The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Double-crossed and left without water in the desert, Cable Hogue is saved when he finds a spring. It is in just the right spot for a much needed rest stop on the local stagecoach line and Hogue uses this to his advantage. He builds a house and makes money off the stagecoach passengers. Hildy, a whore from the nearest town, moves in with him. Hogue has everything going his way until the advent of the automobile ends the era of the stagecoach., A beautifully crafted Old West tale from Sam Peckinpah. Jason Robards stars as the lucky prospector who finds water in the desert., After the intense bloodshed of The Wild Bunch (1969), this comic western fable took the opposite approach to director Sam Peckinpah’s continuing examination of the end of the West. Left for dead by a couple of lizard-slaughtering desperados in the middle of the desert, prospector Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) is saved by his unexpected discovery of water “where there wasn’t any”. Hogue turns the water hole, felicitously located near a stagecoach route, into a thriving business, creating a rest stop for a never-ending series of parched travelers. On his occasional trips to the closest town, he meets chipper prostitute Hildy (Stella Stevens), who joins him in his oasis, completing Hogue’s little paradise. But even though Hogue may be able to succeed and avenge himself against his original attackers, there is one thing that he cannot stop: progress. Completed before The Wild Bunch was released, and replete with comical and even musical interludes, Peckinpah’s gently picaresque telling of Hogue’s rise and fall stands in distinct contrast to the visual violence of its predecessor. The underlying message about the cost of modernity, however, equals The Wild Bunch in seriousness. The callous randomness of Hogue’s fate is as shocking as the Bunch’s final blaze of glory; as in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller from the same period, a tool of “civilization” provokes a most uncivilized end for an Old West dreamer. Although the film was as light-hearted in approach as the 1969 smash hit revisionist western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Warner Bros. mishandled the release and it did barely any business; Peckinpah returned to his trademark gore in his next film, the controversial Straw Dogs (1971). Still, The Ballad of Cable Hogue is less an anomaly for a master of violence than an ironically charming chapter in Peckinpah’s career-long elegy to the western., Prospector Cable Hogue is robbed and left to die in the desert. But instead of breathing his last, he discovers water and survives to turn his personal oasis into a stagecoach stopover point., A prospector who becomes the proprietor of a stagecoach watering stop., In this film, Sam Peckinpah dropped the violence he became known for with The Wild Bunch but remained with the theme of the closing frontier in this gentle comedy-drama. Cable Hogue Jason Robards is a weary prospector robbed and left to die out in the Arizona desert by two ruffians, but he discovers water at the spot. He lives, digs a well, and sells water to passersby, including a demented preacher (David Warner). Throughout the episodic story, Hogue turns his location into a profitable concern and a beautiful prostitute (Stella Stevens) from the nearest town joins him, adding a relationship to his life. Eventually the two men who dry-gulched him return and he gets his revenge. When, in 1908, visitors stop in a horseless carriage, he is run over and killed in a rather quiet, anti-climactic scene. This film has a leisurely pace, but the script and performances keep it moving as a romantic tribute to pioneer spirit. It is one of the better westerns about the closing frontier that appeared in the late ’60s and early ’70s, along with Peckinpah’s own The Wild Bunch, George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Monte Walsh, the directorial debut of cinematographer William A. Fraker., A beautifully crafted Old West tale from Sam Peckinpah. stars as the lucky prospector who finds water in the desert.