The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969): USA

Reviewed by Larry Gleeson. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on Thursday, February 3, 1 P.M. at the 2011 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The Wild Bunch is a film about “An aging group of outlaws look for one last big score as the “traditional” American West is disappearing around them.” IMDB

The film is a classic. Given an opportunity to view it on 35mm screen go for it!

Here are several excerpts from leading critics:

You know a film is powerful when it’s controversial when it opens and when a restored version is planned for re-release 25 years later, an MPAA ratings dispute over its violent images delays the re-release until it was 26 years old. Now 40 years old, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch not only retains its power, the film grows in magnificence. If re-watching it evokes anything negative, it’s the sadness that great films such as this hardly ever get re-releases anymore, affording movie fans the chance to see movies made before their time in a theater. As theaters move toward digital, it’s probably sadly passed. Still, DVD and a good home setup keep The Wild Bunch vibrantly alive, if not ideally viewed….

—- BY EDWARD COPELAND / June 18, 2009

Towards the end of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, four men walk down a street to face their destinies. Facing overwhelming odds and armed with only rifles and righteous vengeance, they don’t go for honour or glory but for the love of a friend. The walk takes them much further than the small Mexican township of Agua Verde. It takes them into the realm of myth where they fulfil their dream of becoming the legendary outlaws that they always wanted to be…

—- BY MIKE SUTTON / February 21, 2006

In an early scene of “The Wild Bunch,” the bunch rides into town past a crowd of children who are gathered with excitement around their game. They have trapped some scorpions and are watching them being tortured by ants. The eyes of Pike (William Holden), leader of the bunch, briefly meet the eyes of one of the children. Later in the film, a member of the bunch named Angel is captured by Mexican rebels, and dragged around the town square behind one of the first automobiles anyone there has seen. Children run after the car, laughing. Near the end of the film, Pike is shot by a little boy who gets his hands on a gun.

The message here is not subtle, but then Sam Peckinpah was not a subtle director, preferring bold images to small points. It is that the mantle of violence is passing from the old professionals like Pike and his bunch, who operate according to a code, into the hands of a new generation that learns to kill more impersonally, as a game, or with machines….

—- BY ROGER EBERT / September 29, 2002

The Wild Bunch feels like the culmination of all Westerns, a wrapping up of every gun shot and dust-blown hero cliche into an all too personal epitaph. Opening in an anonymous Texan town with its rutted streets, children playing free and Temperance Union, the view shifts to a column of soldiers. At the head rides Pike Bishop (William Holden), plainly the leader, next to his right-hand man Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine). However, as soon as the group moseys into the local railroad office they whip out shotguns and start grabbing money – this is no military force, they’re a gang of outlaws! With a minimum of fuss (“If they move, kill ’em”) they load up and prepare to move out, until the lookout notices something suspicious – the glint of sunlight off of a gun barrel on a nearby roof-top. It sure looks like an ambush to Pike….

Centering on US transition from lawless Wild West to superficially civilised East, The Wild Bunch uses Pike and his gang as epic symbols. The entire crew, even Angel on his first raid, reflect the disconnected ways of the American frontiers, where individuals could break the law with impunity. The coming of the telegraph and automobile changed all of this, showing Pike and Dutch for the tired men that they are. Running alongside these changes is the theme of loyalty, the bond formed between men on the edge of society. Every one of them is dangerous, sometimes psychotically so, but they can laugh, whore and drink together. The sweeping changes visible in the children loitering on the edges of violence reflect how these attitudes are archaic – no longer will mere friendship be enough…

—- BY DAMIAN CANNON  / 1997 UK
It’s astonishing how harrowing “The Wild Bunch” is, more than 25 years after it blasted its way onto the big screen to become maybe the best shoot-’em-up ever made, the one that turned meanness into a haunting pictorial poetry and summed up the corruption of guilt, old age and death in the American fantasy of the Old West.

It’s an exciting thing, an event, to see director Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 classic again, to be worn down by it, yet to feel the pulse of it, forebodingly calm one minute, pumping like shotgun blasts the next. The film is in your face with a leathery, sun-beat and guilt-crippled bravado…>

—- BY PETER STACK / Friday, August 18, 1995