Director Sam Peckinpah, who revolutionized cinema with an alpha male strut that spilled over to his films and characters and was an A-list influence to scores of directors who followed, passed away 30 years ago today.

Cinema had not seen such a spitfire, gritty kind of man as Sam Peckinpah before his films rapidly exploded on screen or in many ways since. Although he wasn’t the first director to infuse a sense of machismo, and not just on the sleeve, but right in the viewers face, a bloody knuckle sandwich to the senses, he remains one of the more well known rebels of Hollywood in an era when studio systems pretty much ruled and dictated final directions. Peckinpah, a tough, hard edged man by nature, had skirmish after skirmish with studios over his final visions, which almost cost him his career. Somehow, however, he didn’t get totally blackballed by the industry, although his reputation was even then, already encased in cement.