The Wild Bunch

1969, Sam Peckinpah, USA

A classic of the revisionist Western genre and Peckinpah’s most famous film, The Wild Bunch is a bloody tale of the end of the old West by one of America’s most relentless myth-makers and breakers. Peckinpah (Straw Dogs, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) was inspired by Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde – a key film in the New Hollywood movement – to bring an intensity and authenticity to the violence in The Wild Bunch, contrasting with the simple escapism of most Westerns, which often feature bloodless kills with no real impact (similar to modern superhero films).

Set in 1913, The Wild Bunch follows an aging gang of outlaws (including William Holden and Warren Oates) who escape Texas for Mexico and become entangled in the conflict between the Mexican government and rebels. Victims of Sin (screening in November) director Emilio Fernández appears as the key antagonist, General Mapache.

Although rarely made now, Westerns remain one of the genres that reflect the development of film as both entertainment and art over the 20th century, offering an important lens on American culture. For some, The Wild Bunch may be too crude and violent, but for others, it offers the chance to experience an influential Western that transformed the depiction of violence on screen, paving the way for directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.

“It’s a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya’s. By a supreme burst of filmmaking energy, Sam Peckinpah is able to convert chaotic romanticism into exaltation; the film is perched right on the edge of incoherence, yet it’s comparable in scale and sheer poetic force to Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.” Pauline Kael, The New Yorker