Rugged prospector Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) is double-crossed and abandoned in the desert without water by his two partners, but an entrepreneurial opportunity arises when he finds an underground spring in just the right spot for a much-needed rest stop on the local stagecoach line.
This elegy for the Old West is a beautifully crafted and very funny film. Like director Sam Peckinpah’s earlier and more explicitly violent The Wild Bunch (1969), it leaves an audience with nostalgic pangs for a lifestyle that perhaps only existed in motion pictures.
Tender and ironic by turns, it contains marvellous performances from a whimsical Robards (arguably a career best) as an itinerant prospector who “found water where it wasn’t” and sexy Stella Stevens (definitely a career best) as Hildy, a hooker from the nearest town who becomes his lady.
Hogue has everything going his way until the advent of the automobile ends the era of the stagecoach.
The film was severely truncated for release in Britain, where it ignominiously supported The Alf Garnett Saga, but the fabulous two-hour version is sublime.
Cable Hogue
Jason Robards
Hildy
Stella Stevens
Joshua
David Warner
Bowen
Strother Martin
Ben
Slim Pickens
Taggart
L Q Jones
Cushing
Peter Whitney
Quittner
R G Armstrong
Clete
Gene Evans
Jensen
William Mims
Mrs Jensen
Kathleen Freeman
Claudia
Susan O’Connell
Director
Sam Peckinpah
