The strangest movie I have ever seen: “The Osterman Weekend” and the story behind it.

A while back—perhaps not as long ago as I’d wished—I watched a film I had long been curious about. Though I’d never seen it, I recall reading something years ago about a movie called The Osterman Weekend, a 1980s spy thriller which was director Sam Peckinpah’s last film. Peckinpah is a director whose work I’ve slowly been exploring for the past several years. To call him problematic is something of an understatement. He’s most famous for The Wild Bunch, a picture I detested, but I liked some things about Convoy, which is a wretched but perversely enjoyable film. I’ve never seen Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, despite its unforgettable title, and for a long time I’d never seen The Osterman Weekend. I can’t recall where the article was that I read or who wrote it, but it derided the film as atrocious but also bizarrely fascinating, and more so once you take into account the curious story of how it was made. I am, as you know, a sucker for bad films, so I was naturally curious.

So I watched The Osterman Weekend. I realize this may sound like hyperbole, but it’s the single most bizarre movie I’ve ever seen. Not the worst, but the strangest. It’s odd, perplexing and head-scratching in a much more profound way than are movies whose makers intended them to be odd and perplexing (say, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Mulholland Drive) precisely because the people who made The Osterman Weekend thought they were making a fairly straightforward action thriller movie. It’s also a terrible piece of cinema in its own right, but that’s almost beside the point. A film this unusual is definitely worth talking about, which is why I decided to do a column on it.