Simply A Masterpiece

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

I can't believe this movie got less than 8 stars.Cable Hogue may have been Jason Robards greatest role.Strother Martin plays his character to perfection,and his character was born to be a villain in this movie.In fact,the lead character in Despicable Me should have been formed around Strother Martin,and should have even looked like him.Martin may have been a B list co-star,but he was a GREAT B list co-star.And Stella Stevens was never better eye candy.Hogue is a miserable human being,with good reason,and in spite of himself he manages to attract this crowd of friends and acquaintances.Of course,a lot of his "friends" are directly related to him owning the only water hole on a stage line,and people with money or influence always have more "friends" than they really want. Very few of them real friends.I just bought one of those new Roxio devices to convert VHS movies into DVD movies,and I will soon be opening the still sealed brand new VHS tape of this movie that I bought several years ago and converting it to DVD. As far as I know this movie still isn't available on DVD.

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.

This movie was a low point for both Jason Robards and Sam Peckinpah. Major plot points are taken directly from Sergio Leone's masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in the West" (released two years earlier and also featuring Robards): A man finds a watering hole is found in the desert, being the only water for many miles in every direction, he plans to build a 'station' around the hole and to ensure there's a love interest, he falls in love with a prostitute. To this add an intemperate preacher, bad music, silly fast action shots, even sillier T&A shots - and there you go. There is little question why it failed at the box office. The real question is "how did it make it that far?".

More then a decade ago, when I was a young cognoscente, not yet in love with Mme. Woolf and her stylish literary modernism, nor with Maria Lazariu—so, more then a decade ago, in '96, as a young dashing cognoscente, I have been charmed by this comedy. I did find it a quite sexy movie, funny and what not. In that delightful uncut version, Mrs. Stevens was indeed a girl to be watched. Otherwise, CABLE is a rather sour satire about a looser—quite like the later ROY BEAN. Mrs. Stevens was the babe of the showers or the bath scenes. No babe looks fairer in such circumstances; a cunning, malicious, inventive blonde, she was typecast as prostitute or as babe who takes a shower. A piece of sour revisionism, HOGUE was turned by Stella into a funny sex comedy and even a kind of a clumsy, oxymoron screwball.She always looked like a naughty but essentially accessible babe. In this sense, very late '60s—mere '70s girl. In a way, she looked too average and common to star in real screwballs (apart from the fact that the genre itself was abolished); but she had the charm to turn a satirical western into some kind of a screwball. She was noticeable.Stella Stevens is for me one of the essential actresses—like Mimi Rogers, Eva Ionesco, Deborah Caprioglio, Rene Russo, Alexandra Moen, María Conchita Alonso, Stefania Sandrelli, Claudia Koll , Serena Grandi , Virginia Madsen, Jodie Foster, Kim Novak, Kim Basinger, Michelle Pfeiffer.