After the Big One: The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Posted by Greg Ferrara on December 9, 2012

Many filmmakers have several movies in their filmography before they hit it big. Howard Hawks had been directing for years before taking up the helm for The Dawn Patrol and even a couple more before Scarface put him into the stratosphere. Martin Scorsese had a couple of films (Who’s that Knocking at My Door, Boxcar Bertha) before Mean Streets put him in the big time and Francis Ford Coppola had several films under his belt, even some high profile ones like Finian’s Rainbow and another well-received one, The Rain People, before hitting the biggest of the big time with The Godfather. Other directors, most notably Orson Welles, hit the ground running with their big one (Citizen Kane) or perhaps after only one other theatrical release (Spielberg had a lot of tv experience but only one theatrical film before Jaws). And perhaps because that first big one is so big, I’ve always been more interested in what they decided to do as a follow-up than in the big one itself. Case in point: Sam Peckinpah. He’d already had a long career in television and even some success theatrically (Ride the High Country, Major Dundee) before The Wild Bunch made him into the director that everyone now thinks of when they hear the name Sam Peckinpah. It was the big one and he followed it up with a movie that went against the expectations of audiences expecting more of that Wild Bunch magic. It was The Ballad of Cable Hogue and it may not be The Wild Bunch but it’s definitely an important film in the Peckinpah canon.

If only because it stars Jason Robards, The Ballad of Cable Hogue should be better known. I’m of the mind that there are certain actors who make everything better and are always watchable no matter what the quality of the movie in question. Jason Robards is one of them. Just watching and listening to him is enough to make any movie bearable but The Ballad of Cable Hogue has the added bonus of actually being a fine film on its own.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue begins in the desert with Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) face to face with his dinner to be, a gila monster staring him down. Before he can stab it, the lizard is split in two by a gunshot blast from one of Cable’s two partner’s (Taggart, played by L.Q. Jones and Bowen, played by Strother Martin) who approach afterwards and take Cable’s water. They’d been scouting for water in the desert but found none, just as no one else in that area ever has. They leave Cable to die as they head out with the only water available.

Cable wanders through the desert for four days without water until finally, near death, he stumbles to the ground and notices that his boots are muddy. Looking around for the mud he stepped in he quickly finds a patch of wet ground and digging down about a foot comes upon a natural spring in the desert. He digs it out some more and drinks its bounty before death has a chance to take him.

The next day, as Cable wanders back to civilization a stagecoach passes which he flags down. He’s told that he’s twenty miles from one town in one direction and twenty miles from another town in the other. The stagecoach has to get a move on because there is no water in between and the passengers are thirsty. That’s when Cable realizes the spring he stumbled upon might be a spring of wealth if marketed properly. He goes back, digs it out and charges a dime a drink. His first customer refuses to pay and becomes a corpse instead after he tries to shoot Cable. That’s when Cable befriends a wandering preacher named Joshua (David Warner) who puts the idea in Cable’s head to get a proper deed and license set up before someone else takes the initiative.

Now all of that happens in the first reel of the movie but the real story begins when Cable goes to town to get the deed and meets a prostitute named Hildy, played quite well by Stella Stevens. From this point on, the movie becomes a relationship movie with Cable, Hildy and Joshua sharing digs and building up the business. It’s not until they separate that the story of Cable’s revenge takes over, in which he waits for the day he finds Bowen and Taggart again and can make them suffer as he did.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue is the kind of follow-up that no one was expecting from the man who set the western world ablaze with The Wild Bunch. First of all, it’s a comedy more than drama and second of all, there is little to no violence. Does it succeed? Yes but not completely.

Sam Peckinpah’s strength wasn’t comedy and as a result the comedy in Cable Hogue is very mild and understated, mainly arising out of character situations. Where it goes astray is when the comedy gets broad, which mainly entails Joshua, Hildy and Cable running at double-speed, like a shot from The Benny Hill Show. Characters running at double-speed is such a slapstick staple that it feels out of place in a film that clearly isn’t slapstick.

