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148: Sam Peckinpah: Junior Bonner (with Brian Abrams) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-09-25 16:18:42
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2026-06
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Content

The writer Brian Abrams, author of the new book "You Talkin' to Me?”: The Definitive Guide to Iconic Movie Quotes, joins me from New York City to discuss Sam Peckinpah and his underrated 1972 rodeo drama Junior Bonner starring Steve McQueen and Joe Don Baker.

Right after Peckinpah wrapped on his controversial Straw Dogs in England, he jumped into production on Junior Bonner, a small-stakes character study about an aging rodeo rider (McQueen) who returns to his hometown of Prescott, Arizona to compete for one more victory and to reconnect with his family, including his oafish brother, local real estate developer Curly (Baker) and his estranged parents (Robert Preston and Ida Lupino). It’s also the story of the landscape of the American West giving way to the suburban sprawl and exploitation of the modern world, literally being bulldozed all around the Bonner family. As Junior’s rodeo star father Ace asks: “If this world’s all about winners, what’s for the losers?”

Dismissed in its day, and somewhat of an outlier in Peckinpah’s run of action films in the 1970s, time has been kind to Junior Bonner, which can be appreciated now as a Hangout Movie, three days in the life of an aging rodeo star and a fading way of life, vividly brought to life by Peckinpah and his cast.

Plus we discuss Brian’s new book, which looks into the origins of hundreds of classic movie lines across American film history, how some lines have entered the lexicon and live on in the culture, and the movie quotes we each have rolling around in our heads.

Follow Brian Abrams on Twitter.

Brian’s book "You Talkin' to Me?”: The Definitive Guide to Iconic Movie Quotes is now available.

Trailer for Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah, 1972)

Music video for “Too Late For Goodbyes”, Julian Lennon (directed by Sam Peckinpah, 1984)

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Comments

Chris

Underrated film from one of the most fascinating American directors of all time! Would love to hear JFP cover more Peckinpah

Aden Jordan

Marc Eliot’s book on McQueen is very informative and so is Neil Adams McQueen’s memoir. W.K. Stratton’s book on “The Wild Bunch” also serves as a solid Peckinpah bio.

Aromal Ray Donovan
>>118334990

Would love to hear one on The Killer Elite. Could be about CIA dirty ops/private contractors, mainstream movies use of martial arts, Peckinpah's take on disability, and why it's PG to show in close up massive blood squibs coming out of both sides of a head at once. Pure 70s.

Jesper Ohlsson

...the "I guess I'm always angry, captain" hulk quote reminds me of a critique of early bad attempts at levity-writing for video games, where the player is forced to do something tedious or stale (a block puzzle, or whatever), and someone quips about it being tedious and uncreative. It got some praise early on for being "humourously meta", but it didn't take long for most of the video game press to (correctly) point out that "underlining that what you're doing sucks doesn't make what you're doing suck any less". It feels somewhat similar to the "isn't this quite humorously irreverent, and even meta, if we let the Hulk good-naturedly lampshade how one-dimensional he is?". ...right, but you're still "doing it". Doing a "boy, isn't all this a little silly" is fine, but then don't get upset if I don't find it emotional when the raccoon didn't find the blue crystal so he could save his sister in the other realm an hour later (but then he found the purple gem, which balanced the continuum, so it all turned out ok). "thanks, it's Versayce" is in a pretty silly movie, but it's also about "something". Riffing on "ooh boy, I guess here we go again, saving the world" isn't about anything other than that you're mildly embarassed about these movies having brute-forced themselves into an outsized cultural position, to the degree that they have to fill the function for all the movies they smothered along the way. Yeah, it's embarassing that Elizabeth Olsen is a stand-in for post-partum depression or whatever, in between destroying cities in Eddie Murphy's old red leather get-up. But that's something *you* created. If you don't want to feel sheepish about your own product, then you could just not do it. ..Or at the very least realize that pointing out that something you're doing is garbage doesn't make what you're actually doing less garbage.