The Ballad of Cable Hogue

The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Sam Peckinpah’s “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” is one of the best examples of the New Western. It’s also a very good movie, a wonderfully funny story which we didn’t expect from a director who usually seems more comfortable with violence than with humor.

The New Western generally takes place at the time when civilization reached the West. In the classic Western, states are still territories and law enforcement is a day’s ride away; people are killed fairly casually.

This period lasted, at most, for thirty years before it began to be populated by farmers and telegraphs and city ordinances and automobiles. This conflict between encroaching civilization on one side and pride in being an independent Westerner on the other fascinates Peckinpah as a director. The Wild Bunch was about professional killers going on one last hurrah before they became obsolete now The Ballad of Cable Hogue gives us a glimpse into the life of one of the West’s greatest individualists played brilliantly by Jason Robards.

Cable Hogue has a mean streak and first-name relations with God. After his no-good partners leave him for dead in the desert he crawls miles through wasteland until finally he hands God an ultimatum: God gimme water. And God does. Now Cable is good businessman so he immediately sets up waterhole right there which happens to be halfway between two major towns on stagecoach route. Over years he expands this business into what may have been first motel in West.

All this is photographed with dusty delightfulness that characterized The Wild Bunch. Screen fills up dirt and dust Gila monsters whiskers you begin to understand that for Peckinpah (as for many 20th Century Americans) happiness consists partly getting dirty wiggling your toes mud.

Anyway until meets bounteous Hildy town prostitute Cable pays no attention his appearance But she not just any hooker mind you nor even proverbial heart gold Stella Stevens makes Hildy altogether individual woman perhaps first Women Libber west Pecos. Cable fall into their own variety love spurred slightly touched local minister played David Warner Morgan!. At around point stop being kind western strange wonderful fantasy people

There are many delightful scenes in this movie. Hilde showers while cable scrubs her back during one tenderest moments possible or preacher presides over sincerest funerals imaginable but what makes movie apart from Pecknpah direction good script are performances by robards Miss stevens.

The advertisements claim that Bogart would have acted like Robards when playing Cable. But I don’t think so. All I could think of was good Robards in “A Thousand Clowns” or “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He doesn’t need to impersonate Bogie he is quite raspy and very human by himself. Stevens turns out to be a wonderful actress; there aren’t many who can combine humor with femininity, but she surely can.

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