American Myth - The Wild Bunch (1969)

"Give 'em hell!"

The Wild Bunch is the film that John Wayne said killed the old west. And he was right. Roger Ebert called it a masterpiece. And he was right, too. Sam Peckinpah's epic western redefined the genre, and helped revolutionize American cinema. I chose to review this film for two reasons: 1) you can't do a list of westerns and NOT watch a Peckinpah movie and 2) it changed the game forever. There were westerns made in the seventies, hell, even Peckinpah made one (Pat Garret and Billy the Kid), but The Wild Bunch effectively killed the nobility of the genre, and brought an era to a close. There would be westerns made in the eighties, too, but GOOD westerns wouldn't come back into prominence until the nineties. Let's take a look at why.

Summary:

Pike Bishop and his gang are getting old. Robbery is a young man's game, and they are all well past their prime. They robbed a bank in extraordinarily bloody fashion, and came away with only bags full of metal washers. An ex-gang member leads a troupe of railroad-sponsored bounty hunters against them, and chases them into Mexico. There, Pike and the boys get an offer for one last job, and they cannot refuse it. What unfolds is one of the bloodiest, most violent westerns told in its time.

Pros:

Game Changer: This movie's legacy paints it as one of the most violent films of its time. And it is easy to think that hogwash watching through modern eyes. Our movies have out-paced Peckinpah's blood and gore exponentially. BUT, for the time, this movie must have shocked people. There is blood, everywhere, in vivid technicolor. It looks, often, like bright red paint is splattered all over. I got the full context of it after watching a handful of older westerns: people got shot, sure, but blood was RARELY ever seen. Violence was fast and quick, and noble. Not here: the shoot outs are long, complicated, and vicious. Peckinpah and his co-writer, Walon Green, wanted to demystify the west. They wanted to take the veneer off of it. The heroes of this movie are little better than villains, using innocent bystanders as human shields and gleefully emptying their guns at anything that moves. The men hunting them, sponsored by a railroad baron, aren't any better: they set up the trap in the opening scene, only to unleash hell on the innocents of a local town. The Mexican general that the gang works for later in the film are unrepentant killers, rapers, and wardogs. There are no heroes in this movie, only protagonists, and that must have been quite a shock to audiences at the time. It's a shock even now: Peckinpah allows Pike and his men to have a kind of code of honor, but he spares them nothing in showing how violent they are.

Wonderfully Cut: The film is gorgeous to look at: Peckinpah's sense of levels in frame is wonderful. He pops old buildings against hilly terrain and beautifully cloudy blue skies. His film editing, too, was revolutionary for the time. The movie contains some 3,642 editorial cuts. The opening five minutes alone has 325. This level of editing was unheard of at the time, and would cause a ripple through the history of American filmmaking. The movie FEELS like a modern film, because Peckinpah was doing things behind the camera that no one else at the time was doing. Martin Scorsese was invited to a screening, and he was, in his own words, "mesmerized" by it.

Full Of Metaphor and Statement: In the opening scene, a group of children are torturing a scorpion with an army of red ants. This becomes an interesting metaphor in the film: even the mighty, deadly scorpion can be taken down with enough numbers. The lone gunman isn't enough, any more. And when the children tire of their game? They simply cover the whole affair, scorpion, ants and all, with straw and set it on fire. No one gets out of that encounter unscathed. When our heroes head into the final gun fight, they know they are going to die, and they do. But they kill as many as they can before they are through. And after that epic fight? The buzzards come to pick the remains: Peckinpah deftly intercuts the railroad bounty hunters stripping bodies with shots of actual buzzards perched on the ramparts. It is chilling. The modern world has caught up with the west; this film is set in 1913, and it is no longer a world for noble heroes. It is not hard to imagine a similar set up, a decade or two earlier, in the Golden Era of the western, where the heroes walk away from the fight at Agua Verde. But they don't, here. What's even more interesting is that that same group of kids torturing the scorpion, after the shoot out in their town, immediately begin playing shoot-em-up with each other: throwing their friends on the ground and shouting "bang bang bang bang!" It's almost as if Peckinpah is commenting on how children are quickly inured to violence. And how the western itself has done much of that damage. This film feels necessary as a statement: the old west wasn't romantic, and it wasn't full of heroes. It was a deadly time of rotten scoundrels. The genre needed to be burned to the ground, and Peckinpah was the right man to do it.

The Bunch: The cast of this movie are all doing amazing work. William Holden is an excellent gunfighter past his prime, with only horrible memories to keep him awake at night. Ernest Borgnine is his loyal second, and does wonderful work as an outlaw with an honor code. Robert Ryan is excellent as the former outlaw tasked with hunting his friends down: he wants to be with them, to ride with them, but he also can't wash away the bitterness of betrayal: he was caught while Pike got away, and spent some time in the infamous Yuma prison. All of the characters are fleshed out and lived in, and it makes the story breathe. You know you shouldn't root for these people, any of them: Peckinpah spares no sentiment in showing their villainy. But their charisma is what keeps you along for the ride. And that kind of problematic situation makes for wonderful filmmaking. You can't help but walk away from this one a little bit dirty.

Cons:

It's Long: I watched the director's cut, and it clocks in at 145 minutes (that's two hours and twenty five minutes). While it isn't the longest film I've ever seen, it is truly epic in scope. The film moves quickly, and never really drags, but a good argument could be made to cut something like 10-15 minutes of screen time, I think.

In Conclusion:

This western is legendary, from a legendary American filmmaker. Peckinpah would go on to make a few other westerns, but The Wild Bunch would be one of his last, and most lasting, entries in the genre.

Should You Watch It?

Oh yeah. Modern filmmaking owes a great debt of gratitude to Peckinpah's efforts here. This movie changed the genre, but also revolutionized the way films were made.

Miscellany:

- Peckinpah shot 333,000 feet of film on this project.

- The opening bank heist was originally twenty minutes long. It was edited down to FIVE.
- Peckinpah demanded a new kind of squib to be made for the gunshot effects, and had his sound techs make completely new, unique sound effects for the guns in this movie: he wanted the audience to know what it was like to get gunshot.
- Peckinpah ran his crew ragged, to the point where William Holden threatened to walk away due to the director's verbal abuse of crew members. Ernest Borgnine also, at one point, threatened to "beat the shit out of" Peckinpah. 
- In 2007, the American Film Institute listed this film as its 79th Greatest Movie of All Time. 
- The film received two Academy Award nominations: for Best Score and Best Original Screenplay.
- In 1999, the film was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress.