For years, I had not seen Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
in full. I had caught bits of it on TV, or maybe at the drive-in, where
my mom and dad had carried me along to check it out. I’m sure my dad
liked it--most dads adore
The Wild Bunch--but my mom, who'd had
quite enough of seeing dead bodies returning from Vietnam on TV, felt
sickened by violence in movies at the time (both
Bonnie and Clyde, with its bullet-riddled climax, and
M.A.S.H.,
with its comedic treatment of medical gore, had similarly made her ill;
since, of course, she's been inured to on-screen messiness). For my own
part, I found the movie dull, even as a pretty with-it kid; somehow,
Peckinpah had not gotten his hooks in me (I now see that
The Wild Bunch
is a movie that works least best on the young, and also I always knew
that, on TV, it was being shown pan-and-scan, and that's just a outright
no-no with what any movie geek can see is a beautifully widescreen
presentation).
It wasn’t until its 1995 restoration and re-release, when I was approaching my 30s, that I finally did my duty and caught
The Wild Bunch on the big screen at a four-wall theater, as it was meant to be seen. Afterwards, I could’ve kicked myself
twice, three times even
for not previously grasping what a powerhouse masterpiece it was, for
Peckinpah’s film finally bowled me over as it did almost everyone who
saw it in the late 60s/early 70s (it's certainly a movie that should be
seen at least once at a theater; if you haven't experienced it as such,
you're partially abandoning its strength). From its very first
scene--that staccato credits sequence portraying the titular bunch
trotting past a group of joyful kids cackling as thousands of fire ants
overtake two deadly but hapless scorpions (a mirror of the film's famous
conclusion)
--The Wild Bunch aims to encapsulate the brutality
of criminally-minded men and, simultaneously, their deeply-held longing
to regain some modicum of innocence, honor and compassion. In its
dichotomies, Peckinpah's picture is like no other. It set a template for
a few decades worth of film output behind it.
In it, William Holden (who, while struggling to vanquish an
alcohol-induced career slump, thankfully won the lead over a
then-too-vibrant Lee Marvin) plays the aged, tired Pike Bishop, a former
Army man now commanding a group of droopy ne'er-do-wells through a
rather inert series of bank and train hold-ups. Alongside him: the
unfailingly loyal Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine, in a sweet mid-career
boost); the filthy Brothers Gorch, Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben
Johnson, in perhaps the first of his major roles after John Ford's
Wagon Master);
Angel, the handsome Mexican bandit (Jaime Sanchez, notably the most
youthful and idealistic of them all); and character actor Edmond O’Brien
as Freddie Sykes, the grizzled, tobacco-dribbling horseman (giving
Sierra Madre's
Walter Huston a run for his money as the definitive unkempt mountain
man). Most of the rest of the bunch--including Bo Hopkins as the
too-briefly-seen Crazy Lee ("Well, how'd you like to kiss my sister's
black cat's ass?")--are dispatched in the film’s first big showpiece:
the robbing of the bank in that sleepy Texas town too busy railing
against the evils of drink to notice they’re all about to get blown to
bits (gotta love a movie where the first actor you see with a speaking
line is the inimitable Dub Taylor).
It’s the bunch that starts the gunfire, but it’s Deke Thornton’s gang
of money-hungry buzzards that escalates it, looking to get every penny
they can, even if it means shooting total innocents and then robbing
their pockets, or the shoes off their feet. Thornton is played with a
gorgeous world-weary sadness by Robert Ryan; it’s clear that his
character is not enjoying this assignment. Even though he and Pike ended
their relationship on bad terms (in an essential flashback edited back
into the movie only in its re-release), he still sees more honor in his
nasty work with Pike than he does with the liquored-up trash he’s riding
with now (L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin are extremely memorable here
as the scummiest of Thornton's crew, complete with gentle homosexual
undertones and loud bickering over the corpses they, together, pick
clean). But soulless railroad man Harrigan (a mustache-twirling Albert
Dekker, as maybe the most horrible person in the movie) slams the hammer
down on Thornton, and sets him on his journey: “30 days to get Pike or
30 days back to Yuma. You’re my Judas goat.”
