Jason Robards stars as a grizzled prospector who sets up his homestead on a remote sliver of desert amid encroaching modernity in Peckinpah’s charming, bittersweet fable about the decline of the American West.

A man, a severed head, and a sunbaked excursion into delirious ultra-violence: Peckinpah’s grindhouse–meets–art house pulp masterwork stars Warren Oates as a tequila-swilling barroom piano player on a demented road trip through Mexico to fulfill the titular request.

Peckinpah’s rousing ode to the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1970s stars Kris Kristofferson as a laconic big-rig driver who leads an ever-increasing convoy of renegade truckers on a wild, death-defying interstate chase.

In what Orson Welles proclaimed as one of the greatest antiwar films ever made, Peckinpah unleashes some of the most harrowing combat footage ever seen on screen in this senses-shattering World War II drama in which a disillusioned German soldier (James Coburn) and his platoon are dragged through hell on the Russian front.

The remarkably assured feature debut by Peckinpah is a complex psychological Western about an ex-soldier who accidentally kills a young boy in a shoot-out and then accompanies his mother (Maureen O’Hara) through perilous Apache territory to bury the child.

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw play an outlaw couple on a blood-spattered dash across Texas in this taut action joyride, a tour-de-force of sustained suspense based on a novel by pulp poet Jim Thompson.

The director’s gentlest, most relaxed exploration of the changing values of the American West is this reflective, warmhearted character study starring Steve McQueen as an aging rodeo star who returns to his hometown, leaving his shiftless father (Robert Preston) and world-weary mother (Ida Lupino) adrift.

Peckinpah takes a paranoid ’70s conspiracy thriller premise and plays it with a hearty dose of absurdist comedy in this offbeat espionage caper starring James Caan as a secret agent who’s double-crossed by his partner (Robert Duvall).

Charlton Heston delivers a commanding performance as an obsessive cavalry officer on a doomed mission in Mexico in this fascinating bridge between the nostalgic mythmaking of the studio era and the nihilistic fury of The Wild Bunch.

A television journalist (Rutger Hauer) is recruited by the CIA to ensnare three friends believed to be KGB agents. Peckinpah’s final film is a delirious conspiracy thriller set in a world of Cold War paranoia and omnipresent surveillance.

James Coburn stars as the outlaw-turned-lawman hunting Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) in this gorgeously shot, slow-burn elegy for the mythic freedom of the Old West. Bob Dylan (who wrote the music for the film) co-stars as an enigmatic drifter.

Veteran Western stars Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott headline Peckinpah’s second—and arguably first great—film, a magnificent ode to the waning West that points the way toward the revisionist masterpieces to come.

Dustin Hoffman gives one of his finest performances as a mild-mannered mathematician driven to extremes in this harrowing investigation of trauma, violence, and victimization, one of the most controversial films of the 1970s, as well as one of the most frighteningly effective thrillers ever made.

A band of aging outlaws live (and die) by their outdated moral code in Peckinpah’s breakthrough work, which explodes the myth of Old West honor in a blast of bullets and bloodshed and inaugurated a new era of cinematic violence.