Reeling Backward: The Wild Bunch (1969)
Sam Peckinpah's frontal assault on the Western genre was informed by the outrages happening in Vietnam and cinema’s recent embrace of blood-soaked violent imagery.
The 1960s saw plenty of revisionist Westerns — “One-Eyed Jacks,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “One Upon a Time in the West” — films that tried to reframe the genre with historical accuracy, moral ambiguity and self-awareness about how imperfectly they reflected America’s past and inscribed modern views of it. No less a figure than John Ford tried to make amends for his decades of depicting Native Americans as brute savages with his last Western, “Cheyenne Autumn.”
But “The Wild Bunch” was something else entirely.
It wasn’t an apology; it was an assault. It was director Sam Peckinpah’s frontal attack on everything the Western stood for, informed by the outrages happening in Vietnam and cinema’s recent embrace of blood-soaked depictions of violence as with “Bonnie and Clyde.” It featured mainstream Hollywood stars like William Holden and Ernest Borgnine shooting women and holding old ladies as shields against enemy fire.
For heck’s sake, the opening sequence of carnage where many innocents are killed during a botched bank robbery employs the song “Shall We Gather of the River,” a staple of Ford’s pictures used to depict the goodness of community in the Western, in contrast to the savagery of the bandits and Indians.
“Bunch” was a great big middle finger to the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle, and some of have rightly dubbed it an anti-Western.
At the time, the movie was greeted with a mix of revulsion and praise. Some critics lauded it, but others were turned off by its violence and nihilistic themes. It did modest box office and was only nominated for two Oscars, for Jerry Fielding’s musical score and the screenplay by Peckinpah and Walon Green, with a story assist from Roy N. Sickner.
Now it’s regularly included on lists of the greatest films of all time.
The movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year was “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and the two films have been bound in popular culture ever since. Both are fictionalized depictions of the famous bandits known as the Wild Bunch, though Peckinpah changed their names to Pike Bishop and Dutch Engstrom (Holden and Borgnine, respectively).
“Butch” usually gets written off as lightweight, I think unfairly as it turns ever so relentlessly toward tragedy as it goes. But it’s hard to dispute which of the two movies is darker, and nowadays the comparison often breaks down along lines similar to “Goodfellas” and “Dances with Wolves.”
Watching “Bunch” for the first time in quite a few years, I was struck how simple and streamlined the plot is. After the failed bank heist — a setup by railroad magnate Harrigan (Albert Dekker) to assassinate Pike and Dutch after they robbed him a few times — the Bunch flee to Mexico to hide out.
In pursuit is Harrigan’s posse, led reluctantly by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a former member of the gang let out of prison to catch his old friends. “Thirty days to get Pike, or 30 days back to Yuma,” Harrigan promises Thornton.
In Mexico the Bunch go to work for Mapache, a general in the civil war against the government, who’s little more than a thug and bandit himself. The Americans steal a shipment of arms from the U.S. Army in exchange for $10,000 in gold, secretly giving one box of rifles to their compatriot, Angel (Jaime Sánchez), to defend his nearby village against Mapache or any other warlord who comes to pillage it.
Mapache finds out about it, captures and tortures Angel, and eventually Pike and Dutch decide to stand up to him, wiping out his entire army in a final, colossal showdown in which they are all slain, too.
(I hadn’t known until now Mapache is played by Emilio Fernández, a writer/director/actor who was quite a giant of Mexican cinema in the 1940s-50s.)
The shooting and editing of “The Wild Bunch” are a revelation. Peckinpah, cinematographer Lucien Ballard and editor Louis Lombardo use a mix of camera angles, film speeds, abrupt pans/zooms, and cross-cutting to capture the brutality of gunfighting in a way no other movie had even attempted before. The controlled chaos brought an immediacy to the screen that was dazzling and dizzying.
It’s not an overstatement to say “The Wild Bunch” changed overnight how movies approached action scenes.
