The legend and legacy of Sam Peckinpah (1925-84) is complex and multi-faceted. Peckinpah is often celebrated as an inveterate stylist whose camera and editing innovations point towards the auteurist cinema of the 1970s New Hollywood. At the same time, he is also acknowledged as a soulful revisionist, an artist who extended John Ford’s devotion to the Western through works such as the meditative Ride the High Country and the satirical Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, films that essentially rescued the genre from irrelevance by reinvigorating such central themes as the ethical penumbra enshrouding the law, the clash of traditional morality and technology, the fatal tension between anarchic individualism and an increasingly civilized frontier and the slow, spiraling death of the West.

Far better known, however, is the Peckinpah who achieved considerable notoriety for the startlingly graphic and often disturbingly beautiful violence that defines his most celebrated and contested films. Peckinpah gave a new depth of meaning and expression to screen violence, using gun smoke and fresh blood as almost painterly media and refining such signature devices as slow motion cinematography and “flash” montage. The intense and protracted violence of key Peckinpah films—especially Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch—transformed the director into a household name. Together with their uneasy violence, the perceived misogyny of Peckinpah's films made him an object of steady controversy.  Peckinpah chafed at the sobriquet “Bloody Sam” applied by critics, and complained that the striking counterpart of his gentler films—such as the sensitive character studies The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner—was consistently ignored.

Like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles before him, Peckinpah was a recalcitrant visionary destined to clash with the Hollywood brass who reluctantly employed him. Peckinpah's too, was a tragically compromised career, plagued by impatient studio executives who tried to mutilate, if not destroy, ambitious projects like Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah’s erratic record of box office hits and misses, combined with his own self-destructive tendencies, saw him increasingly pigeonholed as an unreliable "action director,” denied the bigger budget projects that he craved.

Peckinpah has only recently been re-evaluated as critics and scholars have discovered the thematic richness and complexities of his films. Most notable is Peckinpah's powerful examination of the privileges and discontents of masculinity and the bitter failure of the American dream of individual freedom. More than simply an object of controversy, the violence and frequent nihilism of Peckinpah's cinema powerfully distills the raw experiences of the civil rights movement, Vietnam and political assassinations of the 1960s into a vision of a lawless, ragged world that still resonates today.