Arthur Penn: New Edition

Arthur Penn

Inevitable Violence Times Educational Supplement, February 9, 1973, 102. Of the older generation of filmmakers, John Ford has been most consistent in elaborating an image of America. It is not a static image: to follow his films from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) to Cheyenne Autumn (1964) is to trace a steady progress into disillusionment, a growing awareness (implied rather than explicit) of the widening gulf between the idealized and optimistic vision embodied in the films of the 1930s and 1940s, and the discouraging realities of contemporary American society. The Fordian values were too deeply rooted for him ever to be able to confront that disillusionment, which would have involved confronting modern America: it manifests itself indirectly, in the way all movement toward a future drains away from the films, in the increasing strength of nostalgia and a pervasive half-acknowledged bitterness. Ford’s heirs are Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah. They take over where he left off, sharing his central preoccupation with American civilization but accepting the disillusionment with full consciousness. Both began their film careers with Westerns; both have returned repeatedly to the genre or its derivatives (Penn’s The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde both treat themes traditionally belonging to the Western). Their films are vivid embodiments of the unresolvable tensions inevitable for artists who reject the society they live in without being able to accept or construct any defined ideological program that might oppose it, an intensely American predicament that drives both directors to take as typical protagonist the antisocial outsider rather than the committed revolutionary. 166 robin wood Given the basic similarities, the differences are mutually illuminating . Penn’s characters are either essentially gentle, nonparticipating dropouts (Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant, Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man) or are caught up helplessly in events they can’t control (Bubber Reeves in The Chase; Bonnie and Clyde). Peckinpah’s are more deliberately aggressive and much less innocent, more responsible for their actions : their assertive maturity emphasizes by contrast the childlikeness of Bonnie and Clyde and the passivity of the Alice’s Restaurant hippies. Where Bonnie and Clyde are mercilessly slaughtered, Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch deliberately provoke their own deaths in a general holocaust , while in The Getaway (1972) Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw are actually allowed to escape with their loot from the bank robbery after annihilating most of their enemies. Doc (Steve McQueen) and Carol McCoy (Ali McGraw) in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972). Inevitable Violence 167 Both directors see the inevitability of violence in the American social situation, but their attitudes are very different. In Penn’s films, the pain and horror of violence get the emphasis. To Peckinpah, violence is inherent in the conditions of life itself and must be accepted. For Penn as an artist, the chief danger is ineffectuality: the hiatuses in his work suggest that it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to make films, and one senses a relation between this and the high value that his work places on tenderness and sensitivity. Peckinpah, on the contrary , lacking perhaps Penn’s self-doubts, is at present in the midst of a remarkably creative period. For him, the chief danger is brutalism. His attitude to violence is always equivocal: in the slow-motion blood ballets of The Wild Bunch (1969), acceptance of its necessity escalates into ecstatic, mindless celebration. One can see Peckinpah going the way of Ted Hughes, whose work shows a progress from the acceptance of violence as a condition of life in the early poems to the celebration of total insensitivity in Crow. Straw Dogs (1971) offered a remarkable cinematic equivalent for Hughes’s poetry, in its force and vividness and expression as much as in theme and attitude. The warmth and generosity of Junior Bonner—one of 1972’s very few outstanding films— seemed a welcome complement and corrective. TheGetaway, a characteristically vital and inventive movie, confirms both one’s admiration for Peckinpah and one’s anxieties. Particularly worrying is the equivocal presentation of Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri), the gangster whose systematic humiliation of Harold (the veterinarian he has abducted and the film’s chief representative of established society) drives his victim to hang himself. Rudy’s brutalism is never securely placed, and one has a sneaking suspicion that Peckinpah half admires it, even finding Harold’s suicide funny. The assertion of masculinity is often a central thrust in Peckinpah’s work, its...