The Wild Bunch

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THE WILD BUNCH

USA, 1969

Production: Warner Bros. and Seven Arts, Inc.; Technicolor, 33mm, Panavision 70 (US), 70mm, CinemaScope (Europe); running time: 143 minutes (after release, the studio cut 4 scenes reducing running time to 135 minutes). Released 18 June 1969, Los Angeles. Filmed in Torréan, El Rincon del Montero, and El Romeral, Mexico.

Producers: Phil Feldman with Roy N. Sickner; screenplay: Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah, from an original story by Walon Green and Roy N. Sickner; photography: Lucien Ballard; editor: Louis Lombardo; sound: Robert Miller; art director: Edward Carrere; music: Jerry Fielding; music supervisor: Sonny Burke; special effects: Bud Hulburd; costume designer: Gordon Dawson.

Cast: William Holden (Pike Bishop); Ernest Borgnine (Dutch Engstrom); Robert Ryan (Deke Thornton); Edmond O'Brien (Sykes); Warren Oates (Lyle Gorch); Jaime Sanchez (Angel); Ben Johnson (Tector Gorch); Emilio Fernandez (Mapache); Strother Martin (Coffer); L. Q. Jones (T. C.); Albert Dekker (Pat Harrigan); Bo Hopkins (Crazy Lee); Dub Taylor (Major Wainscoat); Jorge Russek (Lieutenant Zamorra); Alfonso Arau (Herrera); Chano Urueta (Don José); Sonia Amelio (Teresa); Aurora Clavel (Aurora); Elsa Cardenas (Elsa); Fernando Wagner (German army officer).

Publications

Books:

Kitses, Jim, Horizons West, Bloomington, Indiana, 1970.

Evans, Max, Sam Peckinpah: Master of Violence, Vermillion, South Dakota, 1972.

Caprara, Valerio, Peckinpah, Bologna, 1976.

Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Western Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976.

McKinney, Dough, Sam Peckinpah, Boston, 1979.

Seydoe, Paul, Peckinpah: The Western Films, Urban, Illinois, 1980.

Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-Up: The Contemporary Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1981.

Simmons, Garner, Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage, Austin, 1982.

Thomas, Bob, Golden Boy: The Untold Story of William Holden, New York, 1983.

Arnold, Frank, and Ulrich von Berg, Sam Peckinpah: Eine Outlaw in Hollywood, Frankfurt, 1987.

Buscombe, Ed, editor, The BFI Companion to the Western, London, 1988.

Fine, Marshall, Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah, New York, 1992.

Bliss, Michael, Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah, Carbondale, 1993.

Bliss, Michael, editor, Doing It Right: The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Carbondale, Illinois, 1994.

Weddle, David, If They Move, Kill 'Em: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah, New York, 1994.

Prince, Stephen, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, Austin, 1998.

Prince, Stephen, editor, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Cambridge, 1999.

Articles:

Schrader, Paul, "Sam Peckinpah Goes to Mexico," in Cinema (Beverly Hills), no. 3, 1969.

"Sam Peckinpah Lets It All Hang Out," in Take One (Montreal), January-February 1969.

"Man and Myth," in Time (New York), 20 June 1969.

Gilliatt, Penelope, in New Yorker, 5 July 1969.

Kauffmann, Stanley, in New Republic (New York), 19 July 1969.

Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 31 July 1969.

Clark, Arthur, in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1969.

Farber, Stephen, "Peckinpah's Return: An Interview," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1969.

Milne, Tom, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1969.

Whitehall, Richard, "Talking with Peckinpah," in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1969.

"What the Directors Are Saying," in Action (Los Angeles), September-October 1969.

Austen, David, in Films and Filming (London), October 1969.

Cutts, John, "Shoot: An Interview with Sam Peckinpah," in Films and Filming (London), October 1969.

Sragow, Michael, in Film Society Review (New York), November 1969.

Brown, Kenneth, in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1969–70.

McCarty, John, "Sam Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch," in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1969–70.

Simon, John, "Violent Idyll," in Film 1969/70, edited by Hollis Alpert and Andrew Sarris, New York, 1970.

Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), May 1970.

Blum William, "Towards a Cinema of Cruelty," in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Spring 1972.

Shaffer, Lawrence, "The Wild Bunch versus Straw Dogs," in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1972.

"Peckinpah Issue" of Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1974–75.

Pettit, Arthur, "Nightmare and Nostalgia: The Cinema West of Sam Peckinpah," in Western Humanities Review (Salt Lake City, Utah), Spring 1975.

Barbaro, Nick, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 8 September 1975.

Pearson, M., in Jump Cut (Berkeley), August 1978.

Meyerson, Harold, in Magill's Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980.

Simmon, Scott, "Return of the Badmen," in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), Fall 1981.

Boyero, C., in Casablanca (Madrid), December 1981.

Camy, G., "Sur le sentier de l'oubli: Sam Peckinpah," in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), April-May 1982.

Rentero, J. C., "Sam Peckinpah: El largo adios," in Casablanca (Madrid), March 1985.

Engel, L., "Space and Enclosure in Cooper and Peckinpah: Regeneration in the Open Spaces," in Journal of American Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio), no. 2, 1991.

Holtsmark, E.B., "The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema," in Bucknell Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1991.

Triggs, J. A., "The Wild Bunch: Scourges or Ministers?" in New Orleans Review, no. 3, 1991.

Segaloff, N., "Greenland," in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1993.

