Touches You

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Blistering performances.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

I was expecting to see a serious western. Cable Hogue does deliver with that aspect, when a down on his luck drifter discovers a water source on a stagecoach route and turns it into a going concern. The movie also depicts the main characters romantic pursuit of a young woman who is looking for a sugar-daddy in order to escape her means of prostitution. Hogue also wants revenge on the two former partners that left him high and dry (literally)...but the movie also has a comedic side to it, very similar to the likes of "Support Your Local Sheriff".An All-Star cast also adds to the viewing experience, and the sexually revealing scenes of Stella Stevens (though portrayed in a comedic way) were actually quite risqué for the time.If you're looking for a gunslinger western...this ain't it. But if you're looking for a interesting story with a great cast and some comedic overtones...then this movie will deliver.

Released in 1970 and directed by Sam Peckinpah, "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" is a quirky Western drama/comedy/romance starring Jason Robards as a grizzled man left to die in the SW desert, but he miraculously finds a spring and starts a way station servicing stagecoach people and other travelers. He befriends a dubious evangelist (David Warner) and falls in love with a local prostitute (Stella Stevens) while hoping for revenge against the men who double-crossed him (Strother Martin & L.Q. Jones). R.G. Armstrong is on hand as a banker.If you're looking for a conventional Western akin to Pechinpah's "Ride the High Country" (1962) or "The Wild Bunch" (1969), look elsewhere because this is a totally offbeat Western. As noted above, it's an eccentric mix of drama, comedy and romance, but such a description doesn't do it justice because it's so much more. Despite its amusing elements, it's a clever commentary on the human condition: The nature of God and man, spirit and flesh, love and sex, vengeance and forgiveness, religion and libertinism. Legalistic types might find it "offensive" and "anti-God," but nothing could be further from the truth. The LORD is all over this movie, despite the characters' overt moral failings or simple ignorance, just as depicted in the bible (the stories of Samson, Rahab and Naomi come to mind). If you can overlook the goofiness, or let it amuse you, this movie is actually profound with riches to mine. My title blurb says it all.The film runs 121 minutes and was shot in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.GRADE: B

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.

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.