BBC2's weekly cinema night. Tonight's programme is the first full-length portrait of controversial director Sam
Peckinpah who died in 1984. His films included The Getaway and Straw Dogs , but he was most closely identified with westerns like The Wild Bunch,
Ride the High Country, Guns in the Afternoon, and Pat Garrett. Combining the intensely violent with the deeply elegiac, Peckinpah did more than anyone to dramatise the death of the west. Actors
Kris Kristofferson , James Coburn , Ali MacGraw , Jason Robards and other collaborators reflect on working with this unique maverick whose own version of his late masterpiece Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid follows this programme. Director Paul Joyce
Series producer Paul Kerr
A Lucida production for BBCtv