By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: Sam Peckinpah’s 1966 western-themed drama Noon Wine, starring Jason Robards, Olivia De Havilland, Per Oscarsson and Ben Johnson.
Many, many revered and iconic filmmakers have a television history, from figureheads like Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet right through to transgressive agitators like Abel Ferarra. You’d never guess it from his wildly visionary, often beautiful and more frequently horrific, and deeply cinematic oeuvre, but so too did the late Sam Peckinpah, whose work would obviously appear to be too big and bold for the small screen. But “Bloody Sam” – now practically worshipped for confrontational classics like The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, Straw Dogs and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia – did indeed begin his fraught and fractured career journey on television.
And while Peckinpah created the series The Westerner and wrote and/or directed a stampede of other television episodes (on principally western series like Gunsmoke, Tales Of Wells Fargo, The Rifleman, Klondike, Pony Express and more) prior to making his big screen debut with 1961’s The Deadly Companions, the director’s most impressive small screen moment would come after he’d already established himself as a filmmaker of note. A small, fine-cut jewel of a film, 1966’s haunting and profoundly affecting western-adjacent drama Noon Wine also proved to be something of a career saver for Sam Peckinpah.
After the deeply troubled production of the director’s fascinating 1965 western epic Major Dundee, and subsequent firing (he was replaced by Norman Jewison) from the 1965 Steve McQueen starrer The Cincinnati Kid, Peckinpah’s name in Hollywood was mud. Quarrelsome, headstrong and wilfully iconoclastic, Peckinpah had seemingly cashed in all his chips and burned all his bridges…but someone extended a much-needed helping hand. That hand belonged to producer Daniel Melnick, and many attempted to pull it back before Peckinpah could grab hold.
Against the protestations of pretty much everyone around him, Melnick (a big fan of Peckinpah’s The Westerner and his 1962 film Ride The High Country) offered Peckinpah the job of adapting and directing Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel Noon Wine as an instalment of the ABC Stage 67 anthology programme of one-hour television plays. Not only did Melnick offer Peckinpah the job, he also gave him free rein. Seemingly on his best behaviour, Peckinpah turned in a work of striking maturity, restraint, sensitivity and quiet power. Fully endorsed by the source material’s author and critically acclaimed across the board, Noon Wine restored Peckinpah’s tattered reputation, and his next film was the game-changing 1969 masterpiece The Wild Bunch.
Noon Wine marked an absolutely pivotal moment in Peckinpah’s career, and it still stands as a rich and highly complex piece of television. The great Jason Robards (who would later star for Peckinpah in 1970’s wondrous The Ballad Of Cable Hogue, one of the director’s gentlest and most underrated films) is in majestic form as Royal Earle Thompson, a blustery, self-absorbed, and self-serving farmer married to the prim and proper Ellie (Olivia De Havilland is superb), who takes care of their two boys. When Thompson opportunistically takes on the wandering, seemingly dazed Swedish immigrant Olaf Helton (Per Oscarsson is magnetic) as a farm hand, he gets a great worker for an even greater price. Though distant and strange, Olaf eventually becomes an ersatz part of the Thompson family, which will eventually have major repercussions for them all.
While it’s talky and short on action, Noon Wine is utterly gripping. Without wanting to give away any of the surprising plot turns that snake through its brief 55-minute running time, Noon Wine sees Royal Earle Thompson placed amidst a moral quandary that would not be out of place in a Greek tragedy or one of Shakespeare’s more melancholy works. The manner in which this moral quandary tears at both Thompson’s very soul, and of those closest to him, is emotionally devastating and frequently difficult to watch. Though virtually all of the film’s violence takes place off-screen, Noon Wine is just as confronting in its own way as some of Peckinpah’s far rougher work.
Though referenced principally as an important footnote in the Sam Peckinpah canon (Sam regulars Ben Johnson and LQ Jones also appear to strong effect), Noon Wine is much, much more than that. There’s a dark poetry and grinding sense of inevitability to this grim small screen morality play that makes for truly gripping viewing. In short, Noon Wine is nothing less than essential for all Sam Peckinpah completists.
Availability: Noon Wine has been released on DVD in the US and Europe, and was even included as a “special feature” on a prior release of Peckinpah’s 1975 thriller The Killer Elite.
