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One reason it seems so natural to compare Sam Peckinpah and John Ford was the way certain people mattered in his films. Think of Peckinpah and you think of them-faces, voices, the ways their bodies move, occupy space, wear clothes, grow hair. As we came to know and look for Ward Bond, Francis Ford, Jack Pennick before we ever learned their names, so the cinema of Sam Peckinpah is, inescapably and invaluably, Warren Oates, R.G. Armstrong, John Davis Chandler, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Emilio Fernandez, Bo Hopkins, Jorge Russek, Dub Taylor, Richard Wright, Donnie Fritts. And Strother Martin.
It seems as if Strother Martin must have been in more than two Peckinpah pictures. To be sure, their paths crossed more often than that: "Cooter," a Gunsmoke episode written by Peckinpah, was one of the few prints of his own work that Martin was able to collect. But the TV stuff is in limbo for most of us, while the image of Strother Martin as a Peckinpah person is as vivid and permanent as any more conventionally stellar icon. All because of two films, two incarnations, at the end of the Sixties:
The Wild Bunch: As Coffer, one of the bounty hunters: slapped down at the edge of the roof by Robert Ryan; scampering from corpse to corpse in the telephoto-flattened San Rafael street, like a ravenous crow not knowing where to peck first; joined in unholy and palpably unclean partnership with L.Q. Jones, who fought him over credit for a kill till Martin screamed "Liar! Black liar!" and Jones wimpered "You shouldn't talk to me that-a-away!" and Martin chewed his lip and softened: "I'm sawry, T.C. . . . [chucking him tenderly on the breastbone] . . . help me with his boots!" Who can forget his hungry awe after the final battle ("It's PikeV), his eager, deferential hands as he asks, "Mr. Thornton, shall we . . . load 'em up?"
The Ballad of Cable Hogue: As Samuel D. Bowen, still in tandem with L.Q. Jones (Taggart): A bit less scurvy here, eventually seen duded up like a gent, his hat seated back as if topping a superannuated Little Lord Fauntleroy; the voice wheedling, tender, sliding almost involuntarily into singsong ("We'll drink...