Popular reviews

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★ 2

  Cinematic Time Capsule
  1961 Marathon - Film #78

  "If they’re going to heaven, let’s you and me not go."

  Sam Peckinpah’s directorial debut comes hot off the heels of his work on the TV show, The Westerner, and even includes it’s star Brian Keith.

  At its heart is a solid western revenge story, but sadly the film’s a cheaply made affair that’s completely undercut but a horrendously distracting musical score.

  Peckinpah was so infuriated over his lack of power on this one that he vowed to never again direct a film unless he had complete script control.

  ”I never did trust a man that don’t lose his temper once in awhile.”

  
  Cinematic Time Capsule - 1961 Ranked

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 14

  According to If They Move, Kill 'Em!, David Weddle's biography of Sam Peckinpah, the reason Peckinpah was hired to direct The Deadly Companions, the movie that would become his feature debut, was because the success of The Parent Trap gave Brian Keith enough power to pick this film's director as a condition of his agreeing to star. This makes sense, except for one thing: though The Parent Trap was shot in 1960, it was actually released a few weeks after The Deadly Companions, which means the box office success of the Disney film had nothing to do with who directed this one.

  It does, however, seem fair to say that the priority of producer Charles B. Fitzsimons (also the brother…

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  Review by panos75 ★★½ 1

  A few years after the Civil War, a mysterious ex-Union cavalry officer arrives at a remote Arizona town and accidentally kills the son of a widow. Wracked by guilt he decides to escort her in a long and dangerous journey towards an abandoned town, in the middle of Apache territory, where she will bury her kid next to her late husband.

  Sam Peckinpah himself admitted later that shooting "The Deadly Companions", his feature film debut, was a learning experience after years of toiling in TV. And it's true: this is by far the most prosaic and impersonal effort of his entire career. Despite the death of a child and the protagonist's sense of aggrievement, this is an emotionally inert picture.…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★

  By all accounts a pretty rocky debut production for Peckinpah (including being cut out of the editing process, something he'd become familiar with) and no Pat Garrett but has a pretty solid premise involving Brian Keith accidentally killing a boy during a bank heist gone wrong and feeling guilty, helping the widowed Maureen O'Hara transport her son's corpse on a dangerous funeral march across the country to bury him next to his father... They both perform this tricky, downbeat dynamic quite nicely inside some good-looking scope photography by regular John Ford collaborator William H. Clothier.

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  Review by ELECTRICWIZARDx ★★★½

  Sam Peckinpah's debut feature opens with a table of men taking bets on how long it will take for a man, who's dangling legs they're sat uncomfortably close to, to die as he's stood on the round of a barrel, a noose slack around his neck.

  The innocence of children playing games in the dust ties together the opening's ensuing shootout, and a conversation between aging men. This trio of scenes acting as a segue to a bank robbery in which Maureen O'Hara's son is accidentally killed.

  Less than 10 minutes into The Deadly Companions and Peckinpah is already frantically laying the table for what was to come, the cloth blood red, tattered and on it's last legs from the…

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  Review by Andy Summers 🤠 ★★★ 4

  Over the course of his career Sam Peckinpah got into more scrapes with his cast and crew than the average director might. So he wasn't accused of being "casually cruel" like Joss Whedon, or accused of sexual assault and harassment like Brett Ratner, but Bloody Sam's reputation for drink, drugs, and a desire to have everything his own way, sure put a strain on his relationship with his co-workers. Chuck Heston apparently threatened him with a sabre during the filming of Major Dundee for his treatment of the crew, and in his feature film debut, The Deadly Companions, he fell foul of both the movie's star, Maureen O'Hara, and her brother Charles B. Fitzsimons, who was the producer of the…

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  Review by Jay D 's Watching ★★½

  Kind of want to rewatch The Wild Bunch sometime this year (it's been a long time) and figured it might be good time to catch a couple of other Peckinpah films - this western is actually his debut picture, after working in TV, and it's a bit of a bumpy go as a result - Peckinpah got the gig on the behalf of his Rifleman star, who had the clout to choose him, and the film is both lusciously lensed and notably focused around a number of preoccupations that would reappear in his later work (hard bitter men, the posse on the criminal's heels, sexually uncomfortable situations, sudden, brutal, unpredictable violence, men of god hanging around the margins, at odds…

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  Review by Bob McQueen ★★★

  Knowing he worked in western tv, this did feel like an extended western tv episode from Peckinpah. Bouncing around his filmography, the hints are there for the greatness he'll eventually hit. It's definitely darker than what would be on tv and my interest was completely kept knowing where he would go with the genre.

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  Review by AThousandSons ★★★ 8

  Early Peckinpah western has early previews of some of his later work - children’s games foreshadowing the violence of grown men, the place of older men dealing with a world that has left them behind, and male relationships rooted in a past that will reveal itself over the film’s runtime. 

  Unlike some of his other films, this one has an active female character in Maureen O’Hara. She is arguably the strongest character. She has her own arc and her warming to Brian Keith’s character doesn’t feel as forced as many films of this genre and time. 

  There’s nothing really new here (although I don’t recall Strother Martin playing a preacher before) but Peckinpah fans will likely be interested in seeing how his style evolved. I also wish this was restored in its original aspect ratio as the cropped screen and washed out colors make it look like a movie of the week from 1968.

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  Review by Jesse ★★★

  Sam Peckinpah Month - Film #1

  Peckinpah’s debut feature film is a fairly pedestrian western that he would undoubtedly turn on its head within his next couple films. The story follows a man named Yellowleg who crosses the frontier to help a woman bury her dead son. Insert countless western clichés and you’ve pretty much seen the film. 

  From what I’ve read this was pretty much a learning experience for Peckinpah who would never make a film without some aspect of creative control. 

  I love this quote from star Maureen O’Hara, “[Peckinpah] didn't have a clue how to direct a movie" and was ‘one of the strangest and most objectionable people I had ever worked with’.”

  Yeah that sounds about right…

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  Review by C.A. DeStefanis ★★½ 4

  I'd love to see what a circa 1970 Sam Peckinpah could have done with this material because the premise isn't bad at all. Sadly in his feature directorial debut, since he wasn't yet the "Sam Peckinpah", he had no hand in shaping the story or the finished product and the film suffers for it.

  The Deadly Companions looks incredibly cheap and is done no services by the terrible version that is currently streaming on Prime. Despite a solid cast featuring Maureen O'Hara, Brian Keith and Chill MF'n Wills, everything just feels like a stock low-budget 60s western. And the music is horrific. There is a lot someone with vision could've done with the material to bring it to life and…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★

  within the first ten minutes, peckinpah stages a ridiculous social situation -- the saloon that our civil war-burnout protagonists decide to visit also functions as an impromptu church, with the gossipy 'civilized' sunday parishioners on one half and the deadly cowpokes drinking whiskey on the other, both confounded by this bifurcated contrast. peckinpah's first film is his most literalist and leaden; he'd have time to languidly saunter into violent poetics later in his career. but it's interesting that even at this tamer inception, his authorial stamp is here: the interest in the inherent contradictions of americana, the black-hearted humor, the abyssal cyclone of violence that devours all of his characters.