Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah

“Peckinpah Today is evidence of Bliss’s reputation as an important Peckinpah scholar, bringing together essays of the most significant writers and researchers on this director and his work. This collection will immediately generate enthusiastic interest, as it covers substantial new ground. Peckinpah specialists, film scholars, fans, and buffs will all welcome this book.”–Gabrielle Murray, senior lecturer in the Media and Cinema Studies program, La Trobe University

“Peckinpah Today: new Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah shows Peckinpah remains an inexhaustible source of fascination for filmmakers and scholars….The material on The Deadly Companions in Garner Simmons’s ‘The Deadly Companions Revisited’ is particularly valuable for its reclamation of the film as an important Peckinpah work. The director himself disowned the movie, and, as a result, many critics have given it scant attention. Yet Simmons and Gerard Camy, in a later essay comparing Companions to The Osterman Weekend, prove the artist is not alwys to be trusted as a judge of his own work; the two pieces devoted to The Deadly Companions prove it to be a significant explication of many of the themes that would obsess Peckinpah for his entire career. The two pieces also serve as bookends for a collection that proves the films of Peckinpah are as vital and thought-provoking today as ever.”–Jim Hemphill, AC Book Reviews

A teacher of writing, literature, and cinema at Virginia Tech, Michael Bliss is the author or editor of eight books of film criticism, including Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah, Doing It Right: The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, and Dreams within a Dream: The Films of Peter Weir.