The Wild Bunch (1969)

Very disappointing...

Just perfect...

Fantastic!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Sam Peckinpah's revisionist Western epic is venerated for its astute end-of-an-era nostalgia, the hard-boiled action spectacles, a trenchantly felt brotherly camaraderie and the go-for-broke self-assurance that bluntly depreciates mortality into triviality. Bestriding the frontier between USA and Mexico, THE WILD BUNCH takes place in the early 20th Century when a modern revolution is heralded by the advancement of railroads, a novel machine gun and an archetypal automobile, that soon will drive horse-riding to the verge of obsoleteness. The Mexican desert is still expansive and awe-inspiringly impressive, particularly against the golden rays of a westering sun in a panoptic arrangement, but its inhabitants are dogged by civil wars, and our titular bunch of gringo trigger-happy gunslingers (save for one Mexican, Angel) are aiming for one last bountiful swag before time is running out on their old games. Opening with a grandiosely rowdy shootout when the bunch robs a railroad office, Peckinpah makes on bones about decimating innocent bystanders during the helter-skelter crossfire, and often shows the carnage through children's excited eyes, cross-cut with the shots of a scorpion dropped onto an anthill, devoured by ants, then set on fire altogether by these rubbernecking kids, Peckinpah hammers home to us that violence is an elemental impulse that resides inside every human being, a constituent of our original sin, the process of deglamorizing and demystifying it is very much against the tenet of the genre it denotes, and contributes a perspicacious tonic to give the dying form one last hurrah!After the ambush, only six living souls have survived, with a posse of bounty hunters breathing down their necks, led by Deke Thornton (Ryan), the erstwhile parter of the gang's leader Pike Bishop (Holden), it all seems like the usual cat-and-mouse chasing game, but it isn't. The sextet crosses the Rio Grande and soon hatches a plan to steal a shipment of weaponry from a USA army train and sell them to General Mapache (Fernández, crassly rebarbative) of Mexican Federal Army in exchange of gold coins, a time-honored ploy of selling massive-killing weapons to an embattled country for monetary gains, a scourge attendant with the entire human history. The team makes a triumphant derring-do to wrest the arms even with Thornton's posse giving chase unexpectedly (culminated by a bridge detonation money shot), but bad blood (both personally and politically) between the young Angel (Sánchez, doesn't degrade his character into a racial cliché) and General Mapache turns their success into a jittery impasse when Angel is captured and physically tortured under the order of the callous Mapache, with paycheck securely in their hands, will the rest of the bunch leave one of them in the lurch? At one point, Peckinpah archly teases us that it would be the case, since Pike has no qualms in deserting his long-time gang member Freddie Sykes (O'Brien) when the latter is shot (not fatally) by one of Thornton's men. But inexplicably, or maybe under the influence of post-coital blues, the remaining gang of four: Pike, his right-hand man Dutch Engstrom (a game Borgnine) and the two Gorch brothers (Oates and Johnson, often saddled with comic crassness), valiantly makes their final request of releasing Angel, which ultimately set off a kamikaze 4-versus-200 pitched battle (consonant with Peckinpah's philosophy on violence, human shields are frequently employed, a luscious girl can be liquidated if she dares to shoot behind one's back), but before all that, an utterly left-field moment crops up which perfectly elucidates what is the unthinkable and almost droll calm before the tempest, this is Peckinpah's most staggering coup de maître! A robust ensemble made of nearly exclusively by men, William Holden exhibits a true leader's flair competently and compassionately, weather-beaten, bedeviled by the guilty of choosing expediency in the face of danger, he makes the death wish roundly poignant and rousing which otherwise very likely would plunge into empty heroism if someone hams it up. Robert Ryan, counterpoising his ostensible villain designation, is pregnant with a sublime tint of self-resignation, world-weariness and fatalism, only seeps a vestige of hope amid the plaintive coda, of a pièce-de-résistence which finds the perfect equilibrium between idealism and praxis.