The
opening scene has long been called a ballet of blood and for justified
reasons. Louis Lombardo’s superb editing here ratchets up the tension,
with the sound of rapid heartbeats as background, until the sequence
literally explodes--if any movie "explodes," this one does--in a
cataclysm of shotgun lead, trampled townspeople, bloodied henchmen,
falling bodies, crumbling storefronts, rearing horses, crushed dreams,
and frightened children (there are almost endless shots of babies and
kids all throughout the film, as a callback to the return-to- and
destruction-of-innocence theme; women, however, do not fare nearly as
well here). There is just simply nothing in cinema history like this
sequence, and any filmmaker who tiptoes even slightly near it is
immediately accused of ripping off Peckinpah’s mastery (only Walter Hill
has gotten away with aping the Peckinpah style in his wonderful
The Long Riders, a movie that should be part of this WONDERS IN THE DARK retrospective and which respectfully sidled up next to
The Wild Bunch but, because of its 1980 release, didn't get much resultant controversy).
This
stultifying sequence is no less than the introduction of a more modern
depiction of violence in movies: a violence correctly fraught with
horrible consequences. It’s this chief aspect of this film that shook
cinema in 1969; even after
Bonnie and Clyde, absolutely no one
was ready for such an onslaught (though I don't really wanna give the
impression that the depiction of violence is ALL this film's about). But
Peckinpah was tired of the bang-bang-you’re-dead cleanliness of
westerns and, seeing that the genre was near the end of its run, he
clearly needed to put the final exclamation point on his view that
bloodletting had to be seen in all its scuzzy goriness in order to be
understood and, finally, perhaps vanquished (only problem is, on-screen
violence continued to get
more graphic afterwards; surely the
cynical Peckinpah could've seen THAT coming, and we have to wonder if he
blamed himself, in his final years, for heightening movie cruelty; that
said, if Peckinpah didn't do it, then someone else surely would have).
After
discovering the robbery's bounty is not all they thought it would be,
in a scene that underlines both the fissures in the bunch’s alliance and
the good humor that cements their bond, it’s up to Pike to find them
something honorable--and profitable--to chase (he admits to Dutch that
he‘d like to "make one good score and back off"). Taking refuge in
Mexico, it’s the big-eyed Angel who leads them to this mission, after
suggesting they take a siesta in his idyllic home village (photographed
in haunting smoky blues and greens by Lucien Ballard, who does the best
work of his long career all throughout the film). In the village, the
bunch reconnect with joy, dancing with senoritas while drunk with
happiness and passion (one of the village elders responds to their
abandon when he says, in one of the film‘s key observations: "We all
dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst
most of all.")
In the film’s most moving scene, this bunch--this
wild bunch--are given an inspiring send-off by the Mexican villagers,
who soulfully incant the mournful “La Golondrina” as tribute to their
heroes' new mission: to find the General Mapache (in a superbly greasy
performance by Mexican film director Emilio Fernandez), who recently
raided the village, killed their leaders, and stolen their women,
including Angel’s paramour. I adore this scene of ardor and heroics; it
really makes me weep every time I watch it. It’s the final, gigantic
tribute to a group of men who’ve probably done nothing worth paying even
slight tribute to in their whole lives. It’s their awakening, and it’s
the memory they each take to their graves (that’s why the scene is
called back in the film’s final frames). Absolutely no one--not even the
most hardened psychopaths--could walk the tributary gauntlet they walk,
tipping their hats in respect to the noble poor and accepting generous
flowers from the ladies, without being completely transformed by the
experience.
The
detailed screenplay, by Peckinpah, Roy Sickner and Walon Green, is
unusual in numerous ways, one of which is its second-act shift from
western genre territory into almost war (or crime) movie-land, with
Mapache (under the thumb of a couple of Nazi-precursor German
consultants) conducting his federales against the revolutionaries, and
the bunch--all US Army veterans--once again abandoning their morals and
agreeing to heist a trainload of American guns for the General's
nefarious use. Pike’s men are to split a cache of gold coins as payment,
but Angel--bitter over the subjugation of his village and the theft of
his woman (whom he’d rather see dead than with Mapache)--asks for a
crate of guns and ammo instead of gold, so that his village can fight
against the general. Angel's compatriots see this as a risky though
honorable trade-off, and so they comply. This leads us to the
brilliantly tense train heist scene--a centerpiece of the film which
Peckinpah slyly directs with almost no dialogue or music cues. Only the
rhythmic sounds of the train appear on the soundtrack, heightening the
strain of this enormously entertaining sequence which culminates in one
of the hugest stunts ever seen in cinema: the determined destruction of
the dynamited bridge, with Deke Thornton’s men on it (the resultant
blast is so massive--by Peckinpah's design--that its shockwave visibly
stuns Holden on-screen).