The story takes place in the familiar setting of a western frontier on the verge of civilization hanging on as the modern world renders it irrelevant. The underlying story, the one between the lines, of the obsolete man replaced by technology, is so well constructed that one wishes Peckinpah had done more with it. Cable famously “finds water where it wasn’t” and water is exactly what horses on stagecoaches need when they’re passing through. It’s the gasoline of the stagecoaches but by the end of the film, motorcars and motorcycles are passing through, and by, Cable Springs without so much as a second glance. They run on gas, not water, so who needs to stop? When a car does stop it holds the old love of Cable, come back for one last visit until that modern technology of hers becomes his undoing in ways more than one.

This technology replacing man aspect as well as the relationship/revenge threads (this comprises every element of the movie) are all handled well enough but with such a light passing glance that the movie never feels as strong as it could be. The Ballad of Cable Hogue is a very good movie but its failures come in small degrees and there are just enough of them to make one wish for more than what one gets. Not because the movie fails but because it just barely succeeds instead of succeeding grandly. In the same year, another semi-comical look at the old west, Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, did succeed grandly and I think that, in part, is responsible for Hogue’s lack of outright success.

Still, it took a great amount of artistic courage to move so boldly against the tide with something like this right after the amazing success of the great The Wild Bunch. To make such a gentle, unbecoming serio-comic tale about the western frontier was a way of Peckinpah saying, “The audience won’t dictate what I do next.” And thanks to a stellar lead performance by Jason Robards and excellent support from Warner and Stevens, the audience got a film filled with enough great acting and good story-telling that it allowed Peckinpah to continue to make movies the way he wanted to, without compromise. It may not be the follow-up anyone expected but it works and provided a nice tonic to the violence that Peckinpah would return to soon enough.

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26 Responses After the Big One: The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Posted By Emgee : December 9, 2012 5:27 pm

I remember seeing this as a kid and enjoying it a lot; should i see it again or will my memories betray me? Heck, why not!
Jason Robards is always a joy to watch; unforgettable as Cheyenne, or as Ben Bradlee. Solid, unpretentious actor, just the way i like it.

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 9, 2012 6:33 pm

Robards makes the movie. The supporting cast is good too. Like I say in the piece, it doesn’t fully succeed (or just barely) so you leave thinking it could have been better but it’s good. Comedy just wasn’t Peckinpah’s strong suit and when it gets broad (the speeded up running, several visual “jokes” concerning Stella Stevens body parts) it’s at its weakest.

Posted By David : December 10, 2012 7:05 am

Greg, thanks for posting on this less celebrated film of Peckinpah’s.
I have recently watched it again, after an interval of 30 years, and it was better than I remembered it to be. Yes, it has those mis-steps of the speeded up comedic scenes, and some ham fisted T and A jokes, as you rightfully pointed out, but it also has the glorious cinematography of Lucien Ballard, and Robards is eminently watchable, and well supported by the rest of the cast.
I like it because Peckinpah was not afraid to make films about ordinary, ‘little’ people, as well as the larger than life ones, as found in the Bunch. I like Junior Bonner even more for that reason.
On a side note, Butterfly Mornings, the song used in the sequence where Hogue and Hildy grow to be comfortably domestic in life at the spring, could be considered just a so-so sentimental song, though used efectively enough in the film. There is a wonderful version of it by Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions that just shines, check it out on You Tube.

Posted By Ghijath Naddaf : December 10, 2012 7:56 am

Minor Peckinpah is still very good. And you are right about
Robards of course. A wonderful Actor.
I also love the opening Song “Tomorrow is the Song we sing”
and the whole “dealing with God” thing.

Posted By Ghijath Naddaf : December 10, 2012 8:03 am

Posted By Emgee : December 10, 2012 8:19 am

Your point about humor being Peckinpah’s weak spot brings to mind the use ( or misuse) in contemporary westerns by Sergio Leone. He also liked to mix high drama with fairly crude humor.
Not to mention the crass Bud Spencer-Terence Hill movies of the seventies.
Part of it may have been a reaction to the serious tone of the John Ford-Howard Hawks-style western. Sure, they had humor too, usually centered around a Walter Brennan-type sidekick. But they still observed the regulations of the Code. By the Seventies of course, anything went.

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 10, 2012 9:11 am

but it also has the glorious cinematography of Lucien Ballard

I should have mentioned that in the piece. The movie looks great as Ballard had a way of framing a slapped together house and watering hole in the middle of a desert and making it somehow interesting.

