EDIT, I said “only on Music Babble do I ever see people talking about Peckinpah without acknowledging that it’s one of his two best loved movies.” That’s not true if we mean “mentioning him or any of his movies at all,” but I would stand behind it if we’re talking about any big picture discussions of him I see anywhere. Maybe more people “talk about” Straw Dogs, but it’s equivalent to a discussion about something like Scarface vs. Blowout. What movies do people who are actually fans of the director know, vs. people who like two of his movies but never looked into his filmography? And I did not ever realize that even that was true until people on Music Babble pushed back on me. For a long time I thought that everyone considered Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch to be his two most significant films.

FWIW, it’s his fourth highest rated on They Shoot Pictures, after The Wild Bunch, Alfredo Garcia, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It was his third highest rated when the list debuted.

THE WILD BUNCH (Sam Peckinpah) 59 > 55 > 56 > 58 > 51 > 48 > 48 > 64 > 67 > 71 > 67 > 65 > 62 > 66 > 67 > 69 > 69 > 81 > 80

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (Sam Peckinpah) 346 > 360 > 393 > 385 > 386 > 407 > 426 > 688 > 700 > 540 > 526 > 551 > 552 > 560 > 621 > 653 > 644 > 655 > 645

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (Sam Peckinpah) 737 > 797 > 525 > 496 > 530 > 576 > 570 > 522 > 514 > 488 > 505 > 537 > 515 > 533 > 542 > 542 > 553 > 621 > 636

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (Sam Peckinpah) 413 > 458 > 561 > 571 > 549 > 562 > 548 > 963 > 941 > 0 > 0 > 898 > 901 > 941 > 911 > 951 > 945 > 0 > 968

I see 19 listings there, but I think there might have been fewer than one update a year, so maybe more than 19 years? The boxset of High Country/Wild Bunch/Cable Hogue/Pat Garrett came out in 2005. Also the year that the restored Major Dundee came out. Also the year that I got into Peckinpah. Before that I only knew Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch (and I knew Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was a Bob Dylan album). So my perceptions of how his films were viewed were mostly formed then.

It’s 6th on Letterboxd by “average rating.” It’s seventh by all-time popularity, with The Getaway climbing higher. That was his biggest commercial hit, but do people still care about it all that much? I guess it gets watched for the cast. I remember liking it, but it’s minor Peckinpah. Steve McQueen’s slapping of Sally Struthers was was unscripted.

Like I’m not gonna argue that film critics in the 1980s may have thought it was his best film, but he’s definitely better known for his late 60s/70s stuff now.

That book was just about Westerns, so something like Straw Dogs wouldn’t have mattered. Do you think that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is more famous for reasons other than its soundtrack?