DIRECTOR: Sam Peckinpah
PRODUCER: Phil Feldman ​    
PRODUCTION CO: Warner Bros
​​SCREENPLAY: Walon Green, Sam Peckinpah, Roy N Sickner
PHOTOGRAPHY: Lucien Ballard
EDITOR: Louis Lombardo
MUSIC: Jerry Fielding
WITH: William Holden (Pike Bishop), Ernest Borgnine ("Dutch" Engstrom), Robert Ryan (Deke Thornton), Edmond O'Brien (Freddie Sykes), Warren Oates (Lyle Gorch), Jaime Sánchez (Angel), Ben Johnson (Tector Gorch)

REVIEWS

“From the opening sequence, in which a circle of laughing children poke at a scorpion writhing in a sea of ants, to the infamous blood-spurting finale, Peckinpah completely rewrites John Ford’s Western mythology – by looking at the passing of the Old West from the point of view of the marginalised outlaws rather than the law-abiding settlers. Though he spares us none of the callousness and brutality of William Holden and his gang, Peckinpah nevertheless presents their macho code of loyalty as a positive value in a world increasingly dominated by corrupt railroad magnates and their mercenary killers (Holden’s old buddy Robert Ryan). The flight into Mexico, where they virtually embrace their death at the hands of double-crossing general Fernandez and his rabble army, is a nihilistic acknowledgment of the men’s anachronistic status. In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle, Lucien Ballard’s superb cinematography complementing Peckinpah’s darkly elegiac vision.”

– Nigel Floyd, Time Out

“As the western genre dried up around him, Sam Peckinpah assembled a group of grizzled veterans for one last trip into the breach. A cadre of aging outlaws, fleeing the authorities, attempts to make a final score for a Mexican general, but when things go awry, the gang finds itself in one of the wildest and bloodiest of screen shoot-outs. Peckinpah’s masterpiece is at once classical and revisionist, an exemplar of the very genre it so brilliantly subverts.”

– Museum of the Moving Image 
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“At once strongly metaphoric and shamelessly visceral, Peckinpah’s saga of outlaws on the lam is arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s — a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.”

– J Hoberman, Village Voice 

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Hamilton
Monday, 24 March, 6.30pm

New Plymouth
Wednesday, 09 April, 6.00pm

​Whanganui   
Monday, 05 May, 7.00pm

Auckland
​Monday, 23 June, 6.00pm

Dunedin
Wednesday, 16 July, 7.30pm

​Queenstown  
Tuesday, 19 August, 8.00pm

Wellington  
Monday, 08 September, 6.15pm

Wellington  
Tuesday, 09 September, 8.30pm
PECKINPAH'S WEST >> ​