The Ballad of
Cable Hogue (1970) is a comedic and poetic parable of greed, revenge and love
made by film director Sam Peckinpah in between two of his most violent movies --
The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971). Like most of Peckinpah's westerns, Cable Hogue
is set in the last fading days of the Old West when capitalism, technology and
modernization were encroaching upon the few good years of anarchic freedom
possible only in myth, memory or dreams. Jason Robards stars as Cable Hogue, a man
without a past who was left to die in the Arizona desert without water like the
ill-fated dentist in Frank Norris’ brilliant novel McTeague (1899), which was filmed by Erich von Stronheim during the
silent era as Greed in 1924.
After swearing
revenge on his betrayers (Peckinpah regulars L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin),
Hogue is rescued by the miraculous discovery of an underground spring of water
halfway between stops on the busy stagecoach line. In town, the gruff and unkempt Hogue purchases
land claims surrounding his clandestine water well and falls in love with
Hildy, the town prostitute, who longs to move to San Francisco and marry a
wealthy man to save her from the soiled rooms above the local saloon. Hildy was a career role for Stella Stevens, a
former Playboy model from Memphis who had previously appeared in Elvis Presley
and Jerry Lewis movies and afterward as (another) former-prostitute in The
Poseidon Adventure with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, and Carol Lynley. With homemade underwear featuring a removable
flap that displays her name underneath, Hildy falls for Hogue after a rocky but
endearing courtship.
During his time in the desert, Hogue is also befriended by a wandering and philandering preacher named Reverend Joshua Duncan Sloan. Played by British character actor David Warner (best known for The Omen), the Reverend bares an uncanny resemblance to the real-life George Wharton James, a wandering and philandering Methodist minister who arrived in California in the 1880s. An amateur anthropologist, James was a prolific writer who looked to the Mojave Desert and American Indian way of life as a model for the white, urban, eastern man's ultimate salvation and peace (this never came to pass). James' record of adultery surpassed the fictional Reverend’s: his wife brought suit against him in 1889 for "an absolutely prodigious number of adulteries with ladies of the parish, including one heroic feat of bedding down, all together, a matron and her three daughters" and other lurid activities that the Los Angeles Times deemed "of such a filthy nature that it would be impossible to print it." (1)
The Ballad of
Cable Hogue stands out, however, not only for the career-best performances of
Robards, Stevens, and Warner, but also as an elegy for a lost dream of
happiness and peace. Hogue’s hallucinatory world is akin to the “La
Fiesta de Los Angeles” parades of turn-of-the-twentieth-century California,
wherein the fantasy of a vanished Spanish/European civilization was marketed to
midwestern migrants by the LA Times, Chamber of Commerce, and Merchant and
Manufacturer’s Association to sell Southern Californian real estate between the
1880s and 1910s. These Anglo Fiestas
(the traces of which can be viewed in the annual Rose Parade on New Years Day) articulated
Los Angeles’ determination to claw its way to prominence through anti-labor
legislation, the theft of water rights and the celebration of whiteness through
the symbolic replacing of the Mexican present with an artificial and dreamlike
Spanish past.
Cable Hogue's death at the end is not unlike the apocalyptic finale of the Wild Bunch when confronting the Mexican caudillo General Mapache (played by film director Emilio Fernandez). Though under far less violent circumstances, the automobile that rendered Hogue's stagecoach water-stand out of date was not much different from the one that Mapache used to drag Angel (Jaime Sanchez) to his slow and brutal death as the Wild Bunch looked on. In Peckinpah's world, men like Pike Bishop (William Holden) and Cable Hogue do not belong to the modern world and thus cannot pass into it. If their death offers the audience a spiritual regeneration it is one devoid of the dignity and honor that dies with his leading men. At the same time, Hogue’s quest for new sources of water remain part of contemporary California’s continuing thirst for suburban lawns and sparkling swimming pools amid historic drought conditions. The state’s destructive water politics and environmental instability has been presented by both the academy and in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, starring Jack Nicolson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston (as the unforgettable Noah Cross). (2)
The Ballad of
Cable Hogue was a financial ruin at the box office, as the public longed for
the jarring violence of his other films. Despite this, Cable Hogue remained Peckinpah's
personal favorite for the rest of his life and served as a memorial to his own
pioneer family who had settled in parts of Fresno County and the High Sierras
in the late-nineteenth century (his grandfather was a local politician and the
last “hanging judge” in California). The
film has flaws, such as the sequence featuring the song "Butterfly
Mornings,” but it was beautifully shot by cinematographer Lucien Ballard. A Peckinpah staple who also shot Ride the
High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, and Junior Bonner, Ballard had
previously filmed The Killing for Stanley Kubrick and The Outlaw for Howard
Hughes among many other films in a long and distinguished career.
Notes:
1.
Kevin
Starr, Americans and the California
Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 204-205.
2.
For
books on California and water, see Margaret Leslie Davis, Rivers in the Desert (New York: Harper Perennial 1994); Catherine
Mulholland, William Mulholland and the
Rise of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Mike
Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the
Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990); and Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the
Imagination of Disaster (New York: Picador, 2000).
