New Mexico

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")

The first theatrical feature from famed 'maverick' director Peckinpah is a very odd film. For one thing, it takes some careful reflection to recognize that it has virtually no story, simply the working out of apposite relationships between people having almost nothing in common with one another. The abortive bank robbery becomes almost forgotten, overshadowed as it is with O'Hara's journey to bury her son near her husband.

Which brings us to the first important historical point of the film. The attempt to bury the son is going to leave an impression on Peckinpah, who revamps it as black comedy for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (It also apparently left an impression on Tommy Lee Jones, who borrows the idea for his recent "Three Burials" film.) Peckinpah would also rework the Chill Wills character through several films. Brian Kieth's driven Civil War vet becomes the basis of Major Dundee, and of Holden's Pike Bishop in the final battle of The Wild Bunch. Another reviewer remarked that the boy playing the harmonica foreshadows the Bob Dylan character in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; but, more importantly, it clearly provided the inspiration for the Charles Bronson Harmonica character in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. The arrival of the three would-be bank robbers in the town at the beginning uses camera angles that would recur in the Wild Bunch, just as the arrival in the abandoned village at the end of the film includes camera angles used in the scenes from the Bunch that are set in Mexico. Another reviewer has rightly remarked the resonance of the barroom church service with similar scenes in later Peckinpah films. And the undeniable sexual tensions between Kieth, O'Hara and the two bank robbers would reappear in an almost unrecognizable fashion - not in the Ballad of Cable Hogue, as the reader might have expected, but in Straw Dogs, where it explodes into open violence, only achieving partial resolution in the McQueen/ McGraw relationship in the Getaway.

Whew! that's a lot of potential to discover in a low budget western. But there's more! One of the reasons why this film would leave an imprint on Tommy Lee Jones and Sergio Leone is that it is not really a "Western", i.e., a cowboy genre film. Except for the references to the Civil War, it could easily have been set somewhere in Africa, Mexico, or Australia. It could have been set in the Middle Ages. There's only one character that is pure "cowboy" movie stereotype, the black-clad gunslinger. And he is so openly a stereotype, one can't help wondering if he represents some intentional parody element to the film. At any rate, the point is that Peckinpah's decision to film a "non-Western Western" is historically crucial - If films like the Wild Bunch and Once Upon a Time in the West can be truly said to mark the end of the Western genre as a whole, the first notice of this transition is to be made in Deadly Companions.

Finally, one ought to note the performances of the actors. All of them, it should be noted are either miscast or cast against expectations. Chill Wills had never played such a nasty crud before; Maureen O'Hara playing a loser is completely antithetical to the cinema persona she had previously established for herself, and to which she would later return in films like McClintock! And Brian Keith turns in a great performance in a role that is really thanklessly unsympathetic for the audience in many subtle ways.

Really a remarkable achievement for a young director with little or no budget to work with.

Produced by Maureen O'Hara's brother,in order to recharge his sister's career,Sam Peckinpah did not like this film.O' Hara sings on the cast and credits and at the end of the movie.It's strange to see this par excellence Fordian heroine on Peckinpah's territory.

But you do not have to be a Peckinpah fan to enjoy this crepuscular western (Peckinpah is not my cup of tea as far as western are concerned;give me Ford,Daves,Walsh,Mann instead).If there had been problems between the director and his star,the movie did not suffer for it.

It is a good western but be warned: it's a gloomy one.The story begins with the death of a dancehall girl's child ("He was all I loved in this world" she would say later).THe movie looks like a long funeral ;it's a long way to the place where the boy must be buried in his father's grave.It's difficult to tackle a sadder subject.

Another great moment is O'Hara's and Keith's arrival in the ghost town,searching for the grave.Often filmed at dusk or in the darkest night,this film is also a story of redemption,of forgiveness.

This is a small scale western, but with some skillful acting and directing that make it seem a tad better than one might expect. Keith is a wandering ex-Union soldier who comes across a grizzled old outlaw whose being hanged for cheating at cards. He, for unknown reasons, saves the man (played with effective nastiness by Wills) and commandeers him and his pal Cochran to a town where a bank is ripe for robbing. There, the trio runs into O'Hara and her harmonica-playing young son. Circumstances lead to Keith offering to help O'Hara cross hostile Apache territory to visit the grave of her husband. Along the way, his motives for saving Wills are exposed, along with some of his insecurities (such as why he won't remove his hat.) O'Hara (who also sings the opening song) and Keith have undeniable chemistry (shown to greater effect in their simultaneous pairing "The Parent Trap", but still on display here, albeit in a more somber way.) It takes a while before the characters are really cared about, but once they are, the story takes on greater meaning. Cochran (displaying a still fit figure at 44) is appropriately slimy. Debits would include the rather small amount of "savage, terrifying Indians" (they are creepy and a little threatening, but there isn't quite enough menace to make them as threatening as one might like) a few continuity gaffes in the editing and the deadly, intrusive, lame, often inappropriate musical score. The music in this film detracts from the visuals and actually serves to cheapen the film. It sounds like someone told Porter Wagoner to pretend he was Phantom of the Prairie and play funereal organ music with the occasional hint of "gee-tar". Awful. One sequence, in particular, stands out. O'Hara stands guard in a cavern lit by a hole in the top of it and is gradually descended upon by an attacker. The charm of the stars takes this a long way, but be warned...there aren't many smiles in this one.

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.