THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE at 50: A Retrospective
Jason Robards as Cable Hogue
To crib a line from his friend and collaborator Kris Kristofferson, Sam Peckinpah was a walking contradiction. The visionary director, known best for his controversial portrayal of onscreen violence in films like The Wild Bunch and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, wasn’t reveling in the carnage; his time as a Marine in post-WWII China had given him a look into the dark depths of man, and the blood spilling across the celluloid was more catharsis than celebration. If you were an actor on his set, he would be your best friend one day and an unrelenting taskmaster the next, depending on what he needed out of you. He was married five times to three different women – not a ratio normally seen outside of a Liz Taylor bio – but maintained a loyal film family of actors and crew across a span of decades. And if you asked him which of his fourteen feature films he loved the most, it wasn’t the epic gamechanger Wild Bunch or anti-war masterpiece Cross Of Iron but the little Western allegory about a man who found water “where it wasn’t”.
Initially ‘released’ (more on that in a bit) by Warner Bros. in March of 1970, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue was a relative relief for Peckinpah, coming straight off shooting The Wild Bunch. Not that he was taking any kind of break; Hogue was a six-day workweek and he was editing Wild Bunch on Sundays. But the intimate character study of a stubborn desert rat that faces death, makes good and finds love spoke to Peckinpah in more ways than one. Jason Robards, in one of his finest performances, plays the titular Cable, betrayed and left to die by his nefarious partners (L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin) in the baking Nevada sun. Wandering the desert, he speaks directly to God (“Ain’t had no water since yesterday, Lord. Getting’ a little thirsty. Just thought I’d mention it. Amen.”) for four days until, in his last hours, he stumbles upon a spring. The water saves him, and soon he’s building a way station for travelers while always keeping an eye out for the men that betrayed him.
Hogue’s relationships with the other characters may as well be Peckinpah speaking through him. As he navigates the red tape of securing ownership of his discovery, he doesn’t suffer the fools of bureaucracy. The land office clerk, the banker, the stage line owner: they’re stand-ins for the studios, critics, and any other busybody in Peckinpah’s way (“I was robbed and left to die. Well, do I look dead? No, sir! Climbed up on my hind feet and walked straight to water.”) They write him off until the true nature of his worth, an oasis in the literal Valley of Fire, makes itself known.
Peckinpah’s commentary on religious hypocrisy is embodied in the Reverend Joshua Sloan, richly portrayed by David Warner (best known to US audiences as doomed photographer Keith Jennings in The Omen) as a lecherous creep with a knack for espousing random sermons and chasing tail with equal vigor. Sloan latches on to Hogue early in his enterprise and remains loyal throughout the story. Hogue’s love interest Hildy (Stella Stevens) is a local prostitute that he falls for upon first sight; while there are several touching scenes between them throughout the film, and both Robards and Stevens are in top form, their relationship feels stilted and flat. While Hildy’s strong-willed character could be a good foil to Cable’s stubbornness, she often comes across as one-dimensional. This may or may not have been an indirect result of Peckinpah’s voracious sex drive at the time, which included an endless stream of prostitutes, starry-eyed fans and even affairs with the wives of friends and associates.
Cable (Robards), Hildy (Stella Stevens) and Reverend Joshua (David Warner)
As the film rambles on – and without much of a narrative structure, it does ramble – it becomes clear why Peckinpah was drawn to it. In Cable Hogue he sees the crafty, entrepreneurial spirit that drove his ancestors west to carve their own destiny out of the mountain. One of the first things Hogue builds at his new way station is a flagpole and runs the Stars & Stripes up proudly; he’s nothing if not American, loving his country both for what it stands for and what it provides. It’s not hard to see why Hogue made an impression on another larger than life Hollywood outsider, John Milius, and his script for John Huston’s The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean two years later. Paul Newman plays the titular Bean, a Texas outlaw that declares himself judge and jury of a town of his own creation on the outskirts of civilization. Without a conventional plot and its episodic nature, it’s impossible to imagine something like Cable Hogue ever being greenlit by a major studio today, even as awards bait.
Director Sam Peckinpah on set with Robards and Stevens
Without spoiling the ending, it’s positively Peckinpah. The Old West is fading quickly into history while the modern age literally comes driving through, and Cable is caught in the middle. The paradox of vengeance and change hits him almost simultaneously, and his sense of humanity, much like the director’s, determines his fate.
On the production side, what began as a low-budget Western love story quickly became another setback in Peckinpah’s career. The shoot was plagued by bad weather; for a character motivated by a search for water, the Arizona desert was deluged with rain for almost three weeks. This led to extra time spent in the hotel bar for both cast and crew, with a final tab rumored to be in the $70,000 range: about $500K in 2020 dollars. In addition, a total of thirty-six (!) crew members were fired during production. The reasons come down to who you ask; the allegations of Peckinpah’s wild temperament weren’t untrue but became so exaggerated that over forty cast and crew members bought a full page ad in the Daily Variety declaring loyalty to their director. Most people, fired or not, would agree that working for Sam was always a full commitment and he simply demanded one hundred percent, no exceptions.
Peckinpah, cinematographer Lucien Ballard and Robards
Before Peckinpah and editor Lou Lombardo had made their final cut, Warner Brothers inexplicably showed a long, rough cut without the score or musical numbers to distributors, who had no idea what to do with it. The executive who had greenlit Cable Hogue, Ken Hyman, was gone, and the new regime ultimately didn’t care about the project enough to give it a push. There was one billboard ad in Los Angeles, but no radio or TV spots at all. (Stella Stevens: “Warner Brothers didn’t release it, they flushed it.”) Despite uniformly positive reviews, the film was dumped in second-run theaters and the bottom half of drive-in double features, quickly disappearing. Peckinpah, justifiably angry, denounced Warner Brothers every chance he got and even sued the studio for damage to his reputation (it was thrown out). It ended Sam’s relationship with the studio, and subsequently the opportunity to direct two features they had in the works: Milius’ new screenplay, which became Jeremiah Johnson, and the film adaptation of James Dickey’s Deliverance. A world where Peckinpah directed even one of those, never mind both, is fascinating to contemplate. But his reputation as an obstinate pain in the ass was just further solidified, and he moved on to the dark sexual politics of his next project, Straw Dogs.
In the years since, Cable Hogue has solidified its original critical reception. New generations, blessed with ever more access to films of any age, have discovered and fallen in love with the little Western with a big heart, and rightly acknowledge that Peckinpah is much more than the blood and explosions he is loved and hated for. Sam continued to refer to Cable Hogue as the favorite of his films until he passed away in 1984, and in the words of biographer David Weddle “…it’s easy to see why, for it exposes the tender inner core of this turbulent, often misunderstood artist”. And Sam Peckinpah, screen violence and personal chaos included, was above all an artist. The dreamy imagery and allegorical overtones imbued in this film, from bizarre and comical to warm and transcendent, are on par with any Fellini or Truffaut production. For a man who often personified contradiction, his skills and genius were never up for debate.
Arizona indie/Tex-Mex band Calexico and their 2000 single “The Ballad Of Cable Hogue”