Torry, R., "Therapeutic Narrative: The Wild Bunch, Jaws, and Vietnam," in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Spring 1993.

Weddle, David, "Dead Man's Clothes: The Making of The Wild Bunch," in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1994.

Sragow, Michael, "The Homeric Power of Peckinpah's Violence," in Atlantic Monthly (Boston), June 1994.

Redman, Nick, "Peckinpah's Bunch," in DGA Magazine (Los Angeles), vol. 19, no. 4, August-September 1994.

Gaydos, Steven, "Peckinpah's Wild Vision Restored After 26 Years," in Variety (New York), vol. 358, no. 4, 27 February 1995.

Rafferty, T., "Artist of Death," in New Yorker, vol. 71, 6 March 1995.

Brown, G., "Once Were Westerns," in Village Voice (New York), vol 40, 7 March 1995.

Travers, P., in Rolling Stone, no. 703, 9 March 1995.

Ansen, D., "The Return of a Bloody Great Classic," in Newsweek, vol. 125, 13 March 1995.

Girard, Martin, in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 177, March-April 1995.

Simon, J., "Wilder and Wilder," in National Review, vol. 47, 3 April 1995.

Alleva, R., "Nihilism on Horseback," in Commonweal, vol. 122, 21 April 1995.

Higson, Charlie, "The Shock of the Old," in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 8, August 1995.

Seydor, Paul, David Weddle, and Edward Buscombe, "Sam Peckinpah: Wild Things," in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 10, October 1995.

Seydor, Paul, "Facts about Sam," in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 9, September 1996.

Seydor, Paul, "Bunch Continued," in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 11, November 1996.

* * *

When it was first released, The Wild Bunch became the subject of heated controversy among critics and the public alike due to its extraordinary level of violence. Following close on the heels of Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch surpassed the slow-motion death balletics of that film by quantum leaps, shocking and/or revolting large numbers of viewers. (At the Kansas City test screening of the 190-minute rough cut, over 30 members of the audience walked out in disgust, some reportedly throwing up in the alley behind the theater.) Twenty years later, in an age inured to graphic screen violence and gore, the violence of The Wild Bunch is still remarkably provocative and disturbing. This is partially because the violence is not gratuitous, as some have claimed, but central to the film's vision of human experience: it posits a world in which degrees of violence provide the only standards, and violent death the only liberation. If it is a world not predicated entirely on human evil, it is one at least in which there is very little good or hope for change. It seems clear today that what many people object to in Peckinpah's extravagant depiction of violence in The Wild Bunch is actually his dark view of human nature.

Another reason the film's violence still shocks and scintillates is its rendition by Peckinpah's stylized, optically jolting montage. Not since Eisenstein has a filmmaker so radically explored the conventions of traditional editing form. Much of the action in The Wild Bunch was filmed by as many as six Panavision, Mitchell, and Arriflex cameras running simultaneously at different speeds, each equipped with different lenses, including wide-angle, telephoto, and zoom. Peckinpah and his editor, Louis Lombardo, then created elaborate montage sequences by cutting footage shot in "real time" together with footage shot at varying decelerated speeds—all shot through a variety of lenses, some of which created a unique optical tension by zooming in and out nervously (and, amazingly, without calling attention to themselves) at appropriate moments. The perceptual impact of rapidly intercutting violent action shot at standard speed with slow-motion footage and a variety of telephoto zooms, in sequences that last as long as seven minutes, is both exhilarating and exhausting. The Wild Bunch is the most optically violent film ever made, one which relentlessly assaults the senses of its audience with a torrent of violent images to rival and finally exceed Eisenstein's achievement in "The Odessa Steps" sequence of Potemkin. (In fact, The Wild Bunch contains more individualized cuts than any color film ever made—3,642, in a decade when 600 was standard for the average dramatic feature.)

It seems ironic and not a little crazy today that a film so clearly focussed on themes of loyalty, honor, integrity, and heroism could have been reviled in its time for what one major critic called, "moral idiocy." But that was the late 1960s, when the issues of violence in American society and American foreign policy had become central to virtually every national forum of public opinion. We stood at the end of a decade of political assassinations whose magnitude was unprecedented in our history, and we were deeply mired in a genocidal war in Vietnam. The My Lai massacre was revealed less than a year after the release of The Wild Bunch, but many Americans already knew what that revelation confirmed: that to fight a war against a popular insurrection is to fight a war against the populace. For many critics The Wild Bunch seemed to be an allegory of our involvement in Vietnam, where outlaws, mercenaries, and federal troops fought to produce the largest civilian "body count" since World War II. Others saw the film more generally as a comment on the level and nature of violence in American life. But nearly everyone saw that it bore some relationship to the major social issues of the times, and, depending on how one felt about those, one's reaction to the film was enthusiastically positive or vehemently negative—both mistaken responses to a work whose prevailing tenor is moral ambiguity from start to finish. Today it is possible to find a middle ground; for whatever else The Wild Bunch may be (as it is, for example, the greatest western ever made), it is clearly a major work of American art which changed forever the way in which violence would be depicted in American films, as well as permanently restructuring the conventions of its genre. That Peckinpah was unable to equal it later—as with Welles and Citizen Kane—is not testimony to his insufficiency a a film artist but to the extraordinary achievement of The Wild Bunch itself. It is, as Robert Culp remarked on its release, a film "more quintessentially and bitterly American than any since World War II." Like Kane, The Wild Bunch will remain an enduring work of American art—vast and explosive, vital and violent, with something both very dark and very noble at its soul.