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 10, 2012 9:12 am

Ghijath, you’re right, Peckinpah didn’t make any bad movies, just movies that weren’t as interesting or successful as some of his others.

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 10, 2012 9:23 am

Emgee, I think the period from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies contained some pretty unfunny humor in movies across the genres. Everyone was attempting to exploit the fact that they could now utter profanity and show things they’d never shown before. As such, a lot of the humor that they though was being risque now just seems dated and adolescent.

In a good interview with Robert Klein that I watched years ago, he spoke of doing the first HBO comedy special in 1975 and how he could say whatever he wanted because it was pay tv and most of his jokes used profanity in “boy gets to say dirty words for the first time” way and how he was now embarrassed by it. I still remember him shaking his head and saying, “God, I wish I’d been more clever.”

That pretty much sums up the “risque” “adult” jokes that befell Hollywood after things opened up. Cable Hogue is no exception. Stella Stevens’ breasts, buttocks and panties each get their own lingering visual “jokes” and none of them come off as funny, just dated.

Posted By swac44 : December 10, 2012 10:44 am

Funny you mention Klein, I remember bringing home one of his albums from the local library (I think it was called Child of the ’50s), and getting into trouble with my folks because it featured the phrase “son of a bitch.” Mind you, this was a household where “fart” was considered a swear word, and up to this point (I was probably 10 or 11) all I’d listened to comedy-wise was Bill Cosby and, yes, Firesign Theatre, who were always subversive, but never profane.

I enjoyed The Ballad of Cable Hogue very much by the time I got around to seeing it (I think it was on laserdisc, when stores were dumping their stock in the mid-’90s), but I agree that it’s whole is less than the sum of its parts. I find Butterfly Morning dates the film terribly (not that it’s a terrible song, but it’s a little too Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head for my liking), but was clearly a project close to Peckinpah’s heart (I got to interview LQ Jones years ago, and he talked about how the director was determined to keep it on time and on budget after the experience of making The Wild Bunch) and I think you sense that throughout and forgive its minor drawbacks.

BTW, there’s a two-part interview with Jones just posted up at The Commentary Track podcast, worth a listen:
http://www.thecommentarytrack.com/

Posted By Tom S : December 10, 2012 11:24 am

@Emgee

I always found Ford’s comic relief to be pretty painful, too, particularly in The Searchers. Hawks is about the only Western director whose sense of humor was actually pretty funny, so far as I recall.

Though I think Leone could be slyly funny, it’s just that the character based jokes (Clint Eastwood being a jerk, most everything Eli Wallach said) come off better than the much broader stuff from the purely comic characters.

Posted By Emgee : December 10, 2012 4:46 pm

@ Tom S

Well, Hawks did make some classic comedies, so he knew a thing or two about comedy. Ford’s comedy comes off to me as pretty hokey. Leone’s humor is usually pretty effective and consistent with the characters, but sometimes he couldn’t resist putting in some slapstick-style jokes, which generally fail to amuse me.

Posted By Kingrat : December 10, 2012 8:45 pm

Greg, the first Jason Robards film I saw was JULIUS CAESAR, where he is miscast as Brutus and gives a wretched performance, seemingly hungover and reading his lines off cue cards. Because this was my first exposure to Robards, I’ve never much warmed up to him as an actor, though he is at least acceptable in other films, like the outstanding THE JOURNEY.

Excellent point about the failed humor of many films in this period. So many films from this era seem very dated.

Posted By leopardgrrl1 : December 11, 2012 12:17 am

I saw Cable Mogue countless times on Saturday afternoons as a kid. I don’t know why, but my local TV station’s movie package, which featured westerns and o matinee fare from the 50-early 70s, included a lot of showings of this film. But I was oddly fascinated by it. I was drawn to main title theme of the film, which I can still hum, despite not having seen it in more than 30 years. I also remember being reeled in by Robards’ performance, and what seemed to me, as a kid raised on Gunsmoke, to be a poignant story about people, rather than the usual action fare. These characters were misfits, and the story was off-kilter. To my early teen mind, it was poignant on some level. I can’t say why this film affected me as it did; it’s not at all the sort of movie I was drawn to then, or now. But I watched it every time it appeared on Channel 24′s Saturday movie, and it stuck with me.

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 11, 2012 5:06 pm

swac, thanks for the podcast link and how cool to interview L.Q. Jones.

