Peter G
This film proved to be the most influential WESTERN film of its time despite taking place in 1913. Like Peckinpah's earlier RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY it concerns how the changes in society affect those either reluctant or unwilling to come to terms with what the west has become. How these issues are handled & developed differ slightly in each film. Both though have an elegiac quality regarding the changing times but the ambiance in THE WILD BUNCH, in dealing with more reprehensible characters, is far more bitter & violent. The opening & final scenes illustrate this in a memorable yet disturbing manner. The ant & scorpion scene with the gleeful children in the opening carnage is one example. Most of the cast here have seldom given better portrayals, IMO & Peckinpah & his editor have achieved effects entirely new at the time the film came out & have either influenced or surpassed recent western films. The 1960s proved be the last decade of so many great western films. Peckinpah, Ford's THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE, & Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST lead the way & amazingly enough both Leone & Peckinpah made 2 in the same year!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
11/22/23
Full Review
Matthew B
John Wayne was dismayed by the release of The Wild Bunch, because he thought that it destroyed the myth of the Old West. He was perfectly correct to feel this way. In place of the traditional westerns where even many of the outlaws had their own codes of ethics and standards, we were now entering a world in which there are no more noble men to look up to.
Wayne once refused to carry out a scene in which his character shot a man in the back. In Sam Peckinpah's revisionist western, his outlaws are quite happy to use human shields, and to shoot unarmed civilians, including women. Sam Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch as a reaction against the unreality of the sanitised westerns of his day which glamorised violence while simultaneously being entirely bloodless.
That is not a criticism that could be levelled at The Wild Bunch, which begins and ends with a bloodbath, and features a number of indiscriminate, gory killings caught on camera in highly stylised slow motion shots. Peckinpah deliberately sought to show the ugliness of real violence, and to give audiences a feel of what it was like to be really shot. The movie was intended to show that killing is brutal and not glamorous. Unfortunately, many people drew the opposite conclusion, and the film opened the way for other moviemakers to exploit the public's new found taste for extreme violence.
This is a world in which shootouts are not honourable affairs where both sides wait for the streets to clear before firing on one another. At the start of the movie, a religious procession gets caught in a crossfire between bank robbers and hired mercenaries. Nobody is safe anymore.
Peckinpah may have been influenced by the mood created by the war in Vietnam, where non-combatants were just as likely to be victims as soldiers. This had been true of wars for some time, but the Vietnamese war and all its atrocities were recorded in newspapers and on television in a manner that had not been seen before.
In this misanthropic take on the Old West, there are no longer any heroes, and we have the outlaws on one side, and mercenaries and sadistic Federal Army soldiers on the other. The outlaws that we are asked to identify with are crude men who visit whores, squabble over their takings, threaten to kill one another and gun down anyone who gets in their way.
However we still feel that they are better than the men who hunt them down. Hired by a harsh and unrelenting railroad official, the mercenaries lack any dignity or decency. Watched over by vultures, they squabble over the bodies of the men whom they claim to have killed, knowing that each body carries a reward.
The situation is summarised by a symbolic image at the beginning of the movie. As the outlaws head into town to rob the bank, they pass a group of children who are laughing as they watch a few scorpions being over-ran by ants. Perhaps the children put the scorpions in with the ants. Certainly they decide to top their pleasure by setting the creatures on fire. This is a world where children are becoming desensitised by violence, and it is a young boy who kills an important character at the end of the movie. The story takes place just before World War One when many young people were to be caught up in an unusually vicious conflict.
The Wild Bunch was a remarkable movie for its day. It balanced a more realistic approach to the western with the stylised techniques of moviemaking. The realistic approach can be seen in the amount of bloodletting in the shootouts, and in other little touches. For example, Peckinpah paid careful attention to reproducing how each gun would sound, rather than applying the standard western technique of using one sound so that guns of all varieties sounded the same.
The opening credits pause in artistic freezes that make the character look like drawings. The action scenes are shot with rapid, multi-angle cross-cutting interspersed with occasional slow motion effects. A telephoto lens was used to ensure that both foreground and background were clear.
I have mixed feelings about The Wild Bunch. There is a part of me that sympathises with John Wayne's view. The revisionist and violent westerns of the 1960s did not merely kill off the myth of the Old West. They also helped to kill off the western as a popular mainstream genre. At one time westerns were widely-loved and could be happily watched by the entire family on a wet afternoon.
With the incoming of directors such as Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, westerns became too violent and ugly to allow wider family viewing. The western became an adult genre, but a number of adults were repelled by them too. However this new approach to the subject matter meant that westerns made in the traditional style began to look old and tired. It is hardly surprising that after the 1960s the western ceased to be a major movie genre.
On the other hand, this is not to detract from Peckinpah's achievement. He made a movie that was innovative in both style and content, and offered something that was powerful and thought-provoking.
I wrote a longer appreciation of The Wild Bunch on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2017/10/13/the-wild-bunch-1969/
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
09/28/23
Full Review
Robert R
I'm embarrassed. The score associated with this review should be much higher, but here we are. Let me be clear, I do like "The Wild Bunch" and appreciate everything it is, with its unflinching depiction of violence paving the way for some of cinema's most impactful films and filmmakers. In fact, I'm comfortable saying that the opening and closing gunfights in this are absolutely perfect. Damn near everything between them, however, pales in comparison. I just couldn't find anything to latch on to when it came to these characters, save for maybe Ernest Borgnine's "Dutch Engstrom," probably the only stand-up guy in the whole picture. Everybody else either falls somewhere between stoic blank slate (i.e. William Holden's "Pike Bishop") or literal pile (Jaime Sanchez's "Angel). This hampers the weight of the ending, as well as everything that comes before it. Big hat-in-hand hours here, but it is what it is. Wish I liked this more.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
08/25/23
Full Review
Charles P
I've never been as bowled over by a movie. I couldn't sleep for hours after seeing it in '69 and woke up the next day thinking about it.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
08/21/23
Full Review
Wayne K
The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah's iconic revisionist western, depicts the ending on an era, a time when the gun slingers of the Old West were forced to thrown down their six shooters and ride off into the sunset one final time. At 2 hours and 20+ minutes, it has its long, slow moments that feel like filler between confrontations. Peckinpah's films were never know for their brisk paces, and I imagine this film, if watched back today, will strain the patience of most. Like Bonnie & Clyde 2 years earlier, it's a watershed moment in the depiction of onscreen violence, and some scenes really go balls out when it comes to carnage and body count. The way its edited often obscures what's happening, but that feels like the point. Bloody Sam wanted his audience to feel what it was like to be caught in the middle of a gunfight, your head zipping from left to right, anticipating the next direction from which the next bullet will come. The violence didn't bother me, probably because such acts are commonplace in movies nowadays, but what really resonates is its effects on the eponymous group. When one of the is killed or injured, you're really made to feel it. They're a band of outlaws that often seem on the verge of collapse, but the humour and banter they share keep the audience on their side. There's a lot of moral ambiguity as you'd expected, with no clear goodies or baddies, and that's the way it should be. It's deliberate pacing would make it hard to watch again, but if you wanted to see why Sam Peckinpah's is famous, or perhaps infamous, in the world of cinema, The Wild Bunch is a good place to start.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
06/22/23
Full Review
Jeffrey L
They're murderous, ruthless, brutal, vile.
But they have a code.
A beautiful, extremely violent, epic movie.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
05/30/23
Full Review
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