This tragicomic fable is to Sam Peckinpah 's C.V. as THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY was to Hitchcock 's: a pastoral ‘take’ & comic indulgence on personal themes. Jason Robards, just split from Lauren Bacall, brings a bit of Bogie’s Fred G. Dobbs to his rich portrait of the illiterate Cable. Left to die in the desert, he discovers water, a love, a life, a best friend & ultimately an easeful death. Stella Stevens as the hooker he loves & David Warner as the itinerant ‘preacher’ he befriends are at their best. Peckinpah megs inconsistently, some of the comic set pieces & the painfully unfunny undercranking make him look all thumbs, but when he lays off a bit, the film plays like a dream. It certainly looks like one under Lucien Ballard’s lensing, even the period abuse of zoom shots are kept to a bare minimum. Lovely score, too, the film’s almost a mini-musical. I’d still chop off the last half hour and get composer William Bolcom to turn it into an opera.
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