As for comedians and language, I still remember getting the Richard Pryor concert album in or around 77 and feeling like I’d crossed the Rubicon, no going back and all that. Of course, Bill Cosby was just as funny to me as ever but in the moment, Pryor seemed like an a-bomb going off.

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 11, 2012 5:08 pm

Tom and Emgee – I’m with Tom about most of Ford’s comic relief as well (and slapstick in general). It just doesn’t make me laugh. And that’s fine, not everything makes everyone laugh but some of that stuff makes me cringe and when that happens I think, “Couldn’t they have just made this gag unfunny? Did they have to make it embarrassing too?”

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 11, 2012 5:09 pm

Kingrat, since I have always loved Jason Robards and never seen that version of Julius Caesar, I shall avoid it like the plague.

Posted By Greg Ferrara : December 11, 2012 5:11 pm

leopardgrrl1, I have plenty of movies like that. Movies that I saw on tv on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon that stuck with me. Where I grew up, the local station ran a movie on Sunday afternoons called Popcorn Theater and always showed mediocre fare (like the George Gobel remake of The Lady Eve) but they all stuck with me as positive memories even if the movies weren’t that good.

Posted By Tom S : December 12, 2012 12:29 am

Greg, are you referring specifically to slapstick in the context of non-slapstick movies, or are you painting our beloved Laurels, Hardys, Chaplins and Keatons with the same brush? Because that would just be blasphemy

Posted By Larry S. : December 12, 2012 12:17 pm

One of my all time favorite films.I saw it six times in the theatre and catch on tv whenever I can.Yes the under cranked comedy and the use of the Zoom are a bit annoying to the modern eye but the great thing about the film is that it takes a lot of chances.Not all successful but all are interesting.
Robards is great, as is the supporting cast.Davis Warner is really good as is Stevens,Pickens,Martin and Jones.I’ve always wondered what Peckinpah had in mind with Warners character.Every time that he shows up things change for Cable.

Posted By Peter Nellhaus : December 12, 2012 12:37 pm

What certainly didn’t help Cable Hogue was that Warner Brothers changed ownership between the time the film was made and when it was ready for release. What theatrical run existed was minimal.

Posted By swac44 : December 13, 2012 9:40 am

I have seen that version of Julius Caesar, and it’s better off avoided. It didn’t help that we watched it in high school English class, on a lousy 16mm print without the proper anamorphic lens (saw Waterloo the same way). Even then, I knew something looked funny about the picture.

I used to watch a lot of “Popcorn Theatre” type shows as a kid too. The way I look at it, how could I properly appreciate Gary Cooper’s Beau Geste if I haven’t also seen the version starring Doug McClure? And trust me, they showed a lot of movies starring Doug McClure.

Posted By Jenni : December 13, 2012 10:10 am

A third echo, avoid the Julius Caesar movie with Robards in it as Brutus. I don’t know what his problem was making that film, but he is truly awful in it. Much like Kingrat said, because of that performance, I am not as enamored of Robards as others are. It’s a shame he stunk up that film, because everyone else in the cast: Charleton Heston, Sir John Gielgud, Diana Rigg, Robert Vaughn, Christopher Lee, Richard Chamberlain, Michael Gough, are really putting forth a great effort, and then here comes Robards, saying his lines as if he’s reading them off the cue cards! Frustrating experience, to say the least.

Posted By Juana Maria : December 21, 2012 5:37 pm

I had been waiting to see “Cable Hogue” for quite some time,ever since TCM talked about the release of the Sam Peckinpah box set of films. One day awhile back I found the whole movie on You Tube! I watched it. It is not my favorite movie even if it is a Western. Though I have nothing bad to say about Robards or my beloved l. Q. Jones! The only thing I found funny was Strother Martin’s singing! It always riles me inside to watch L. Q. Jones get killed on film! I guess Martin’s character didn’t get killed because he did what Hogue told him to. This film has inspired a groovy song and an excellent video by Calexico! Check it out on You Tube! So great. Personally, if I want Western comedy I’ll watch “the Apple Dumpling Gang”,”Along Came Jones”,”Support Your Local Sheriff!”,”Cat Ballou” or “Maverick”,yep,and I’ll watch ‘em with my family! Adios!

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After the Big One: The Ballad of Cable Hogue

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