La morte cavalca a Rio Bravo

The veteran Civil War Yankee officer Yellowleg (Brian Keith) saves the cheater Turk (Chill Wills) in a card game, and together with the gunslinger Billy Keplinger (Steve Cochran), they ride together to Gila City with the intention of heisting a bank. Yellowleg has a war scar on the head due to a man that tried to scalp him and his has been on the trail of his attacker for five years. When bandits rob a store, Yellowleg shoots against the outlaws and accidentally kills the son of the cabaret dancer Kit Tilden (Maureen O'Hara) and the grieving woman decides to bury her son in the Apache country Siringo, where her husband is also buried. Yellowleg calls Billy and Turk to escort Kitty through the dangerous land.

"The Deadly Companions" is the first feature of the great director Sam Peckinpah after six years directing Westerns for television. The credible story is a tale of revenge and redemption with flawed characters. Forty-one year old Maureen O'Hara is extremely gorgeous in the role of a widow humiliated by the locals after the death of her unknown husband and her survival as "dancer" of a cabaret with her son considered bastard by the population. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Parceiros da Morte" ("Partners of Death")

Sam Peckinpah - according to Maureen O'Hara (who had survived five films with that cantankerous old cuss John Ford) "one of the strangest and most objectionable people I had ever worked with" - got his break in feature films at the behest of Brian Keith, with whom he had just worked on five episodes of the TV series 'The Westerner' (and like Dean Martin in 'Some Came Running' always keeps his hat on).

Set in 1867 and shot on a twenty day schedule on location in Arizona with the camera safely in the hands of veteran cameraman William Clothier, Sam's inexperience with the big screen (and the choppy cutting that resulted) and that O'Hara was in reality having such a miserable time probably enhanced the bleak and sardonic quality of the rambling film that emerged; while Marlin Skiles' relentless guitar, accordion & harmonica score - for good or ill - stays with you (as does Miss O'Hara's full-throated rendering of the song that accompanies the opening & closing credits).

A small, interesting cast includes jug-eared veteran Will Wright in one of his last films, and future Peckinpah regular Strother Martin.

For fans of Sam Peckinpah, there's little to recognize of the legendary director in his first movie. Yes, it's a western featuring a morally compromised protagonist (Brian Keith), and Chill Wills plays the first of many bat-guano crazies in the Peckinpah canon. But there's a lot that's different.

Maureen O'Hara stars as a woman who loses her son in a bank robbery gone awry. Keith plays a guy named "Yellowleg", the Union Civil War vet who shot the boy and tries to help her bury him while working in some revenge on the side. There's some shooting and horseback riding, too, but Peckinpah's hard-edged humanism and iconic visual sensibility have yet to arrive.

Keith is the guy more in command of this film. "I hear they got a new bank and an old marshall over at Gila City," is the way Yellowleg frames his outlaw pitch to Turkey (Wills) and Billy (Steve Cochran) at the start of the film. Tough but sly, Yellowleg asserts his authority without the slightest sign of strain.

"You givin' the orders now?" Billy asks him.

"Looks that way, don't it?" is the reply.

O'Hara is more of a problem. Her character, Kit, wants to bury her boy in a ghost town deep in Apache country, and could care less about the danger to herself or others. O'Hara frequently played stubborn characters, but few as unrelievedly serious as Kit. Her manner grates as the film goes on and she seems more put out by the idea Yellowleg might not think she was married to the boy's father than the fact her boy is dead.

It's possible O'Hara's performance suffered from a lack of communication with her director. It's said that the producer, O'Hara's brother Charles B. Fitzsimons, forbade Peckinpah to talk to her on set, then fired the director before editing began. This could account for the fact her scenes never gel with the rest of the film.

I'm reluctant to judge the film too much by its look and feel. The version I saw, part of the "Maureen O'Hara Collection" put out by St. Clair, seems to be a pan-and-scan lifted from a TV print and was possibly edited for commercials. Certainly the film jumps around a lot.

Some blame must fall on either Peckinpah or Fitzsimons. The score is both mediocre and idiotic, soft mariachi music playing while Billy assaults Kit or a lame rendition of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" playing whenever Turkey goes off on one of his rants about creating his own republic complete with "slave Indians". At one point we are asked to believe Yellowleg walking into a camp of sleeping Apaches to steal a horse without getting caught.

Keith reveals himself here as a worthy lead. He worked with Peckinpah on TV shows and would have been an excellent talent for the director on screen. His loss was Warren Oates' gain. You do get the great Strother Martin as one of Peckinpah's few-ever positive religious figures, turning a bar room into a "preach house" and telling Yellowleg and company to take their hats off to the Lord. Moments like that lift the film from being the muddy genre exercise it otherwise is.

Peckinpah is getting to what he later mastered in movies such as Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; outlaws with deep emotional scars who live in the past and wander around like the Flying Dutchman. The scar is made physical as Yellowleg is unable to raise his arm when shooting, which leads to a tragic accident. In Deadly Companions we also see similar character as Bob Dylan played in Pat Garrett; the little boy playing his harmonica. Deadly Companions is a bit clumsy a movie, sometimes it is difficult to see what is actually going on, but the story is good and the characters are real. It's a must see for Peckinpah fans.

This film is best seen as an apprentice work, falling neatly between Peckinpah's TV work (The Rifleman etc), and the string of Western masterpieces that began with Guns in The Afternoon/Ride the High Country. For the only time in the director's work there is no sense of the 'old West' passing, as Peckinpah still works broadly within the established Western tradition - one which he would shortly transform and make his own.

Brian Keith and O'Hara work surprisingly well together, even though in the light of the director's later work the insistance upon a strong and sympathetic female co-lead seems uncharacteristic. Apparently Maureen O'Hara's role in producing the film influenced the emphasis and development of her role.

The film suffers from a poverty of budget (most noticeable in the opening scenes where the bar room appears cramped and two dimensional), as well as over-insistent musical score - one which occasionally detracts from the rhythm of the film. The trademark Peckinpah montage editing has yet to make itself felt and, very unusually for this director, the first few moments of the film seem (to this viewer) slightly rushed and confusing - almost as if Peckinpah is just finding his feet, sketching on a larger canvas than he had previously been used to.

Peckinpah fans will find much to enjoy here, though: the character of 'Turkey' (played by Chill Wills) is as colourful and as rounded as any of the minor low-life characters that appear in the later films. He even hides a 'Major Dundee' military cap under his coat, - in retrospect one which can be seen as an appropriate cinematic "embryo". Even with a limited budget, the film is always in safe hands, the story intriguing and ironic. Riding into town, the desperate trio see a group of children playing and mildly tormenting each other - another Peckinpah trademark. When the desperadoes are confronted by a frontier prayer meeting, the anticipation of the grander meeting at the beginning of 'The Wild Bunch' is obvious. The preacher is in fact the first in a long line of religious failures and bigots featuring in Peckinpah's films.

Perhaps the biggest surprise to those used to Peckinpah's work is the lack of violence (even the end shoot out, although effective, is somewhat muted). Peckinpah, it seems, had yet to discover the stylistic hallmark which later was to mark his career in controversy.