Alex da Silva
Jason Robards plays the title character. He's a drifter who's left for dead in the Nevada desert. After 4 days, the unthinkable happens. He finds water. From this discovery, he sets up a water station for stagecoach traffic and waits for his 2 pals who left him for dead to one day turn up so he can exact revenge. In the meantime, self-appointed minister David Warner (Joshua) and prostitute Stella Stevens (Hildy) alternate as his companions in his lonely existence. One day, an automobile turns up… This film is a comedy that is funny in parts. Robards is a grumpy sort of character that you can laugh at during his initial social interactions whilst Warner is hilarious as a devious preacher with nothing more than tits on his mind. In one standout scene, he starts groping a married woman who is grieving a personal loss. His technique is to be noted – I've never seen that on film before. It reminds you that this is a 70s film. It's all about breasts. However, set against this are the sped up sections a la Benny Hill. Not funny. That technique only works for Benny Hill and his scantily clad women chase sequences. Thinking about it, Robards offers himself as collateral at the beginning of the film to the bank manager. The film could have taken a different direction if this avenue was explored. We could have had the first homosexual western, and with Warner's perverted vicar, this could have been the first great Western porno. With sped up comedy sequences.The film is OK, let down by an unconvincing relationship with Stella Stevens. No way would she be interested in Robard's tramp of a figure. The film also has a very peculiar ending that just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the film and comes out of nowhere. Robards seems to be out of character for this sequence. Finally, there is that blasted awful song about a 'butterfly morning' - what a load of rubbish!
evanston_dad
When Sam Peckinpah allowed some comedy to infuse his otherwise dramatic films, he displayed a subversive and very funny sense of humor. But if "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" is any indication, he was much less adept at staging an all-out comedy.This farcical western starring Jason Robards as a man who discovers a water spring in the desert and proceeds to make a business out of it is an ungainly, even slightly ponderous affair. Its attempts at humor are mostly obvious and lead footed -- like speeding up the camera so that characters run around like they're in a Benny Hill skit. And the movie is far too long for the bare bones plot supporting it. I really like Peckinpah, but I thought this one was a struggle to sit through.Two things I unequivocally did like about it -- the scene where Cable Hogue meets the character played by Stella Stevens and can't focus on anything but her cleavage; and the film's theme song, which I still can't get out of my head.Grade: B-
tieman64
Sam Peckinpah is mostly known for "The Wild Bunch", but his smaller pictures tend to be better, more personal."The Ballad of Cable Hogue", which Peckinpah regarded as both a personal favourite and the most autobiographical of his films, is a 1970 Western which stars Jason Robards as Cable Hogue, a bearded prospector who sets up a stagecoach station at a watering hole out in the desert. Traffic through these parts will be high, Hogue reckons, and so sooner or later Taggart and Bowen are likely to turn up as customers. Taggart and Bowen being the two men who abandoned Hogue to die out in a desert three years earlier. Hogue wants revenge. Taggart and Bowen, of course, do eventually show up.But the film is uninterested in violence, vengeance, and the genre's usual assortments of gun-play, money grubbing and double-crossing. Instead, Peckinpah turns the film into something more unconventional. Though it's primarily a comedy – Peckinpah's trademark slow-motion bloodbaths become fast, sped up comedy routines – the film is also very moody, lyrical and romantic. Peckinpah's more concerned with lingering on Robard's tired, bearded face, the loving glint in Cable's eyes and the charming way this rough and tumble mountain-man does his best to act gentlemanly and proper around a local hooker called Hildy. She's "the ladiest lady" his eyes have ever laid upon, you see.Contrasted with the chivalrous Hogue is a character called Joshua (brilliantly played by David Warner), a sex obsessed preacher who uses Christ and Bible as an excuse to get close to any woman he can. The film's dialogue is great – Robards, always a likable actor, has some endearing moments – but it's Warner who gets the best lines. Whenever he's on screen he's waxing poetic about female body parts, or finding some way to twist Biblical prose into pornography.Peckinpah was always a Romantic. His heroes are all misunderstood outcasts, wounded macho-idealists who flee hell only to end up in worse hell holes. Without hope or future his heroes are content with what little time and pleasures they have left, the latter often amounting to nothing more than some nickle, land, or a fine lady at their sides to help lick their wounds. These women tend to be hookers and whores, not because Peckinpah's a pervert or misogynist, but because, like Van Gogh, he and his heroes identify with the beaten and downtrodden.Peckinpah called "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" his most autobiographical film. There are no drugs or heavy boozers here (Peckinpah was a notorious alcoholic and addict), but Cable does echo Peckinpah's life in other ways. He abandons the towns and cities, moves off into the wilderness, finds some land for himself, becomes a ragged pauper king and then muses about his legacy before dying. "Was I a violent man or a kind man?" Hogue broods, "a killer or a lover?" Peckinpah, of course, grew up on ranches, was virtually kicked out of Hollywood, made a home in the scrublands of Mexico, had a temperament that bounced from violent king to kind, quiet artist, became worried about his films' portrayal of violence, then found himself resorting to dumb, impersonal action thrillers to keep his career alive. He sees the best and worst of himself in Houge.Regardless, "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" is Peckinpah's gentlest, most introspective film. Like "Two Mules For Sister Sarah", a western released the same year by Peckinpah's mentor, Don Siegel, it's also unashamedly offbeat and free-spirited. If the film treads wrong, it's in an overly literal climax, in which an automobile runs over Hogue, mechanisation and the "new", "civilized" world literally heralding the death of the cowboy. This tired cliché and banal observation is found in virtually every post "Liberty Valance" western.8/10 – Worth one viewing. Some more excellent, unconventional westerns from this period: "Bad Company", "The Beguiled", "Two Mules For Sister Sarah", "The Long Riders", "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean", "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson", "The Shootist" etc.
FightingWesterner
Jason Robards gives one of the best performances of his career as Cable Hogue, an iconoclast, desert rat, and shrewd opportunist, who sees his chance to prosper and takes it when he stumbles across a mudhole in the desert and turns it into a profitable oasis.Robards gets great support from all around him, especially David Warner as a lecherous preacher that becomes a kind of sidekick to Hogue and Stella Stevens as the girl Cable lusts after, but can't quite hold on to.Entertaining, fun, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes quite poignant, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue further elaborates on the central themes in previous as well as subsequent Peckinpah westerns, of changing times in the west at the turn of the century. It's a character study, with the Hogue himself symbolizing the life and death of the old west.Peckinpah's favorite of his films, it appears (at least to me) he tried to replicate the feel of this three years later, in Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, with mixed results.
