"If They Move ... Kill 'Em!": The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah.

Certain movie directors have the sly charisma and obsessiveness of natural-born cult leaders: you get the feeling Oliver Stone and Jim Jones could have swapped messianic places and no one would be the wiser. Sam Peckinpah was another one: with his self-mythologizing bravado and chaotic perfectionism, he was all too willing to live up (or down) to the archetype of the beautiful genius/loser, the artist whose integrity dooms him in a corrupt system. That's the context of David Weddle's reverential, spectacularly inane "If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!", a biography that caters to the florid legend. Here's a typical enough passage, in which Peckinpah encounters a wizened John Ford after the release of Ride the High Country: "It couldn't have been easy for the old auteur, for he must have sensed that more than a handshake had been exchanged. The baton had been passed from one generation to the next, and the new decade would belong to the younger man."

Prose like that makes you want to grab that baton and, as Peckinpah once said of director Peter Bogdanovich, hit the author "right in the fucking mouth." Everything in the book is structured around that mindless rite-of-passage notion--as though the ordeals of making each movie and unmaking each relationship were initiations into the great secrets of manhood. Out of this phallic fire is immortality forged, like the time Sam expressed his displeasure at some out-of-focus rushes from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid by getting up, unzipping, and pissing a large yellow S on the screen. That's about how Weddle sees Peckinpah's blind date with destiny--his territorial imperative writ in his own bodily fluids, his imprimatur left on cinema like some cosmic mark of Zorro.

It's easy enough to see how Peckinpah tempts such macho-romantic malarkey: he affected the gasbag sagacity of a low-rent Norman Mailercum-Norman Bates. (Though he could be funnier than Weddle lets on: "I consider myself one of the foremost male Lesbians in the world," he declared amid the furor over his rape-and-pillage paean Straw Dogs. He and Camille Paglia would have made a great vaudeville act.) Peckinpah wasn't a great director because of his half-baked ideas and drunken posturing, however, but despite them. His gift wasn't for thesis but for antithesis, for turning his wishes and fears inside out, making the convulsive into personal rapture: Jean Cocteau with a machine gun.

"If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!" treats Peckinpah's films as though Weddle had taken his title for a motto. Anything that's paradoxical, unsettling, and alive in them he levels, until he has returned every image and gesture to the dust of convention from which they were torn. Of the black hole of a massacre that finishes The Wild Bunch, he writes that the killers "stand up for something noble . . . a dream of a better world." Why certainly, and those buzzards that feed on the corpses are bluebirds of happiness. Weddle's torturous rationalization of the vastly inferior Straw Dogs--as "misunderstood" personal statement rather than smooth commercial sadism--is just as fatuous. In detailing the even thicker atmosphere of degradation behind the scenes, he totally misses the film's one interesting irony: on- and offscreen in Straw Dogs, Peckinpah ruthlessly employed all the devious, manipulative mind games and petty tricks he professed to deplore in women.

You can learn infinitely more about the films and the man himself (not to mention the world at large) from Pauline Kael's terse "Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah" than from Weddle's entire bloated tome. But then, his book is really about a cultist's longing--the dream of being admitted into the inner circle. Weddle belatedly joins the hangers-on who got their kicks serving the master, basking in his importance and reveling in the boozing, broad-nailing exploits of a two-fisted auteur who died with his shit-kicking boots on.

Howard Hampton writes for Film Comment and is working on Badlands: A Psychogeography of the Reagan Era for Harvard University Press.