Filmmakers have rarely come as combustible as Sam Peckinpah, who skirted the line between genius and madness with such reckless abandon that it both defined and ultimately hampered his career.
As the orchestrator of Major Dundee, Straw Dogs, The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, among others, his grounded and gritty aesthetic punctured by bursts of shocking violence rightfully earned him the nickname of ‘Bloody Sam’, as well as a reputation as one of his generation’s most prominent auteurs.
On the other side of the coin, his issues with drug and alcohol addictions and noted mood swings caused countless arguments and incidents in his personal and professional lives, while repeated arguments with his actors and vocal disagreements with studio executives had a severe impact on his reputation and standing in Hollywood as he became an increasingly volatile presence towards the end of his career.
Even though he ended up referencing the film in his own work, in typical Peckinpah fashion, his opinion on John Ford’s The Searchers failed to make it clear whether he was entirely dismissive of the elegiac Western or celebratory of its director’s career at large. He may have called it “a great story”, but he also claimed that it was “one of John Ford’s worst films”.
Either Peckinpah didn’t regard John Wayne’s massively influential masterpiece as t he cinematic touchstone it would become, or he viewed it as one of the lesser works among one of the greatest filmographies ever assembled by a director, a rich and varied back catalogue that numbered Stagecoach, The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, to name just a fraction of Ford’s titanic contributions to the medium.
Of course, Peckinpah’s stylistic and thematic approach was markedly different and very much his own, making it difficult to ascertain for sure whether or not he was being negative towards The Searchers specifically or effusive of Ford’s overall assembly of top-tier cinematic brilliance.
Then again, he did expand on his specific criticisms in an interview with Anthony Macklin, which offered some insight into his thinking. Peckinpah named Ford’s My Darling Clementine “one of the great Westerns ever made” but blasted The Searchers for how “the casting was so shitty I can’t believe it.”
He doesn’t say it’s a bad film, but he does offer that he “didn’t agree with his approach to it.” They only met once in person, too, with Peckinpah telling Ford, “I just want to say thank you,” which could indicate that his stance on The Searchers was defined by where it fell in his eyes amidst Ford’s filmography above all else.
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