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(More customer reviews)Sam Peckinpah is one of the rare directors of Western films in whose
work the effect of tragedy is both an authentic formal cause and an
often devastatingly realized final effect. In this stimulating, well-researched new
critical study, John L. Simons and Robert Merrill use conceptions of
tragedy from Aristotle's Poetics--a work that greatly influenced
Peckinpah in graduate school--through Shakespeare to contemporary
critical theorists as a way of analyzing the director's tragic
vision in five of his best films (Ride the High Country, Noon Wine,
The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head
of Alfredo Garcia). Not least of their achievements is the detailed
chapter on that great, problematic masterpiece Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid. As someone who prepared one of the several versions of this
never-quite-completed film and has written extensively on all of them,
I have no hesitation in pronouncing Simons's and Merrill's the most fair-
minded, balanced, and thorough examination of their contents
and their relative strengths. This book is a valuable and
enlightening contribution to the criticism and scholarship of this
great American original.
--Paul Seydor, author of Peckinpah: The Western Films: A
Reconsideration
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Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical StudyThe work of Sam Peckinpah represents a high point in American cinema. This text is the first theoretical and critical attempt to place Peckinpah within the 2,000-year-old tradition of western tragedy. The tradition, enfolding the Greeks, Shakespeare and modern tragedians, is represented in Peckinpah's art in numerous ways, and the fact that he worked in the mode throughout his career distinguishes him from most American film directors. Films covered include Ride the High Country, Noon Wine, The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
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