Opening in
New York 41 years ago tomorrow, director Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975) –
prescient in its themes of moral corruption and malevolent unlawful activity in
high places during that decade’s outburst of paranoiac thrillers – nonetheless
fell victim to bad marketplace timing. The storyline of the James Caan/Robert
Duvall action tale about CIA-deployed assassins fit the times, as the Pulp Serenade website essayist Cullen
Gallagher writes: “The plot is a strange mixture of ’70s cinematic trends
(political paranoia, martial arts action, and urban thriller) with Peckinpah’s
characteristic concerns about the culture of violence, the bonds of masculine
friendships and anachronistic characters who have outlived their time….Like
the children toying with the scorpion as it is devoured by ants during the
opening of The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah presents a social order in the
throws of chaos. Off-balance with a perverse sense of justice, it isn't clear who
the hero or villain is, what is right or wrong, where one should go or if one
should stay put. In The Killer Elite,
snipers could be on any roof, ninjas around any corner, bombs under any car.
Your partner could be your enemy, your boss your enemy's boss. And your
mission, your purpose for living, might not mean a damn thing.” Intriguing, but
perhaps not the first choice for moviegoers during the year-end holidays and
just shortly after the fall release of the more slickly executed and similarly
themed Three Days of the Condor. And
in the estimation of certain critics, who found more to celebrate in the more
polished and intricate craft of the likes of Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest to scrutinize that year, The Killer Elite felt too
off-the-cuff, unwieldy and unfocused, despite its effective and frequently
exciting use of San Francisco area locations and a strong supporting cast that
included Arthur Hill, Mako, Burt Young, Bo Hopkins and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo
Garcia veterans Gig Young and Helmut Dantine. Someone who took The
Killer Elite’s desultory reception particularly hard was a staunch
Peckinpah partisan, critic Pauline Kael, who published one of her most
memorable blends of appraisal and championing in The New Yorker’s January 12, 1976 issue, entitled Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam
Peckinpah – The Killer Elite. Proposing
that “his new film…is set so far inside his fantasy-morality world that it goes
beyond personal filmmaking into private filmmaking,” she assesses “there are so
many elisions in The Killer Elite that it hardly exists on a narrative level,
but its poetic vision is all of a piece. This film is intensely,
claustrophobically exciting, with combat scenes of martial-arts teams photographed
in slow motion and edited in such brief cuts that the fighting is nightmarishly
concentrated – almost subliminal. Shot by Phil Lathrop in cold, five-o’clock
shadow green-blue tones, the film is airless – an involuted, corkscrew vision
of a tight, modern world.” She went on to blast the film’s handlers with both
barrels: “Peckinpah was forced to trim The Killer Elite to change its R
rating to a PG. Why would anyone want a PG-rated Peckinpah film? The answer is
that United Artists, having no confidence in the picture, grabbed the chance to
place it in 435 theatres for the Christmas trade; many of those theaters
wouldn’t have taken it if it had an R and the kids couldn’t go by themselves.
The film was flung into those neighborhood houses for a quick profit, without
benefit of advance press screenings or the ad campaign that goes with a
first-run showing. Increasingly, his films have reflected his war with the
producers and distributors, and in The Killer Elite this war takes its
most single-minded form.” If the scrappy and single-mindedly personal The
Killer Elite is not a prime exemplar of an all-cylinders-firing
Peckinpah perennial, consider that its Twilight Time hi-def Blu-ray
presentation is top-notch, available here – http://screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm/ID/27855/THE-KILLER-ELITE-1975-NOON-WINE-1966/
– and boasting a warts-and-all Peckinpah experts Audio Commentary, a revelatory
making-of featurette, a comprehensive promotional materials gallery and a
particularly stellar extra, the rarely seen Peckinpah-helmed and -adapted 1966 TV movie of
Katharine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine (in
standard-def) starring Jason Robards, Olivia de Havilland, Theodore Bikel and
Per Oscarsson. There’s no bad timing ever involved in checking out TT’s disc or
Kael’s readily accessible and anthologized full piece.