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Bonner was not Steve’s first choice for his next project. When David Foster bought the rights to the novel The Presbyterian Church Wager, Steve assumed the lead would go to him. Instead, Foster offered it to Warren Beatty, who took it. The film opened that same year with a new title, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and was directed by Robert Altman, hot off his 1970 smash hit M*A*S*H. Steve’s next pick was American Flag, based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, who was also writing the western Joe Kidd for John Sturges (who had managed to bounce back from the debacle of Le Mans and, despite threats from Steve that he would never work again, quickly landed at Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso production company, directing Eastwood in the title role).

Steve hoped that First Artists would produce American Flag, but the company had stumbled out of the gate with a series of flops, including Streisand’s Up the Sandbox, directed by Irvin Kershner, which eventually opened in 1972 and did little at the box office; Newman’s Pocket Money, directed by Stuart Rosenberg, same story; and Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher, ditto again. After these three, First Artists’ board of directors decided to cool it for a while, which ended Steve’s hopes that he could get them to fund American Flag.

Just as he was contemplating which way to go, Sam Peckinpah, the director who had been fired in 1965 from The Cincinnati Kid, struck career gold in 1967 with The Wild Bunch. Originally called The Diamond Story, it was meant to be an ensemble western, to star George Peppard, Charles Bronson, James Brown, Alex Cord, Robert Culp, Sammy Davis Jr., and Steve. Peckinpah had taken it to Warner Bros. and they liked it, except they thought it was too close to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. When it became clear the film couldn’t be released before Butch Cassidy, the studio reconceived it as a group of last-roundup cowboys whose world ends with a bang, not a whimper, and with a new cast that included Edmond O’Brien, William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Strother Martin, and, in the role Peckinpah had originally envisioned for Steve, Ernest Borgnine. Released in 1969, The Wild Bunch was a huge hit and brought Peckinpah back in from the cold. He followed it in 1970 with The Ballad of Cable Hogue, which didn’t do nearly as well, and then rebounded once again with the violent and highly successful 1971 release Straw Dogs, which starred Dustin Hoffman.

After the failure of Peckinpah’s 1970s nonviolent The Ballad of Cable Hogue and the success of Straw Dogs, Peckinpah was hoping to combine elements of the two films into a nonviolent film capable of attracting a wide audience. Junior Bonner was the project, and he wanted Steve to play the title role. With nothing else on the table, Steve took it, grateful that Peckinpah had remembered how Steve had tried to save The Cincinnati Kid for him.

Peckinpah also wanted Gene Hackman to play Steve’s younger brother, but when he couldn’t meet Hackman’s price, Peckinpah hired a far less well-known actor, Joe Don Baker, a year before his star-making turn in Phil Karlson’s Walking Tall, to play Curly, the more practical (and successful) of the two boys. For the role of Ace, Steve’s father, from whom he has been estranged, Peckinpah hired aging stage actor Robert Preston. Steve was concerned about the disparity in their sizes. Preston was a strapping six-footer, and Steve insisted he wear sandals during the scenes they had together. The only significant female role in the film, Junior’s mother, Elvira, estranged from Ace, was played by Ida Lupino. Steve also insisted on doing all his own stunts, and because the budget was so small, no one from ABC chose to notice.

“Sam Peckinpah, boy,” Steve told Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times when the picture was announced. “He and I will be some combination. They say ABC just bought a lot of aspirin!”

The film took seven weeks to shoot on location in Prescott, Arizona, and when it was over, Steve returned to Los Angeles to face an increasingly uncertain future.

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