Michael Sragow discusses the late, great Sam Peckinpah and finds his imprint on the Coen brothers' violent modern Western, No Country for Old Men. Taking a cue from Paul Seydor, Sragow also links Peckinpah with Norman Mailer "as artists defined by their pursuit of extreme action, their rebellion against official culture and bureaucratized society, and their recognition that the quest for authentic manhood is absolute and never-ending. Their paradoxical linkage of fragility with appetite and strength — so different from the cheap certainty of macho camp — drove Peckinpah to create the most dynamic of all visual lexicons and Mailer to master a dazzling variety of rhetoric in both intimate and epic modes." Although a quick scan of what's playing in theaters today might suggest that neither artist is having much of an influence on current cinema, Sragow believes that "No Country for Old Men renews the legacy of Mailer and Peckinpah, who extended the reach and freedom and redefined the positive and negative limits of the male character in American literature and movies." — Phil Nugent