LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sam Peckinpah: High Country
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Junior Bonner is director Sam Peckinpah's lovely, elegiac look at the world of the rodeo--and his only film with nary a bullet wound. Steve McQueen, engagingly easygoing but determined, is the title character, a rodeo rider out to win a big bull-riding contest in his hometown. Even as he confronts his dwindling days on the circuit, he ... must deal with his feuding parents, marvelously played by Robert Preston and Ida Lupino. Preston is particularly good as the randy old con artist; he and Lupino strike real sparks. Peckinpah's slow-motion camera is put to particularly good use filming the balletic violence of the rodeo, at once more terrifying and awe-inspiring than any gun battle. A lovely country-western valentine to a dying breed.
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Peckinpah's next film, Major Dundee (1965), would be the first of the director's many unfortunate experiences with the major studios that financed his productions. Based on a screenplay by Harry Julian Fink, the film was to star Charlton Heston. Peckinpah was hired as director after Heston viewed producer Jerry Bresler's private screening of Ride the High Country. Heston liked the movie and said to Bresler, "Let's use him." The sprawling screenplay told the story of Union cavalry officer Major Dundee who directs a New Mexico outpost of Confederate prisoners. When an Apache war chief wipes out a company and kidnaps several children, Dundee throws together a makeshift army, including unwilling Confederate veterans, and takes off after the Indians.
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Peckinpah got his first feature to direct when The Westerner star Brian Keith suggested him for The Deadly Companions (1961). Though more a vehicle for star Maureen O'Hara than the director, The Deadly Companions ... helped Peckinpah land his second film, Ride the High Country (1962). A spectacular, nostalgic, yet clear-eyed meditation on the passing of the West starring wizened screen cowboys Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott as two gunfighters confronting their mortality, Ride the High Country proved that Peckinpah could already enter his house justified as a filmmaker. The studio thought otherwise, dumping it on its first release; critical accolades and foreign film prizes, however, gave Ride the High Country another shot stateside. With a considerable budget and an unfinished script, Peckinpah embarked on his third Western, Major Dundee (1965), starring Charlton Heston and Richard Harris as two former comrades who clash during an Apache roundup. Shot in Mexico, the production of Major Dundee fell into chaos as Peckinpah fired crew members, fought with producers, and was threatened with grievous bodily harm by a (literally) saber-rattling Heston.
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Even in his early days in Hollywood, Peckinpah's fascination with violence made for a rocky career. He once offered a script to Disney studios, which rejected it with the criticism: "Too many shootings, not enough animals." The first film Peckinpah directed was The Deadly Companions, a 1961 western with a fresh and audacious viewpoint. But it had a limited release and earned little attention. The following year he received more acclaim for another cowboy movie, Ride the High Country, which starred Joel McCrea as a former lawman trying to regain his lost integrity. "This movie celebrates a hero of self-control," noted critic Michael Sragow.
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Peckinpah's ancestry is firmly rooted in California pioneer history. His great-grandfather, Rice Peckinpaugh, was a merchant and farmer in Indiana before moving to California in the 1850s to Humboldt County and changing the spelling of his family's last name to "Peckinpah." The family settled down in the area to participate in the logging business. Peckinpah Meadow and Peckinpah Creek, where the family ran a lumber mill on a mountain in the High Sierras north of Coarsegold, California, have been officially named on U.S. geographical maps.[1] Peckinpah's maternal grandfather was Denver Church, a cattle rancher, Superior Court Judge and a United States Congressman of a California district including Fresno County.[2] David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah was born February 21, 1925, the son of David Edward Peckinpah and Fern Louise Church.[3] Peckinpah and several relatives often claimed Native American ancestry, but this has been denied by surviving members of the family.[4] Sam Peckinpah's nephew is David Peckinpah, who was a television producer and director, as well as a screenplay writer.[5]
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Peckinpah got his break in feature films directing THE DEADLY COMPANIONS starring Maureen O’Hara and "WESTERNER" lead Brian Keith. Though compromised by producer interference, the film still impressed many with its finely-etched characters and themes of loyalty and betrayal. Fortunately, his next film, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, was regarded as a masterpiece and served as a fitting swansong for its stars – Western cinema icons Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Sadly, the follow-up MAJOR DUNDEE emerged as a troubled production. The studio removed segments detailing much of Dundee’s disillusion and emotional rejuvenation in Mexico. To his lasting credit, DUNDEE star Charlton Heston offered to waive his considerable salary if Columbia Pictures would refrain from firing Peckinpah during production.
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High Country