Noon Wine

Sam Peckinpah will probably never earn the accolades of peers like John Ford or Howard Hawks, pioneers in the western genre who left a cinematic trail of wagon ruts every other filmmaker has been forced to follow.  His attempts at fitting into the conventional idea of Hollywood filmmaking (Major Dundee, The Cincinnati Kid) resulted in controversy, dismissal and eventual blacklisting.  He’d win back redemption and then some with 1969’s The Wild Bunch, kickstarting an equally argumentative second career, but the project that got him back into the industry’s good graces was an hour-long TV gig for ABC Stage 67 entitled Noon Wine.  

Based on a short novel by Katherine Anne Porter, the story follows a layabout dairy farmer, Royal Thompson (Jason Robards) and his long-suffering wife Ellie (Olivia de Havilland) whose marriage gets thrown an unexpected lifeline in the form of Olaf Helton, a mysterious drifter whose work ethic soon has the farm profitable again.  But just as things are looking up, a bounty hunter arrives insisting Olaf return to the mental institution he simply walked away from three years earlier.  Thompson comes to his employee’s defense - perhaps for his own reasons – with an act of violence that puts his own family in jeopardy.

Noon Wine is probably only meant for Peckinpah completists.  It leans hard into theatrical tendencies, with both Robards and de Havilland playing to the cheap seats.  Every line of dialogue is shouted at maximum volume.  When Ben Johnson finally shows up as a suspicious sheriff, the audience appreciates his understated, mellow performance all the more.  Peckinpah likely gave his leads plenty of free reign to avoid making waves but the end result is more stagey than cinematic.

Shot mostly on video with some establishing shots captured on film, Peckinpah’s overall goal here seems to be just get out of the way and let the story speak for itself.  There’s little visual embellishment beyond a few superimpositions and the director’s rebirth as a grand scale provocateur is still a couple years off.  Noon Winesimply presents us with man proving he can be a professional on set, learning the rules before he breaks them and paying his dues.  

Unearthed from the archives a few years ago as an extra on Twilight Time’s release of Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite, that out-of-print Blu-ray opened the door for Liberation Hall’s new DVD presentation.  Don’t expect much PQ-wise as video tape can’t be restored in the same way as film.  But there is one heck of an entertaining perk:  besides the commercial free version you can watch the show as it originally aired, corny sewing machine ads and all!