Possibly the most significant director to matriculate from television to film in the 1960's was Sam Pekinpah (1929-1984) who rattled the cages of his producers when he would turn out 1965's star-studded Civil War film Major Dundee and affronted many an audience member with the drawn out slaughter scenes alone from The Wild Bunch. The remaining entries of his canon idealized quite obstinately - the pariah, the loner, the outmoded and the outsider and each were characterized by long, winding sequences of brooding atmosphere punctured by scenes of grotesque carnage and machismo. The sexual assault scene of 1971's Straw Dogs invoked his critical notoriety.
Pekinpah then made two well-received films that starred Steve McQueen, the uncharacteristically sentimental Junior Bonner and an ultra-violent thriller, The Getaway (both respectively 1972), before embarking on an epic, elegiac American Western, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), perhaps his finest crafted and most thoughtful film. His career that followed was somewhat underwhelming, the long-winded insidiousness of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) being succeeded by a routine crime thriller titled The Killer Elite (1973) and the blood-saturated war epic Cross of Iron (1977), a trucker film; Convoy (1978) and a swansong thriller, The Osterman Weekend (1983).
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| Pekinpah goes out with a bang and a whimper with his final film 1983's Osterman Weekend |
Unlike Pekinpah, the Polish-born Roman Polanski (b.1933)is a director whose general preference is to keep violence bubbling just under the skin of his work. Having achieved a healthy critical reputation as a master chronicler of obsession and unnatural sexuality with 1962's Knife in the Water, the intense Repulsion (1965) and Cul de Sac (1966). Polanski would arrive in Tinseltown just in time for love's summer of the late 1960's. He would achieve instant mainstream commercial success with the seminal horror film Rosemary's Baby (1968) starring John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow which was based on the eponymous bestseller by Ira Levin and it convincingly combined archaic forms of black magic practiced in a contemporary metropolitan setting.
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| They could have tidied up first (Cul de Sac,1966) |
The following years his then pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered along with several others by the psychopathic Manson family. Despite the appalling tragedy, Polanski soon returned to the screen with 1971's Macbeth and an all out salute to film noir would come with the inspired Chinatown in 1974 . Polanski went into exile to avert possible sentencing regarding a statutory rape and settled in France where he made another signature thriller which would conclude his 'Apartment Trilogy,' The Tenant (1978) and Tess (1979) a visually arresting though sterile adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Victorian novel Tess of the d'Ubervilles.