With the numerous special editions, extended versions and director’s cuts that bear his name, we hear a lot about the hindrances various studios placed on the maverick vision of one Sam Peckinpah. David Weddle’s book, If They Move... Kill ’Em!, also captures the hindrances Peckinpah himself placed on an otherwise unique and energetic talent: his drinking, his uncompromising nature, and the vindictiveness that regularly caused him to lose focus on the bigger picture of what he was trying to achieve.

This impressive biography demonstrates that, while Peckinpah’s often violent and conflicted films were clearly made up of their director’s insecurities and obsessions, they were also brought in the world in spite of them. The gung-ho title chosen by Weddle contrasts lingeringly with the portrait of Peckinpah eventually developed. Sure, we hear all about Peckinpah the iconoclast, the intensely creative tough-guy who lived a life as unpredictable as one of his trigger-happy hardmen. However, Weddle’s blunt insight and astonishing range of sources (including discussions with James Coburn, Martin Scorsese, Roger Ebert, Charleton Heston, Ernest Borginine, and a throng of surviving Peckinpahs) means we’re also privy to a different side of “Bloody Sam.” We see Peckinpah the bitter child, the hopeless romantic whose serial seduction of women is thoroughly eclipsed by his insecurity around them, the deluded father and (we suspect hardest for Weddle to concede) the squandered talent. Weddle carefully explains these personae while keeping pop-psychoanalytic speculation on Peckinpah’s emotional landscape to a pleasingly minimum. Anecdotes of the director’s turbulent family life and professional relationships alone communicate a vision of an intense, troubled man capable of both a childlike love and generosity, and thoughtless cruelty.

This is a long and compulsively detailed book, and in several sections Weddle’s prose slips out of gear, stalling between the momentous, novelistic cadences of its opening chapter and those of the perfunctory fact-checker, as the author quibbles over details he is at pains to render interesting. The sense of being bogged down in detail rather than being treated to it, however, is alleviated by the halfway point as Weddle recounts the astonishing studio wars fought over many of Peckinpah’s later productions—wars the director fought in tandem with those he waged against himself and many of those who cared for him. Additionally, Weddle gleefully captures the excitement of 60s and 70s film-making culture in a number of wonderful anecdotes, including one in which Marie Peckinpah, first of the Peckinpah wives, slams the phone down on Marlon Brando believing it was her husband doing one of his impressions.

As Weddle’s description of this troubled visionary of the Western becomes more distinct, the clearer it becomes that the author had a task on his hands negotiating the tension between keeping the book’s central character both likable enough to compel us from page to page, and composing an accurate historical and psychological portrait. Somewhat questionable, however, is his willingness to downplay Peckinpah’s extra-marital escapades and general callousness: for example, one of the married director’s frequent brothel visits is romanticized when, on one occasion, his normally standoffish father happens along for the ride.

Perhaps Weddle is merely trying to convey some of the director’s own jaunting spirits at a given moment. However, this “boys will be boys” biographical blind-eye contrasts with his acidic and apparently objective cataloging of the failings of the women in Peckinpah’s life—particularly his mother and his sister. A dubious brood at best, the Peckinpah women are narcissists, headcases and possessive furies, always settling some otherwise long-forgotten score. Peckinpah’s indiscretions—even his ferocious drinking problem—never receive this kind of venom. The cataloging of affairs, outbursts, and the first wife he veritably trod underfoot, comes tinged with the apologist’s appeal to cultural relativism. As Peckinpah’s long-suffering first wife is all but forced into a relationship outside the orbit of her volatile husband, Weddle offers that “With all his own infidelities, [Sam] of course had no right to feel victimized. It was the hypocrisy of a chauvinist, a hypocrisy he and generations of American men both before and after him shared” (190). One gets the impression that when Sam’s women are vile it is individual malice, though when the man himself is reprehensible it is part of some involuntary “cultural shame.”

Weddle’s excitement for Peckinpah’s too infrequently realized creative visions also leads him to speak, perhaps unfairly, in disparaging terms of the so-called “movie brat” generation of Spielberg and Lucas that assumed center stage throughout the 1980s. The blockbuster years may have changed tastes, but they were tastes a boozy, coke-addled Peckinpah was increasingly unable to satisfy as he sent his lead James Coburn out to shoot scenes for him so he could lay sprawled in his trailer with a sinus full of snow.

Overall, however, these are minor blemishes on a remarkable and honest piece of work: Weddle is willing to admit this man’s failings, as both a director and a human being, and it is a more profound admission for his success in communicating Peckinpah’s brilliance for so much of the book.

By If They Move’s conclusion, there is a tendency to feel sorry for the many people in the constellation of this man who, according to one of his enraged producers, “did things that you can never take back” (489). Accompanying this is a tendency to feel David Weddle has produced something special: not only a fascinating read for Peckinpah fans and film buffs alike, but a deeply valuable contribution to the written history of film production and personality.