Control Nathan Rabin #76 The Killer Elite (1975)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Alternately, you could follow in the footsteps of two kind, incredibly appreciated patrons and have me watch and then write about a filmmaker or actor’s entire filmography.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last eight months or so with the filmography of “Bloody” Sam Peckinpah, the manly man behind such masterpieces of machismo as The Wild Bunch. And I recently began a jaunt through the films of David Bowie for another Patreon benefactor as well. 

It saddens me to say that the end is in sight for my journey through Peckinpah’s filmography. After this, all that’s left is Cross of Iron, Peckinpah’s war movie, Convoy, the feature film adaptation of the C.W McCall trucker song and then finally his poorly received 1983 cinematic swan song, the Richard Ludlam adaptation The Osterman Weekend. 

By the final decade of his career as a film director, Peckinpah’s bad reputation as a belligerent, unprofessional, woman-hating alcoholic had negatively affected his career, as did the often modest to meager box office grosses of his films. That Convoy was the legendary filmmaker’s all-time top grossing film says much about how his films were received by audiences at the time. 

Once upon a time Peckinpah would have had had the power and leverage to coldly reject hot new cinematic fads as beneath an artist of his stature. By the 1970s, however, his star had fallen far enough that he found himself saying yes to then-super-trendy ninjas and shit in the otherwise emotionally grounded 1975 spy vs. spy thriller The Killer Elite and in 1978 decided to lend his time and energy and talent to Convoy, a gimmicky new movie rooted in the then-smoking hot CB radio fad and a novelty trucker song by one hit wonder C.W McCall. 

I like to imagine an alternate universe where Bloody Sam took a little better care of himself, or any care of himself, for that matter, and managed to live long enough to be reduced to directing opportunistic breakdancing and Lambada exploitation movies with his characteristic grit and uniquely brutal understanding of the violent,  fundamentally animalistic nature of mankind. 

I CAAN do kung-fu! #Laffs #Jokes #Fun

I was NOT expecting there to be motherfucking ninjas in The Killer Elite even though I do vaguely remember a commenter mentioning them as one of the movie’s more unique features. Given the nature of ninjas, you should NEVER see them coming, in movies but in real life especially. They should always be stealthy as shit. You’re sitting there, minding your own business and then BOOM, sneak ninja attack. 

Some movies, however, flagrantly broadcast the presence of ninjas. To use context clues, the motion picture 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain, for example, involves multiple ninjas, congregating at a place called Mega Mountain at noon. 

But I did not expect, for example, recent My World of Flops Case File Robocop 3 to prominently feature ninja terminators. I consequently was overjoyed by the inclusion of ninja shit just as my enjoyment of The Killer Elite spiked once I realized that it was the one Peckinpah movie prominently featuring martial arts. 

Mamma mia!

To be fair, for much of its duration, The Killer Elite gives little indication that it will involve ninja shit. It begins on a decidedly non-ninja note, with best friends Mike Locken (James Caan) and George Hansen (Robert Duvall, with a neckerchief) pulling off a job for the oily private intelligence agency they both work for. 

Then George betrays his longtime colleague and bosom buddy, killing a defector they’re supposed to be protecting before turning the gun on Mike. George leaves his friend to die but he’s a tenacious sort and even though doctors tell Mike he’s doomed to be a pale shadow of the vigorous physical specimen he once was he makes a miraculous recovery out of a stubborn desire to wreak righteous vengeance on his best friend turned worst enemy. 

The Killer Elite devotes a good half hour of its generous 123 minute runtime to its hero’s painful, laborious physical rehabilitation, as he moves slowly but steadily from a place of complete brokenness and physical devastation to one of surprising health and vigor with the help of a whole lot of metal inside his body and martial arts training. 

Peckinpah and screenwriters Marc Norman and Stirling Silliphant, adapting the novel Monkey in the Middle,  stress Mike’s physical fragility, the way the shooting takes almost everything from him, leaving him on death’s door, before he transforms himself into a man of action through sheer force of will. 

Mike gets the opportunity for revenge that is keeping him alive when he accepts an assignment that will pit him directly against George and also some ninjas, because Enter the Dragon was very popular in 1973 and Billy Jack broke all sorts of box-office records so now one of the most prestigious names in Western filmmaking was getting in on the action, albeit in a relatively half-assed, half-hearted fashion. 

In sharp contrast to the Carl Douglas song “Kung-Fu Fighting”, where EVERYBODY was kung-fu fighting, to the point where it became a little bit frightening, not a whole lot of people kung fu fight in The Killer Elite and the ones that do don’t really distinguish themselves. 

In a characteristic representation of the movie’s wishy-washy, passive-aggressive feelings about kind of, sort of, being a martial arts movies with ninjas and shit, late in the film a phalanx of sleek looking ninjas attack our heroes and Jerome, a wiry sharpshooter played by Bo Hopkins obliterates them in a hail of gun fire. 

All the high-flying acrobatics in the world are no match for good old fashioned American firepower. It reminds of the similarly cheeky, similarly crowd-pleasing scene in Punisher: War Zone where a bunch of similarly trendy Parkour enthusiast go flipping and flying and romping about like they’re auditioning for the Olympics and then the Punisher just fucking murders them with a machine gun. 

The Killer Elite intermittently threatens to turn into a martial arts movie but never does. The ninja shit is the sweetener, something for the kids, or whatever, but the meat of The Killer Elite is pure Peckinpah: a gruff, tough and grown-up exploration of aging and mortality and communities of violent men and the importance of having a moral code In an amoral world. 

Because the betrayal happens so early, Caan and Duvall don’t have many scenes together but they have such potent, unforced chemistry that when one sells out that longtime friendship for a little bit of money it registers emotionally in a big way. These are men who have fought together, who have probably killed together, yet money is all it takes to get one man to turn Judas on his brother. 

Peckinpah’s unique genius for bringing out the best in some of our greatest character actors is wonderfully in evidence here. Grasping nervously at his hat, Burt Young steals the film as Mac, a wheelman who gave up the spy business for something quaint and domestic but is pulled back into the spy business when Mike, his old friend strides back into his life on a quest for righteous vengeance. 

Young suggests what would happen if Popeye’s friend Wimpy was a fire hydrant-shaped mafia thug with the air of a sweaty, lumbering lummox but a surprisingly complex inner life. He may be a supporting character in an action movie, but Young gives Mac more depth, pathos and layers than the protagonists in ninety percent of dramas. 

Bo Hopkins is similarly typecast to perfection as Jerome, a crack shot who joins Mike and Mac as they prepare to take on their old friend and colleague. Like most of the live-wire, wildcard maniacs Hopkins has played, he seems perpetually on the verge of popping off but his professionalism keeps in check his clear desire to kill people if afforded the opportunity. And of course old pros Gig Young and Arthur Hill are tart and terrific as oily, pragmatic veteran private spies whose motivations are most assuredly not to be trusted. 

The Killer Elite is about old pros in the killing business whose loyalties can be bought, along with their souls if the price and the buyer is right that feels like gun-for-hire work from one of the true auteurs of Western filmmaking, particularly after the messily, fascinatingly personal Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. 

That’s okay. Not everything has to be an X-ray of its creators’ soul or a magnum opus. When he made The Killer Elite towards what he must have realized was the end of his career, Peckinpah was an old pro notorious for his lack of professionalism, for often being too drunk to work but The Killer Elite is distinguished by its professionalism, by the experience and care and technique Peckinpah brought to the film. 

Oh, and ninjas. It’s also distinguished by the presence of ninjas, but mainly by the craftsmanship the legendary filmmaker brings to this eminently watchable sleeper. 

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