The westerns I prefer to watch are of the spaghetti variety, but The Wild Bunch is a Sam Peckinpah western, and as such promises to be a little more violent and uncompromising than any John Wayne or Gary Cooper flick.Sure enough, the film opens with one hell of a shootout, as the film's anti-heroes, a group of ageing outlaws led by Pike Bishop (William Holden), carry out the daring robbery of a railroad payroll. Leaving countless bloody bodies in their wake, the gang escape only to find out that they have been tricked, their swag bags full of silver washers instead of coins.Still keen for one last big score before they retire, the desperadoes make a deal with a Mexican general, offering to sell him a shipment of rifles and ammo that they plan to steal from a heavily guarded army train. The deal goes sour, however, when one of their number, Angel (Jaime Sánchez), angers the general by keeping some of the rifles to protect his village.With its ultra stylish ballistic action, with slow-motion deaths and juicy squib-work, The Wild Bunch forever changed the face of the western genre, and became a highly influential film for years to come (John Woo and Quentin Tarantino clearly owe a debt to Peckinpah).The film closes with an impressive bullet ballet that still holds up today, with a tripod mounted machine gun cutting a swathe through numerous Mexican extras, before Pike and friends are finally overpowered.Also starring: Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien and Ben Johnson.

The Wild Bunch is not only one of the best westerns ever made, but is easily one of the best films ever made. Hands down. This is Sam Pecinpah's masterpiece that was very controversial at the time of its release for its shedding of western clichés or conventions and for violence. As far as violence goes there was already Bonnie And Clyde, but The Wild Bunch far surpasses Bonnie And Clyde and to this day, is the most violent western I have ever seen. The Wild Bunch more than delivers on bloody action and I am sure audiences nearly lost their lunch as violence had never been portrayed so graphically or realistically before. The film is about violence and that is the world that our main characters are part of as outlaws in the early 1910's. While the violence/slow mo blood splattering is a lot of what the film is about, this is a very well written, directed and acted film with great dialouge, exceptional camera-work and a great score by Jerry Fielding. The characters are interesting and complex, with layers and quirks. Performances are the best of the best and the actors had exceptional chemistry. With a brilliant cast of William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson and others you really can't miss. However, even the lesser characters are interesting and have a lot to do. In my mind, The Wild Bunch is a flawless masterpiece and if this is a film you can't appreciate, you have poor taste.

Sam Peckinpah's tribute to the old west is a stunningly violent tale of loyalty, brutality, and, well, violence! The excellent storyline is about a group of old men who reminisce about the old ways of the West - and increasingly find themselves in a strange new world. Thus, Peckinpah includes much talk about the "old glory days" as our sorrowful heroes remember how times were. If this doesn't stir you, nothing will! For the most part, we're in standard western territory, with gangs on horses riding around, blowing bridges up, and shooting each other. However the film is book-ended by two spectacular gun battles which put to shame anything John Woo has ever done. Indeed, Peckinpah was the original master of the "heroic bloodshed" film before Woo ever came into the picture and these action scenes have never been bettered, especially the closing one. A trapped bunch, whittled down to four men, see one of their own have his throat graphically cut by a drunk general of the Mexican army. They fire, blasting him apart, and then a silence falls as they look at the two hundred men around them. Just after that, all hell breaks loose...This is an extremely bloody film, where squibs are used constantly and we see blood pumping everything. It certainly earns its 18 certificate, but the violence is not really excessive or gratuitous- it's part of what this film is all about. These were violent times and the people lived and fought in violent ways. The cast is excellent, from a fantastic and understated Holden and Borgnine in leading roles to the supporting players who all do their bit. On top of all this there's lots of beautiful photography and a really clever scene involving a scorpion being attacked by ants which foreshadows the ending. This is a controversial, ageless masterpiece; sometimes powerful, at other times wistful, and very funny with it. It's a must see for anyone with the slightest interest in the western. It also just happens to be one of the most violent films ever made, a film which broke new boundaries on release. And if that's not reason enough, it instantly became one of my favourites on first viewing. See it and find out why!