Benedito Dias Rodrigues If you want a classic western avoid this picture,it's about life....l watched this movie in late 90' and l found it odd,around 2007 l watched one more time and increase the grade to 7/10 now on third revisiting is 8/10. This movie is totally unique since the beginning to end which dropped a little,but all characters are colorful,all situation are interesting... fantastic approach to freedom,the loneliness....living one step at the time,perhaps to understand this movie you have to watch many times...with a hiatus between...Amazing and unique movie as Peckinpah!!

SnoopyStyle Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) gets double-crossed and left with nothing in the middle of the desert. He manages to find water in a waterless stretch between two stagecoach stops. He starts charging a dime for the water. After Rev. Joshua Duncan Sloane (David Warner) makes a threat to spread the news, Cable goes to town to buy up the 2 acres. He falls for local prostitute Hildy (Stella Stevens).Sam Peckinpah is trying more to make a comedy than a violent thriller. The comedy is pretty broad. It's a wild west of sometimes slapstick level. Robards is intriguing but maybe not as a comedian. The story meanders a bit. It is not Peckinpah's normal pathway and it shows a little. It has some fun moments but I wouldn't say any of this is a big laugh. It is still interesting.

bobsgrock In direct response to the controversy which erupted over the unprecedented violence and gritty realism of The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah did what many of the greatest American filmmakers have done over the years. His next project would end up being almost intentionally counter to the previous film.The result was The Ballad of Cable Hogue, a small-scale, intimate tale that is equal parts a nostalgic look back to the Old West and a tribute to the kind of man capable of surviving and thriving in such an environment. Jason Robards is touching and firm as the title character, left for dead in the prologue but able to fight through his misfortunes and create his own oasis. Along the way, he encounters a most unusual and shifty man of the cloth and a prostitute with a heart of gold. Stella Stevens is really wonderful as Hildy, one of the best examples of this most ancient of Hollywood screenplay clichés. Her romance with Hogue is both sincere and sad as Peckinpah uses this as a template for how the romantic West quickly found its way into decline and obsolescence.Peckinpah may have gotten a lot of flack for The Wild Bunch but this film received almost just as much criticism, ironically for being almost exactly not what he had come to be known for. However, some forty years later, Peckinpah's true vision of men unable to conform to the regularities of society shines through. Gorgeous photography, solid acting, a beautiful score and themes of survival and memory point to this as one of the most brutal Western director's gentlest and personal triumphs.

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.