness more tragic. Not primarily because of the vast gap in quality between Osterman and his earlier films — well, except for Convoy and The Killer Elite, though I think it is worse — but because it is a kind of announcement of the annihilation of a great filmmaker. It depicts a world in which all the values that were both celebrated and mourned in his great works – and that ability to both mourn and celebrate at the same time has something to do with their greatness– have ceased to exist. Those values have been destroyed by vast institutions (within the narrative, the CIA and the mass media; while embodied by the film itself, 20th Century Fox and the cheesy producers [Highlander: Search for Vengeance, anyone?] who hired Peckinpah because he would work cheap and could do some signature slow mo). The “action” scenes come off as self-parody, which may have been inevitable given that the techniques of Peckinpah’s brilliant depictions of violence had already been absorbed by the mainstream which had fully inverted their meaning. The performances range from wooden to embarrassing, but what the actors have in common is an apparent cluelessness as to what kind of movie they are in and what they are supposed to be doing. Where Peckinpah’s great films were narratively spare, charting a linear trajectory as they accumulate mysterious depth, Osterman is not only cluttered to the point of absurdity but seems to deliberately void itself of narrative coherence as it proceeds (in spite of a screenplay by the wonderful Alan Sharp.) Where his previous films are preoccupied with the relationship between man and nature, and man and the community, in Osterman nature has ceased to exist (the film mostly takes place in an ugly house cluttered with video equipment, and the exteriors are largely barren) and the community has been rendered an abstraction by the mass media. In short, it may be that by 1983, the artistic construct known as the “Sam Peckinpah film” could no longer exist, not only because of Sam’s alcoholism, but because of history. (Alcoholism may have been only symptom, not cause.)
In any case, it seems like Sam, who had been given the kind of soul-breaking punishment Hollywood reserves for its most committed artists, had decided to offer a parodical reflection back at that world of its idea of what a commercial film is in the early 1980’s, in all its ugly, noisy, incoherent meaninglessness.
The saddest spectacle is watching auteurists try to justify the film’s brilliance, as though the subject matter was an artistic choice as opposed to the only job on offer, and as though it were an artistic testament rather than a self-inscribed grave marker.
It is true that the nihilistic ugliness of the film can be identified as a current in Peckinpah’s work as far back as The Wild Bunch. Part of what made Sam great as an artist was in the demons he confronted. In The Osterman Weekend, he shows us what ugliness is like without the artistry, since the world had no use for the artistry.
I haven’t yet listened to the commentary track by the redoubtable Seydor, Weddle, Simmons and Redmond, whose books I have devoured. Perhaps they will convince me otherwise. Nor have I watched the “directors cut” included, though I would bet dollars to donuts that it is just a more extreme version of everything I have stated above. Peckinpah spent 8 months editing the film before being fired, and I suspect he was just trying to leave them as big of a mess as possible.
Amnonymous 