Sam Peckinpah didn’t just make Westerns, though that is the genre for which he’ll forever best be known. He has a particular reputation for making alarming and violent (for their time) Western movies, and also for generally pushing boundaries at a time in cinema history when things were shifting. “Violence” might be the thing that ties more Sam Peckinpah movies together than “Western,” since Cross of Iron was a downbeat and brutal World War II movie, The Killer Elite was a strange (and sometimes bloody) spy film of sorts, and then Straw Dogs was – or still is – up there among the most intense thrillers ever made.
