Noon Wine

A dark tragedy about a farmer's futile act of homicide that leads to his own suicide, the story takes place on a small dairy farm in southern Texas during the 1890s.

Even though the wage is far below what Helton reports having earned in the wheat fields of North Dakota, he proves himself to be an efficient farmhand, transforming Thompson's run-down dairy farm into a profitable enterprise.

The Thompsons come to view Helton as one of the family; his traits of rarely speaking, never smiling, and continually playing the same song on his precious harmonica are oddities that they simply accept.

Hatch eventually reveals that he is a bounty hunter, and Helton is an escaped mental patient who must be returned to the asylum.

Thompson impresses on Ellie the importance of her swearing that she witnessed Hatch attacking Helton, and she reluctantly agrees.

He decides to pay a visit on every household of the small farming community, accompanied by the unwilling Ellie, in an attempt to regain his reputation.

Literary scholars view the tragic events in Noon Wine as an allusion to the Greek structure of dramatic tragedy, in which a hero suffers a terrible fate caused by his/her own self.

The drama starred Beulah Bondi and John Beal as the Thompsons and was instrumental in the series winning a Peabody Award that year.

At the time, Peckinpah was a Hollywood outcast following the troubled production Major Dundee (1965) and his firing from the set of The Cincinnati Kid (1965).

He caught a lucky break when producer Daniel Melnick needed a writer and director to adapt Porter's short novel for television.

Melnick was a big fan of Peckinpah's television series The Westerner and his 1962 film Ride the High Country, and had heard the director had been unfairly fired from The Cincinnati Kid.

[4] Robards would keep a personal copy of the film in his private collection for years as he considered the project to be one of his most satisfying professional experiences.

A rare film, which, for almost half a century, could only be viewed at the Library of Congress and the Museum of Broadcasting,[5] Noon Wine finally reached home viewers in the summer of 2014 via limited Blu-ray release on the Twilight Time label.

[6] Peckinpah's adaptation of Noon Wine is today considered one of the director's most intimate works, revealing his dramatic potential and artistic depth.

[9] The Western-Drama starred Fred Ward, Stellan Skarsgård, Pat Hingle, Lise Hilboldt, Jon Cryer and Roberts Blossom.