Peckinpah often referred to The Ballad of Cable Hogue as his personal favorite of all his films. In direct contrast to The Wild Bunch, this film is mostly peaceful, sentimental, and even romantic. It is also Peckinpah's most directly comedic of his films, with several touches of pure slapstick.

The story deals with a grizzled prospector named Cable Hogue (Robards) who is abandoned to die in the desert by his traitorous partners, Taggart and Bowen (Jones & Martin, in roles similar to their sleazy characters in The Wild Bunch). After several days wandering he resigns himself to die, only to discover a hidden spring . Eventually he turns the waterhole into a profitable stopover for the passing stagecoaches.

He meets and soon falls in love with Hildy (Stella Stevens), a prostitute from the nearby town. She attempts to persuade him to leave with her to travel to San Francisco. Cable instead stays on at his desert oasis, planning to eventually run into Taggart and Bowen and "live to spit on their graves."

Eventually, Taggart and Bowen do show up. Cable kills Taggart in self-defense, but decides to let the pleading Bowen live. Hildy returns in an automobile and Cable agrees to leave with her, feeling his vendetta has been completed. Unfortunately, Cable is run over by the car when the brakes fail. He soon dies and is buried in the desert. Hildy, Bowen, and Cable's other friends depart and go their separate ways. The watering station is left abandoned, being now obsolete with the coming of automobiles.

Several things stick out in my mind which make Cable Hogue a remarkable film. The performances by Robards and Stevens are great. Their "Butterfly Morning" duet scene is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful romantic interludes ever filmed. David Warner is also very good as the womanizing Reverend Joshua Sloane. For an actor I usually associate with villainous roles, he comes across as very affable and genuinely good-natured.

The film also benefits greatly from a great score by Jerry Goldsmith and songs by Richard Gillis. Each of the main characters has an accompanying theme: "Tomorrow is the Song I Sing" for Cable, "Butterfly Morning" for Hildy, and "Wait for Me, Sunrise" for Joshua. They're all very pretty songs. The multi-paneled title sequence, with Hogue wandering the desert is certainly one of the most creative in film history. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard and editor Lou Lombardo returned with work that was up to the excellent standard they set in The Wild Bunch.

Like The Wild Bunch, this is a "death of the west" story. Cable clearly embodies many of the elements of the early pioneers of the west. He lives almost entirely off of the land, he detests large cities, and he is a firm beleiver that man is at his best when left unmolested by the government and bureaucracy in general. It is bitterly ironic that his death should be brought about by an automobile, one of the major harbingers of the industrial revolution.

Coming on the heels of The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah showed extreme range as a director who could overpower the viewer with images of violence in one film, and follow it up with unforgettable images of tenderness in his next.