It's nuts, the innumerable moments I love in
The Wild Bunch--moments
those rabid fans of this cultiest of cult movie will be very familiar
with: William Holden’s insanely suitable first major line (“If they
move, kill ‘em," which not only became the title of David Weddle’s
authoritative biography of the self-destructive Peckinpah, but also
signifies the second upon which Peckinpah’s freeze-framed director’s
credit appears, as the capper to that energetic credits sequence, and
perhaps the autograph on a career devoted to a strange breed of sadly
heartless humanity; it also might be the one single line of dialogue
that defines the western genre as a whole); the way the temperance league
members can’t--or maybe
won’t--quite follow Dub Taylor’s
pledge of alcohol abstinence; Pike and Dutch’s compact and repeated
comedy routine (Pike: “Get up, ya lazy bastard”); Lyle Gorch being
schooled in what the term “in tandem” means; Pike's regretful
realization that Crazy Lee is actually Freddie Sykes’ now-dead grandson;
Dutch scorching his fingers on and then spitting out Freddie’s awful
coffee; Pike falling off his horse, to the bunch's amusement, and then
agonizingly getting back up on the saddle again, to their respect; Lyle,
at the Mapache headquarters, complaining about being set off at a side
table from the decision makers, and then disdainfully leering at the
sodden general (“Well, look at him--ain’t he the
one?”);
Angel's final exchange with the woman who betrayed him, all in
unsubtitled Spanish, and all before he assassinates her, with an
unforgettable, very-close zoom-in on her rapaciously laughing face, and
then followed by a dismissive response from the general, who sees her
very funeral as merely an irritant; Lyle and Tector cavorting in both
wine and water with two portly Mexican women; the unfailingly ridiculous
Mapache riddling the town with bullets while firing a bulky machine
gun; the wacky scene with the gang sharing a single celebratory bottle
of hooch; a toothy Alfonso Arau (another notable Mexican film director) as
one of Mapache’s deputies, sent to negotiate with the bunch, pleading
mightily with Pike to “Please…cut the fuse.” Like any devoted cultist, I
eagerly wait for all these scenes whenever I watch the movie.
And
maybe my--and everybody's--single favorite exchange in the film: where
Pike finally glances around the Mexican brothel where he's had his last
woman (in a life probably filled with only whores), where he's feeling
bad for the good-hearted, romantic man they left behind, feeling sorry
for the damnable bastard he's become and, with Ballard’s luminous
lighting catching JUST the correct angle on Holden's stunning blue eyes,
then saying to the rest of his fellow bastards simply “Let’s go.” And
Lyle’s also brilliantly terse answer: “Why not?” No more words are
needed (Borgnine's Dutch stands outside of the brothel, just waiting for
the right answer). Thanks to Peckinpah's writing and direction, both
Holden and Oates would never match their career-defining moments here
(though Oates had
quite a colorful filmography ahead of him).
Thus
begins their final march--a march towards immortality, a victory march,
a death march and a march for freedom. These iconic actors--this
iconic moment--this stroll--a moment improvised on location, sculpted in
time--towards a final showdown with Mapache's bacchanal at Agua Verde,
and set to Jerry Fielding’s terrific brass-and-percussion-driven
score--well...there's just nothing like it And after an unbelievable,
unbelievable
denouement--this incredibly grisly climax, deeply emotional and
desperate, with its quicksilver editing, loud and copious gunfire,
exquisite choreography, hundreds of bodies (mostly dead or dying), fleet
moves and slow-motion movements, and then ending with Dutch's final
heartbreaking reach out to Pike--after this, nothing
...nothing... in movies would ever be the same (and yet nothing in movies would really ever match it).
The Wild Bunch, surprisingly
humanistic and supremely lovely and stunning in its understanding of
depravity and its limitations, is not simply the westerns to end all
westerns; it's one of the ultimate examples of pure cinema. That's how
landmark great it has always been, and how mesmerizing it still is.
Pike Bishop: We're
not gonna get rid of anybody! We're gonna stick together, just like it
used to be! When you side with a man, you stay with him! And if you
can't do that, you're like some animal. You're finished! We're finished! All of us!
NOTE: This post originally appeared as the #7 entry in Wonders in the Dark's countdown of the 60 greatest westerns.