Sam Peckinpah, Katherine Anne Porter, and Noon Wine.

With so much new fiction appearing in print and online, not to mention the accompanying clamour for attention in publicity and reviews, it can be all too easy to miss out on films and books that, for whatever reason, have fallen out of favour, have never received the critical consideration they deserved, or have otherwise been neglected. Or maybe it’s simply that I haven’t been paying enough attention. In my defense, until recently I had never heard of, much less read, Katherine Anne Porter. I stumbled across the name while reading a piece about Sam Peckinpah, specifically an article about a little-seen TV movie he wrote and directed in the mid-60s, between Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch.

Peckinpah had already been fired from The Cincinnati Kid and was largely considered unhirable until producer Daniel Melnick got the opportunity to adapt a novella called Noon Wine for ABC Stage 67, a series of one-hour movies. Melnick was already a fan of Peckinpah’s early work and offered him the gig. Peckinpah, in turn, was familiar with the novella and its author, Katherine Anne Porter. His adaptation is a remarkably faithful and sympathetic rendering of Porter's novella, which is perhaps unsurprising given his evident feeling for rural American masculine failure.

Mysterious stranger Olaf Helton arrives at protagonist Royal Earle Thompson's struggling Texas dairy farm and transforms it into a thriving enterprise. Bounty hunter Hatch appears with a story about Helton being a murderous lunatic escaped from an asylum in Dakota, and wanting to take the man into custody for the reward. Out of a sense of loyalty to Helton, Thompson defies Hatch, leading to an ambiguous killing, and Thompson's subsequent psychological disintegration. After being cleared of murder, he travels the countryside, obsessively retelling his version of events, having coerced his wife, who didn't witness the killing, into backing him up. He grows increasingly estranged from his family, and ultimately kills himself.

Thompson's particular tragedy, the collapse of a man's idea of himself, sits squarely in Peckinpah territory. Jason Robards plays Thompson with a perfectly rendered ramshackle, self-deceiving dignity. The moral ambiguity of the killing is preserved without softening, and the compulsive retelling sequences carry their full psychological weight. It is a small, quiet, serious piece of work, and the fact that it remains largely unseen is one of those minor injustices that film history specialises in. However, the film was a critical success, with the Hollywood Reporter's John Mahoney calling it "one of the finest hours of many a season, something of a milestone ... and one of the few TV moments which might be termed poetic."

Noon Wine earned Peckinpah nominations from both the writers' and directors' Guild of America for best adaptation and direction. Yet sadly, the ratings for Stage 67 proved disappointing, and relatively few people got to see Noon Wine. According to Peckinpah's biographer, David Weddle, by the mid 1970s, all the master tapes for the Stage 67 show had been destroyed.

Yet despite this, the TV film now ranks among Peckinpah's most intimate works, signaling later films like The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Indeed, the critical acclaim it received opened up a path for his return as a director. It's almost impossible now to envisage the radical innovations of the New Hollywood without Peckinpah's return to major studio filmmaking with his epic revisionist western, The Wild Bunch, and the entire history of the modern action movie would look very different in its absence. And yet, without Noon Wine, it's highly unlikely Peckinpah would have been able to make his bloody, elegiac movie. And as different as the two films may appear on the surface, they share a common directorial vision and thematic focus that showcases Peckinpah's ability to craft narratives that challenge audiences to confront the complexities of morality and violence in human life.

To read my extended review of Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Selected Stories, including Noon Wine, go here.

Peckinpah's adaptation of Noon Wine is available on YouTube here.