The Wild Bunch is like a swift kick to the guts. It’s salt in a wound. It’s a cinematic rape of the senses. A bombardment of quick cuts and violence. A stab at the jugular. A punch to the spleen. It’s a movie that exudes masculinity. That assaults unsuspecting viewers with a story of “unchanged men in a changing land” doused with a healthy dose of the ole Ultra Violence. The Wild Bunch is, in short, perfection. Here’s why…
When The Wild Bunch dropped in 1969, it immediately resurrected Peckinpah to his legendary, “heir to John Ford,” fame. The movie’s Peckinpah at his most Peckinpah. It encapsulates every theme the writer/director would eventually become legend for–”the conflict between values and ideals,” “the corruption of human society,” and the violence mankind’s capable of achieving. Even the characters are pure Peckinpah. To quote Wikipedia:
[Peckinpah's] characters are often loners or losers who harbor the desire to be honorable and idealistic but are forced to compromise themselves in order to survive in a world of nihilism and brutality…. They are portrayed as being prisoners of their fates and their own failings who nonetheless seek redemption and meaning in an absurd and violent world. The theme of longing for redemption, justification, and honor in a dishonorable existence permeates almost all of Peckinpah’s work and has helped to elevate his reputation from that of a skilled director of action films to one of the greatest cinematic artists of his era.
I’m sure someone somewhere could have written the same script and someone somewhere could have directed it and it would have been a great movie. But it wouldn’t have been The Wild Bunch. This is a movie that from the balls-to-the-wall, kickass title sequence to the balls-to-the-wall, kickass climax bears the every fingerprint of Peckinpah. It’s as much a piece of the man’s soul as The 400 Blows was to Truffaut.
If you’ve ever read any Hemingway, you’re probably sensing some sort of commonality with Peckinpah. You’ve got a nihilistic world view combined with “conflicts of masculinity,” and it seems like the two are an obvious comparison. People certainly use the same rhetoric to dismiss Peckinpah as they do Hemingway. “He’s misogynistic” and other vaguely applicable complaints. This demonstrates a lack of understanding. An inablity to see the forest for the trees. Again, I’ll differ to Wikipedia:
…While the women in [Peckinpah's] films are generally seen through men’s eyes, it is the men who are abusive, corrupted, and violent. The women are generally either victims of the brutalities of men or survivors attempting to eke out an existence in the unforgiving world created by men.
Another common complaint critics use to write off Peckinpah is that he’s too violent. On the DVD extras to Straw Dogs it’s said that Peckinpah once considered the act of seeing violence on screen as cathartic. As if to say that if you witnessed violence on screen, you’d get your fix and wouldn’t result to it in real life. However, Peckinpah came to find that his audiences relished the violence. They loved it. And this fact would come to “trouble him deeply later in his career.” Again, Wikipedia:
Peckinpah’s approach to violence is often misinterpreted. Many critics see his worldview as a misanthropic, Hobbesian view of nature as essentially evil and savage. In fact, Peckinpah himself stated the opposite. He saw violence as the product of human society, and not of nature. It is the result of men’s competition with each other over power and domination, and their inability to negotiate this competition without resorting to brutality.
The Wild Bunch is one of the most important films of the 20th century (it’s number 80 on the list of AFI’s Top 100 American Films). It’s an enduring portrait of fated men at the cusp of obsolescence struggling against their ideals. It’s the quintessence of one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. And, most importantly, it’s a really kickass action flick. It has depth, it’s a fun viewing, and it’s a must see. See The Wild Bunch now.
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