Peckinpah’s unexpected follow-up to The Wild Bunch was this wonderfully loose-limbed, cockeyed comedic Western, a winning blend of slapstick and frontier myth. Left to die in the desert by his shiftless compatriots, illiterate man-child Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) gets the last laugh when he discovers water and sets about establishing a homestead on a remote sliver of land—abetted by a rapscallion preacher (David Warner) and a kind-hearted prostitute (a sensational Stella Stevens). Peckinpah’s warmest and most charming movie begins as a rollicking pioneer comedy and gradually develops into a bittersweet, disarmingly moving fable about the decline of the American West.