I’ve seen -The Losers (1963) and also -Pericles on 31st Street (1962), good stuff from Sammy.
Nice - both from the same “Dick Powell Theater”. Where did you get to see them - old TV recordings?
From a copied disc that a friend got from a torrent site.
Just been reading about Convoy, and never knew till now James Coburn was the second unit director, interesting stuff !
But only for some later parts of the shooting.
I think he is mentioned in the closing credits though.
I wish Peckinpah’s original rough cut had survived in some form or another. Apparently it was far better than what was released (which is actually surprisingly entertaining). At least with “The Osterman Weekend” we can still see the “Peckinpah cut” albeit in terrible quality. Maybe one day someone will find it stored in a vault somewhere or even in someone’s home…
In David Weddle’s Peckinpah biography?
Coburn is credited as second unit director (together with Walter Kelley). Weddle writes that “Peckinpah read the Convoy script through a fog of coke and booze. […] Out on the highways, […] the logistics overwhelmed him. Stoned out of his mind, he contradicted himself constantly. The coke-fed paranoia so overwhelmed him that he spent more and more time hiding in his trailer.” And, quoting long-time Peckinpah collaborator and partner Katy Haber: “‘Sam had brought James Coburn onto the picture as a second unit director […] because Jimmy wanted to get his DGA [Directors Guild of America] card. Jimmy ended up directing scenes with the principal actors; so did Walter Kelley, and so did I. We had to because Sam was dropping the ball.’” (David Weddle, “If They Move … Kill ’Em!” The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah, New York: Grove Press, 2001 [1994], pp. 514–515)
As a teenager, in the early 1980s, I loved Convoy. Today, I still think it’s better than its very negative critical assessment would indicate. Film scholar Stephen Prince in particular dismisses the film completely. In his Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999 [1998]), he disparages Convoy as an “embarrassment” (p. 6) and a “sorry spectacle” (p. 155): “[…] Peckinpah’s agreement to do the film was widely perceived as a terminal error and further proof of a career beyond salvage” (p. 216). And in his “Introduction: Sam Peckinpah, Savage Poet of American Cinema” (in Stephen Prince [ed.], Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1998], pp. 1–36), he states that Peckinpah’s films after Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) “achieve only fitful moments of narrative coherence and stylistic grace, and they collectively demonstrate Peckinpah’s rapid artistic decline and failure to sustain a career as a major American director” (p. 30).
No, just some web pages about Convoy and the films of the lates 70’s that tended to have trucks, cars etc as stars.
It is quite interesting what producer Michael Deeley writes in his book. One chapter is dedicated to Convoy. Peckinpah was a real pain in the ass on the set, and sometimes out of his mind due to his heavy cocaine abuse.
Actually it is a wonder how good and coherent Convoy looks. The film contains several excellent scenes and is highly underrated.
But I’m not sure if a Peckinpah version wouldn’t be a little mess, considering his ambivalent attitude towards the film’s content.
That seems to be the general consensus among the “Peckinpah scholars” and I couldn’t disagree more: “Cross of Iron” arguably represents the zenith of Peckinpah’s career (it is my personal favorite); “The Killer Elite” would have been great had it not been ruined by all the martial arts nonsense (the first half an hour or so is still excellent); the director’s cut of “The Osterman Weekend” is great and far better than the theatrical version; “Convoy” is not really a Peckinpah film given how it was completely taken away from him (there are still occasional flickers) and yet it still remains surprisingly entertaining.
It is a Peckinpah film. He changed a lot in the script, and turned it into a typical Peckinpah movie. Everything is there, only a bit lighter, without blood, and the violence destroys vehicles instead of bodies.
For me Convoy is a fitting end for 10 years of making films about outsiders fighting against an equalizing society. Just like TWB 10 years earlier it ends with a laughter. This time the Peckinpah outsider survives, but before he lost his game, and his last death seeking attack is as great as the bunch’s final walk, Billy’s smiling expectation of Garrett’s bullet or Steiner and his men running into the own gunfire.
There is only one Peckinpah that stands out for me…‘THE WILD BUNCH’…
So many great actors (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones), and a scutch of classic lines, that remain in the memory…
Pike Bishop (Holden): “We’re not gonna get rid of anybody! We’re gonna stick together, just like it used to be! When you side with a man, you stay with him! And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal, you’re finished! *We’re finished! All of us!”
Pike Bishop: “If they move, kill 'em!”
Pike Bishop: “Come on, yer lazy bastard!”
Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins) “Well, how’d you like to kiss my sister’s black cat’s ass?”
Its one of his best for me. Wish he had done more war films.
He did with Major Dundee.
I should have said more second world war two films 
Whatever the case, the version of “Convoy” that was released was undoubtedly not as good as what was shown to a few lucky individuals as a pre-release cut where at least Peckinpah was still at the reins.
Yeh - “Cross of Iron” is a staggeringly good film. I can only put the common criticism leveled by American reviewers as a case of reviewers just following each other without properly appraising the film. In Europe, it seems the reception was rather more favorable - and rightly so.
That’s a surprise, I guess most people would pick as their favorite Peckinpah film one of his Westerns. I re-watched Cross of Iron yesterday, and yes, I agree, it’s a fine film indeed, much better than I had remembered it. Of course, you have to be willing to accept that – some – Wehrmacht soldiers are depicted in an ultimately heroic way, basically a WWII Wild Bunch. When my father, who turned ninety-four this year and had the misfortune to be conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1941 and sent off to the Eastern Front the following year, saw the film in 1977, I remember that he dismissed it as a work of pure fiction. As such, it is an entertaining, well-made war-adventure movie, whose homosexual subtext(s) would be worthy of further discussion.