First viewing.
My prior knowledge of Peckinpah extends to single viewings of 'The Wild Bunch' and 'Straw Dogs' and a vague knowledge that he made films about men for men. With this in mind, a tail-end Western with hints of romance, screwball comedy, revenge thriller and musical took me aback somewhat. Or was it the fact that Jason Robards and the excellent Stella Stevens looked a little too like Bill from 'Kill Bill' romancing Gail Tilsley that I found so disconcerting?
Either way, I found the film enjoyable but slight. Robards pulls off the sly trick of getting the audience rooting for Cable Hogue but not really liking him ("don't make me out no saint, but don't put me down too deep") while David Warner does a smashing job as the preacher/con-man Joshua ("Since I cannot rouse heaven I intend to raise hell").
The premise of the story is that Robards makes his fortune while waiting to take revenge upon his two ex-partners who abandoned him to die in the middle of the desert (and is it just me who imagines that the desert would be half-full of men left to die, there are a few in every Western) but that revenge is a wasted emotion and an ultimately unfulfilling act. THAT, I loved. "'Vengeance is mine' sayeth the Lord" quoted the preacher during an early scene and- we are shown- forgiveness is the more satisfactory act for Hogue.
Against the backdrop of this is the 1908 setting- the coming of the motor car, the development of modern cities, the death of the 'old ways', the power of the bankers- and the end of the Western era. A man out of step with the changing times turns his back on the revenge he had waited years to enact and finds contentment. As an elegy for the civilisation of the west, it makes a lovely story. Even if the awkwardness of the genre-swapping robs the story of much of its power, its plot holes (that bank loan!) are more than compensated for by some smashing cinematography.
I bet that I enjoy this film a lot more on second viewing but, for now, it gets a solid 6/10.