As astonishing as the screen pyrotechnics are, it’s the in-between scenes that really form the spine of the picture. Set in 1913 in the absolute last gasping days of the Old West, it’s the story of aging men who have used violence to forge an identity, and now recognize the end of their time has come — it’s only up for them to choose where and how.
“We’ve got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast,” Pike instructs his men.
At the start of the movie they must number a dozen-and-a-half, but after the disastrous bank job are down to just six. (A seventh, blinded by a shotgun blast, is put out of his misery personally by Pike.)
In addition to Angel and Dutch — Pike’s right-hand man and enforcer — there are the Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector (Peckinpah favorite Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), a dimwitted but stout pair who seem to only care about wine and women, and Freddie Sykes, a broken down old man whose duties appear limited to watching the horses, cooking the food and acting as the court jester, cackling at the Bunch’s latest misadventure.
Played by legendary character actor Edmond O’Brien, Sykes is continually targeted by the Gorches, who first want to deny him a full share of the bank haul (before discovering their bags are filled with worthless steel washers) and then making to kill him when Sykes clumsily spills their whole caravan of horses. He seems content to play the fool, not even revealing to Pike until after the fact that his own grandson, Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins), was one of the Bunch killed at the bank.
But Pike repeatedly defends Sykes from the others, noting the old man had “killed his fair share and then some” back in the day. No doubt he looks upon the pathetic old timer as his own future awaiting, so his altruistic behavior toward Sykes is more about protecting his personal fading honor.
Pike is notorious for never getting caught, ducking out when Deke was shot and captured, and nearly getting killed when a man shot him in the leg for sleeping with his wife. It’s still gimpy, something the Gorches tease him about, reckoning that a cowboy who can’t mount his own horse might as well dig his own grave.
The story keeps cutting back to Deke, who is none too pleased with the “gutter trash” of bounty hunters Harrigan has supplied him with. He continually compares them unfavorably to Pike and his crew, whom he dubs “the best,” openly wishing he was riding with them instead of against them.
The chief miscreants are Coffer and T.C., played by the great Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones, are usually found bickering over the loot stripped from the bodies of the men they have just killed. They act as both comedic relief and a stark reminder of men’s squalidness.
The ages of the main characters are never stated, other than they are old by the standards of a dying profession. Holden was 51 and Borgnine 52 when the movie came out, but are made to look older and I’m guessing Pike and Dutch are closer to 60, with Deke in the same range. O’Brien was just 54 but I’m guessing Sykes is supposed to be north of 70.
The dialogue is very plainspoken yet filled with portent. Early on in discussing their dimming prospects, Pike pledges to Dutch that he’d rather go out on his own terms than fading into obsolescence. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” they agree, and it’s essentially two best friends making their death pact.
The one line Pike repeats throughout the movie is a simple, “Let’s go.” It can be used as an order in their latest escapade, and instruction to quit their bickering or, in the last time it’s used, a call to sacrifice themselves for Angel.
As iconic as the closing battle has become — a veritable orgy of death — it’s the moments right before that stick with me. Pike, having just lain with a whore who’s barely more than a girl, sees that he can die by his code or adapt to a time of automobiles and telegraph, and decides he’d rather go.
He enlists the Gorches, and then steps out to find Dutch sitting there whittling, as if waiting for this moment. The only dialogue is Pike saying, “Let’s go,” and Lyle responding, “Well, why not?”
“The Wild Bunch” has been studied and written about as much as just about any other film made. I’ve read a fair piece of it, with all sorts of interpretations about what the movie “means.” I tend to hate this kind of analysis, because to me a film’s meaning is specific to each person who experiences it.
For me, it’s a watershed in American moviemaking. Not just because it was willing to say that killing is a horrible act that degrades both killer and victim, or because it depicted this violence in a way that put it right in the audience’s face.
It’s a film that stripped bare the Western’s haze of mythology clouding our nation’s early, brutal years. The genre would never be the same.