Review of The Wild Bunch (1969) by Davey M — 24 May 2009

The crossroads where the Peckinpah of "Ride the High Country" and the Peckinpah of "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" meet--in many ways it's a classical western, even as it creates a foundation for all the anti-westerns to come, and the casting of the weathered Hollywood stars is perfect.

The violence is what it's remembered for, and that's understandable--even forty years later, this is easily one of the most violent films I've ever seen (though still, despite the accusations of Peckinpah's naysayers, he doesn't dwell on the violence: the deaths are shot and edited with a powerful sort of realist-expressionism, with the slow-motion, the quit cuts, the fast zooms, and the spurting blood giving as much an impression of violence as an actual depiction; no one captures the deep sadness of death quite like Peckinpah).

But just as important as the brutality and the blood are the scenes of the bunch wandering almost aimlessly through the desert, drifting around and across the Mexican border, trying to find a place where they can belong, that create the emotional bedrock that gives the action scenes their power.

This is a story about old men with no country, about the death of a value system, however filthy it was to begin with, and, poised on the brink of the first of two world wars, the mournful, bloody, elegiac mayhem of the shootouts ultimately serves as much as anything as a reminder of the even greater (and more mechanical) slaughter that will very soon take place, and by men who would be praised as heroes rather than decried as villains.

"The Wild Bunch" has a lot in common with "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," another one of my favorite westerns and also a 1969 release--a gang of anti-heroes trying their best to survive in an era they've outlived, fleeing the border and meeting a tragic end in a brutal South American village shootout climax; both films are deeply nostalgic, but where Butch and Sundance were both classically romantic heroes, William Holden and his gang of thieves and murderers are deplorable anti-heroes.

"Butch Cassidy" is a heartfelt tribute to the death of romanticism; "The Wild Bunch," on the other hand, makes the argument that romanticism has been dead for a very, very long time (if it was ever alive to begin with), and things are only headed downhill from here.

That the film can be so pessimistic and still have such heart, that it can present such apologetically depraved men and still make us care for them, is a testament to its greatness.