Our first image is of a lizard sunning itself on a desert rock, its repose disturbed by the shadow of a man approaching from off screen. “Sorry, old timer,” the man tells the lizard softly in close-up, “but you’re only part poison, and I’m hungry for meat. Thirsty, too.” Peckinpah is establishing the situation in progress, as well as a central character innately gentle enough to apologize in hunger to the creature whose life he must take to sustain his own. (Crawford/Penney’s undated draft contains no dialogue before the lizard is killed.) But in a medium two-shot of kneeling man and lizard, Peckinpah shows the character draw his knife from a sheath hanging on his hip, just where the typical Western character would wear a gun belt (as both Taggart and Bowen do). Cable Hogue will demonstrate proficiency with rifles, but killing men is not a way of life for him, and throughout this film, Hogue significantly will never touch a pistol (except in one sequence to be discussed later, which Peckinpah shot but was right to eliminate).
For all the recurrence of Peckinpah protagonists suffering betrayals, none of his other films actually begins with such an event, which makes the marvelous Cable Hogue main-title sequence even more striking for its context. The director spins us unprepared from Hogue’s anguish into a delightful, visually clever split-screen montage, with the image frequently dividing into halves (horizontal or vertical), quadrants, and other fractions equal or unequal, depicting Hogue’s desert ordeal in multiple simultaneous images while saving or creating one blank screen area at a time to display credits.
After the bleak opening, the entry of an upbeat song on the soundtrack is almost never expected (despite the film’s title containing the word “Ballad”). But with the delayed main title and split-screens begins “Tomorrow Is the Song I Sing,” an anthem of optimism and perseverance that will become the film’s musical theme. Jerry Goldsmith’s beautiful melody complements the cheerful lyric (and robust vocal) by Gillis, with toe-tapping accompaniment featuring guitar, autoharp, and upright bass with tambourine strikes in between. The singing pauses only a minute in for Cable Hogue, in full-screen close-up, to offer his first prayer: “Ain’t had no water since yesterday, Lord; gettin’ a little thirsty. Just thought I’d mention it. Amen.” The mood of this song combines with the spirit of the sequence to increase the appeal of both the character and the film for us, creating completely different expectations from the way the story had begun.
After the song ends and toward the close of the title sequence comes Hogue’s collapse, followed by his delayed prayer of submission (“You call it, Lord . . . I’m just plain done in”) and the film’s single most essential shot: the steep-angle crane shot peering down through the sandstorm tempest at the exhausted mortal sprawled below as he croaks “Amen.” A viewer who misses seeing those seventy-seven frames, or fails to link them to the subsequent close-up of Hogue noticing the (off-screen) mud on his shoe, cannot appreciate that nothing is ambiguous, coincidental, or random about the character’s rescue. This first crane shot indicates the will of God to respond to Hogue’s earnest prayer with water. Whether that water had been there from the Beginning or if Hogue truly “found it where it wasn’t” is left to mystery. But each subsequent crane shot will tie the Lord’s presence - or intervention - to on-screen action.
The main titles end with a dissolve to Peckinpah’s credit next to a sleeping Hogue, awakened in the desert morning when his hand slips into his cradled waterhole, before he discovers the road nearby.
(excerpt from the chapter The Ballad of Divine Retribution by Garner Simmons included in Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films
of Sam Peckinpah, 2012,
Southern Illinois University Press, editor Michael Bliss)