June 18, 1969 marked another milestone moment for the still-emerging New Hollywood, with the premiere of Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist western The Wild Bunch. It was something of a comeback for the veteran director, a hard-drinking ex-marine with an unpredictable, combative personality, who made a career of battling studio bosses (and alienated enough of them that four years had passed since his last feature film). It would mark the beginning of a remarkably productive decade for Peckinpah, who would direct nine films—an impressive run ending with Cross of Iron in 1977. Every one of those efforts is worth taking seriously—even Straw Dogs, which we consider to be an immoral film (if you’re going to push the envelope, sometimes you go too far). And none of them is like the others (though they are all recognizably from the same hand); our favorite remains the restored version of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
The Wild Bunch, shot on location is Mexico (far from probing studio eyes) is a stunningly beautiful film. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard would shoot three more films for Peckinpah—some of the best work in his career that stretched back to the 1930s (a resume that includes Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 masterpiece The Killing). The movie is also distinguished by an astounding set of performers, including William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Ben Johnson, and Peckinpah regular Warren Oates—and this Mount Rushmore of greats is just the tip of the cast-berg; the invidious General Mapache, for example, was played by Emilio Fernandez, one of Mexico’s greatest film directors.
Holden (as Pike Bishop) provides the center of gravity for The Wild Bunch, and is the fulcrum for its two key relationships: with loyal right hand man Dutch (Borgnine), and former gang member Deke (Ryan), who bought his way out of a brutal prison by promising to help the authorities track down his former mates. The wise, weary, weather-beaten Holden is also the director’s surrogate in the picture. “Of all the projects I have ever worked on,” Peckinpah wrote, “this is the closest to me.” And in the extended title sequence, it is no coincidence that the freeze frame on Pike’s line “if they move . . . kill ‘em!” (it’s a bank robbery) is accompanied by the director’s credit.
The Wild Bunch is steeped in the moral ambiguity that was at the center of the New Hollywood—and is even more daring in this regard than Bonnie and Clyde. As critic Steven Farber argued at the time, it “is sharper and more honest than Bonnie and Clyde.” Sure, Arthur Penn’s film came first, with charismatic, outlaw protagonists and unsympathetic forces of the law, but he put his finger on the scale. The Barrow gang, throughout their wild, legendary inter-state crime spree, only kill in self-defense, and reluctantly and remorsefully (in the movie, that is). The Wild Bunch, on the other hand, “does not flinch about showing the brutality of its heroes.” There are no good guys at all in this picture—the wealthy railroad titans out to crush Pike and his comrades have an utter disregard for any innocents that might be caught in the crossfire of their pursuit, as the blood-drenched ambush at the start of the film clearly illustrates.
Neither they nor the savage bounty hunters in their employ have a sense of honor—and that is what distinguishes them from our protagonists, and why the movie favors the Bunch over the Law, on both sides of the border. Peckinpah himself deeply valued such attributes, which he described as “courage, loyalty, friendship, grace under pressure.” Of course, as then-critic Paul Schrader observed, our guys are barely clinging to “only remnants of the code,” which Pike, with the loyal support of Dutch, tries to enforce. But the best of the bunch have outlived their time—and they know it. It’s 1913 out there, at the dawn of internal combustion engines, machine guns, and industrial scale World War. Near the end of the movie, when Pike says, simply, “let’s go” – because the bunch have one final obligation of honor to fulfill – they know it will be their last shooting match.
And so the film will end as it began, with an orgy of violence far beyond anything that had been seen in a Hollywood movie. Again the bar had been set by Bonnie and Clyde, and again Peckinpah was determined to go one step further—and in so doing, raised questions about the responsible portrayal of violence on screen, conversations that were now necessary to have with the censors chased from the scene. The critics were deeply divided on the issue (art versus exploitation), as they had been over Bonnie and Clyde. At one press preview, Roger Ebert recalled, “the audience reaction was extreme.” Some people walked out; others booed—but young Ebert was on the other side of the barricades, announcing, “I just want it said: to a lot of people, this film is a masterpiece.”
As for Peckinpah, he was true to form: “I tried to make a film that showed violence as it is, not as some goddamn Hollywood piece of shit,” he explained. His position regarding the portrayal of violence is that it was irresponsible not to show its brutality, to allow it to be painless, antiseptic, and vicariously entertaining. It was also deeply hypocritical, he noted, when you consider that as the film was in production in 1968, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, and the U.S. suffered its bloodiest months of the Vietnam War, with battles shown nightly on the evening news. And as for his unrelentingly dark portrayal of the forces of law and order, Peckinpah would later point to the subsequent police riots at the Democratic National Convention that summer, which “prove the point I was trying to make, that power corrupts as much as lawlessness.”
Unfortunately, we don’t much talk about the responsible portrayal of violence on the screen these days. (A pity, as it is a discussion worth having.) And Peckinpah’s film, seen today, would barely raise an eyebrow on that score. But even though the blood spilled in The Wild Bunch no longer shocks, the movie remains a landmark of the New Hollywood, distinguished by its strong performances (especially from masters-of-minimalism Holden and Ryan), ambitious set-pieces, finely-crafted widescreen compositions, and distinct (and sharp) point of view.
“If They Move . . .
. . . kill ’em””
Deke (Robert Ryan), on the other side
Pike enforces the code
Tight Spot
“Let’s go”