Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection

SAM PECKINPAH'S LEGENDARY WESTERNS COLLECTION

Warner Home Video, $59.95

Alfred Hitchcock might have treated his actors like cattle, but it took a demented iconoclast like Sam Peckinpah to actually pull a gun on them. Brilliant, mercurial, hard-drinking, violent, and by all accounts an impossible human being, he was arguably the greatest director of Westerns since John Ford.

Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection showcases four of his most celebrated films on six DVDs, tracking his evolution from cinematic traditionalist to postmodern radical. Ride the High Country (1962) was Peckinpah's most accessible oater; even audiences who detest his work are impressed with it. As aging ex-lawmen reunited to guard a gold shipment, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott give the performances of their careers, laying a foundation for the themes that would define Peckinpah's best work: loyalty, betrayal, and a nostalgia for the passing of an era. 1969's The Wild Bunch blew the traditional Western formula apart like a keg of nitroglycerin and then reassembled the debris, influencing every Western that followed. Both damned and praised at the time of its release for its unprecedented graphic violence and unflinching pessimism, its notoriety obscured its romanticism and revolutionary editing.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is at once Pekinpah's most fascinating and troubled film, a "languorous dirge, a drifting death-poem" made during a tempestuous period in the director's life. Following the success of Wild Bunch, Peckinpah found himself celebrated by the counterculture and critics alike, but was battling alcoholism, illness, studio interference, and a bad reputation. MGM took his cut and sawed it down to the bones in an attempt to duplicate his previous success, fatally scarring it. The set's inclusion of both the 1988 Turner reconstruction and a new version incorporating elements of the original theatrical release illustrates how the tiniest edit can make or break a director's vision. Rounding out the collection is 1970's The Ballad of Cable Hogue, an amiable but shambling comedy that proves – if nothing else – that Peckinpah should never have attempted a musical duet between Jason Robards and Stella Stevens.

Each film is splendidly remastered and features enlightening commentaries and extras. Peckinpah may have been prone to shoot himself (and anyone else foolish enough to be near him) in the foot, but when he did, it was bloody, visceral, and entertaining. Alfred Hitchcock might have treated his actors like cattle, but it took a demented iconoclast like Sam Peckinpah to actually pull a gun on them.