Back-Room Ballad

The grizzled old Westerner stares longingly at the Gila monster. Reaching slowly and cautiously down, the prospector has the lizard shot right out of his hand. "You peckerwoods just raised hell with our supper," he complains as two grungy rounders advance on him. "It's just like you said, Hogue," says one, "there's enough water for two but not for three." They rob him of his canteen and leave him to die.

That is the beginning of a new movie called The Ballad of Cable Hogue and, truth to tell, there is not much more of a plot after that. Cable (Jason Robards) stubbornly battles thirst and wins, discovering a water hole in the desert. He stakes a claim, swears revenge on his two partners (Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones) and meets a tasty tart named Hildy (Stella Stevens), who winds up keeping house at his combination water hole and stagecoach stop. He falls in with an itinerant preacher and whoremonger who calls himself the Rev. Joshua Duncan Sloane (David Warner) and who can spin his clerical collar around into layman's garb faster than most men can draw a pistol. Everyone sort of threatens, jokes and loves each other, and gets in each other's way. All in all, pretty unlikely ingredients for an exceptionally fine movie.

Middle-Aged. That it achieves such distinction so effortlessly is due in large part to the wizardry of Director-Producer Sam Peckinpah, who makes shooting a movie look as easy as whittling. Cable Hogue shows a new side of Peckinpah. It is not so melancholy as Ride the High Country or so raw and violent as The Wild Bunch. It is quiet, lyrical, bawdy, funny and sad in almost equal portions, exactly as a good back-room yarn should be.

Cable, like other Peckinpah heroes, is a man who knows he is fast becoming an anachronism. Pike Bishop and his band of middle-aged outlaws in The Wild Bunch realized that the days of living by their guns were "passing fast," and aging Frontier Marshal Steve Judd was greeted with derisive hoots as he rode down the main street of a booming little Western town at the opening of Ride the High Country. Cable is a frontiersman at heart, with no love for cities or their inhabitants. It shames him to admit he cannot spell his name, and he has no notion of what collateral is. But such men were the essence of the new country, and Cable's ever-prospering water hole becomes a symbol of the opening West.

Cable dies as must have been preordained: a motorcar starts rolling down a sandhill and the frontiersman, dealing with the machine as if it were an unruly stallion, is run down by progress. It is a measure of Peckinpah's great skill that he makes such a mechanical symbolic device not only work but seem perfectly fitting and inevitable.

Lickerish Cleric. Not all of Peckinpah's devices work so well. An engraved face on a $5 bill waggles its eyes suggestively and needlessly as Cable ponders spending the money on Hildy. But such isolated faults seem insignificant alongside Peckinpah's larger virtues. Even his rambling lends the story a leisurely lyricism rare in films today.

His actors all perform immaculately. Jason Robards gives the screen performance of his life. Stella Stevens is cynical and wistful with equal facility, and David Warner is wonderfully funny and moving as the lickerish cleric. Together with Peckinpah's usual stock company of Martin and Jones, they make the old desert as real and recent as yesterday. With this film, Peckinpah unmistakably becomes the successor to John Ford, not only as a director of westerns but as an American film artist.

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