Even with two movies expanded to double discs, this collection of Sam Peckinpah Westerns is thinner than you might expect. The Deadly Companions and the recently restored Major Dundee are owned by other studios, but even had Warner Bros. secured the rights, and thrown in the rodeo elegy Junior Bonner to boot, the total would only run to half of Peckinpah's 14-film oeuvre. Encompassing Peckinpah's masterpieces, The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, along with his desert reverie The Ballad of Cable Hogue and his revisionist classic Ride the High Country, The Legendary Westerns Collection contains much of Sam Peckinpah's best -- and, inextricably, some of his worst. But it's worth pointing out that, no matter how much Peckinpah was identified with, and bonded himself to, the Western genre, it was more often a touchstone than a lodestar. He fought its conventions as much as he embraced them, most productively doing both at once.

As early as 1962, the 37-year-old Peckinpah was mourning the death of the old West, even as he questioned its values. In a scene as cutting as anything in John Ford's contemporaneous The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Ride the High Country opens as stolid, law-abiding gunman Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) arrives in a Nevada frontier town. Ambling onto Main Street just ahead of an impending parade, Judd briefly pretends that the crowd has gathered in his honor, until he's shoved out of the way by a galloping camel, then nearly run over by a motorcar.

An aging ex-marshal reduced to babysitting mine-company payrolls, Judd stumbles on his former partner Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), now pimping his trick-shot skills to a traveling carnival. The reunion is bittersweet: McCrea drafts Scott (along with hot-tempered sidekick Ron Starr) to ride shotgun on a payroll run, but leaves no question who's the boss, while Scott plans to talk his old friend into making off with the loot, or kill him if he doesn't comply.

Having spent the previous decade working on TV Westerns (including Gunsmoke), Peckinpah could exploit the genre's history and subvert it at the same time. He knew Western fans would recognize Scott and McCrea as over-the-hill stars reliving their own regrets; there's no missing the resonance when McCrea sighs, "Used to be. We all used to be." But, having cast Scott as the stalwart traditionalist and McCrea as the amoral opportunist, Peckinpah flipped the roles and had both men play against type, coaxing lively performances from actors by then prone to wallowing in their established personae.

With its stolid staging and ponderous score, Ride the High Country is Peckinpah's only classic Western, and you can feel him champing at the bit. He puts less energy into staging an early barroom brawl than he does the shot of Scott and McCrea lifting their glasses the instant before their table is demolished by an unlucky patron. The movie doesn't come alive until it sets its grizzled traditionalists against the anarchic force of the Hammond brothers, a quintet of murderous mountain hicks whose animal appetites eclipse Scott's desire for a golden nest egg. (Among the Hammonds are actors L.Q. Jones and Warren Oates, who would go on to be part of Peckinpah's unofficial stock company.)

Peckinpah took another shot at undermining tradition with the overblown Major Dundee, a subversive cavalry epic whose failure nearly demolished Peckinpah's career -- the first of many brushes with the annihilation Peckinpah eventually courted. Fired off The Cincinnati Kid, Peckinpah dragged his heels back to TV, adapting Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine and mulling over his comeback. The result, of course, was The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah's self-conscious statement on the corruption of American ideals. Drawing on a grand vision that owes more to Visconti than Ford, Peckinpah picked up, at least geographically, where Dundee left off, with Peckinpah's heroes seeking in Mexico a freedom the U.S. no longer allows.

In a sense, the frenzy provoked by The Wild Bunch's slow-motion gun battles has never really died down, a furor that, however in line with Peckinpah's intentions, has permanently overshadowed the rest of his work. Branded "Bloody Sam," Peckinpah was pre-judged by critics, audiences and, most tragically, by Hollywood, who typed him as a director of action and eventually refused to provide the money for him to do anything else. Peckinpah struggled against his reputation as soon as it was established, following The Wild Bunch with the lyrical Cable Hogue, and the vengeance-mad Straw Dogs with the mournful Junior Bonner. But when both movies flopped, Peckinpah's fate was sealed, his decline irreversible.

With its fairy-tale tone and musical interludes, Cable Hogue is Peckinpah's most eccentric movie by a long shot, but its matter-of-fact surrealism rivals Buñuel. As Hogue, a desert-stranded dreamer who finds "water where it wasn't," Jason Robards explicitly channeled Peckinpah (as Warren Oates did to much darker effect in the equally crazed Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), at once lofty idealist and vengeful paranoiac. David Warner's lusty jackleg preacher gives voice to baser appetites, while Stella Stevens' headstrong whore is the most decisive rebuttal to the charge that Peckinpah was an unreflective misogynist. True, the movie makes a crass joke of Stevens' robust cleavage, flashing back to tight shots of her bosom as an awestruck Cable walks away from their first meeting. But considering that Cable has just spent weeks wandering the desert (and, we're led to believe, considerably longer without spiritual sustenance), he could hardly be expected to avert his eyes. That's not to say Cable's leering -- which is, inevitably, the movie's as well -- is excusable, but it is, undeniably, truthful. It also bears noting that, while Peckinpah was hardly the only director to exploit Stevens' stunning physique (seen The Nutty Professor lately?), no one ever made better use of her acting talents. (Stevens, who was stung by the movie's failure to garner her an Oscar nomination, has since taken issue with Peckinpah's manipulative techniques, but a featurette on the DVD gives her the chance to bury the hatchet.) A splendid, stirring allegory whose long-awaited availability shatters one-note conceptions of Peckinpah's talents, Cable Hogue was the film Peckinpah would most often show to student groups in his later years, waging a futile one-man campaign to expand his place in history.

The latest of the box set's films, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid brings the collection full circle. Released in 1973, as Peckinpah was beginning his long, final slide into addictive self-destruction, the film is Peckinpah's last attempt to grapple with the Western, a poignant farewell dance at once chaotic and magisterial. By now Peckinpah, who some associates speculate may have been an undiagnosed schizophrenic, had become obsessed with the theme of the double, explicitly framing lawman Garrett (James Coburn) and fugitive Billy (Kris Kristofferson) as incompatible mirror images unable to coexist or live without each other. Warner Bros.' two-disc edition attempts to reconcile the completeness of the pre-release "director's cut" with the tighter editing of the mutilated theatrical version, creating a Frankenstein cut whose appropriateness may grow as memories of other versions fade. (The pre-release cut is included for comparison, but the theatrical version seems to have been permanently disappeared.) Restored is an awkward but thematically rich scene between Garrett and his Mexican wife, Alma (whose name, of course, means "soul"), revealing that the outlaw-turned-sheriff is literally as well as metaphorically impotent -- a discovery which, in turn, adds poignancy to the movie's final moments, when Garrett waits for Billy to finish making love before gunning him down. With its inordinate sunsets and graceful editing, Pat Garrett is a self-aware parting shot, an unsentimental valentine acknowledging that frontier archetypes have crippled as many men as they've freed -- and often made one the price of the other. In the movie's most haunting scene, aged gunfighter Slim Pickens expires as the sun goes down, his sobbing wife (Peckinpah's mistress Katy Jurado) honoring his unspoken last wish: to die alone. (Against Peckinpah's direct wishes, the new cut restores the vocal to Bob Dylan's underlying "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," unnecessarily gilding the lily.) His solitude is at once tragic and transcendent, and a fitting capstone to Peckinpah's career.

Warner Bros.' characteristically thorough box set includes commentary, a handful of featurettes and the career-spanning documentary Man of the West, although curiously no more than a minute or two of the man himself.