If They Move-- Kill 'Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah

This biography portrays writer-director Peckinpah (1925-1984) as a gifted man at war with Hollywood, his four wives and himself. The signature of a Peckinpah film like The Wild Bunch or Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is an audaciously protracted, viscerally exciting brawl or shootout. The gravity of such carefully crafted sequences stems from their integration into psychologically nuanced narratives and from their moral ambiguity: in Peckinpah's world, even the ``best'' of men are capable of harrowing and unbidden acts of violence. Such a finely honed moral sense separates Peckinpah from his noisier imitators and speaks to his struggle to reconcile his aesthetic sensibility with the austere machismo he inherited from the unsentimental and self-reliant men in his family. Yet, as film critic and historian Weddle shows, the volatility of the filmmaker's temperament gets the upper hand, hastening his artistic and personal decline. (Sept.)