The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch is a 1969 American epic revisionist Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates. The plot concerns an aging outlaw gang on the Mexico–United States border trying to adapt to the changing modern world of 1913. The film was controversial because of its graphic violence and its portrayal of crude men attempting to survive by any available means.[2]
This article is about the 1969 Western film. For other uses, see Wild Bunch (disambiguation).The Wild Bunch
- Walon Green
- Sam Peckinpah
- Walon Green
- Roy N. Sickner
Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
- June 18, 1969
145 minutes
United States
English
$6 million
$11 million[1]
The screenplay was co-written by Peckinpah, Walon Green, and Roy N. Sickner. The Wild Bunch was filmed in Technicolor and Panavision, in Mexico, notably at the Hacienda Ciénaga del Carmen, deep in the desert between Torreón and Saltillo, Coahuila, and on the Nazas River.
The Wild Bunch is noted for intricate, multi-angle, quick-cut editing using normal and slow motion images, a revolutionary cinema technique in 1969. The writing of Green, Peckinpah, and Sickner was nominated for a best screenplay Oscar, and the music by Jerry Fielding was nominated for Best Original Score. Additionally, Peckinpah was nominated for an Outstanding Directorial Achievement award by the Directors Guild of America, and cinematographer Lucien Ballard won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cinematography.
Regarded as one of the greatest films of all time,[3][4][5][6][7][8][9] The Wild Bunch was selected by the Library of Congress in 1999 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".[10] The film is ranked 79th on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American films and the 69th most thrilling film.[11] In 2008, the AFI listed 10 best films in 10 genres and ranked The Wild Bunch as the sixth-best Western.[12][13]
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
In April 1965, producer Reno Carrell optioned an original story and screenplay by Walon Green and Roy Sickner, called The Wild Bunch.[14]
In 1967, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts producers Kenneth Hyman and Phil Feldman were interested in having Sam Peckinpah rewrite and direct an adventure film called The Diamond Story. A professional outcast due to the production difficulties of his previous film, Major Dundee (1965), and his firing from the set of The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Peckinpah's stock had improved following his critically acclaimed work on the television film Noon Wine (1966).
At the time, William Goldman's screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had recently been purchased by 20th Century Fox. An alternative screenplay available at the studio was The Wild Bunch. It was quickly decided that The Wild Bunch, which had several similarities to Goldman's work, would be produced to beat Butch Cassidy to the theaters.[15][16][17][18]
Writing[edit]
By the fall of 1967, Peckinpah was rewriting the screenplay and preparing for production. The principal photography was shot entirely on location in Mexico, most notably at the Hacienda Ciénaga del Carmen (deep in the desert between Torreón and Saltillo, Coahuila) and on the Nazas River.[19] Peckinpah's epic work was inspired by his hunger to return to films, the violence seen in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), America's growing frustration with the Vietnam War, and what he perceived to be the utter lack of reality seen in Westerns up to that time.[20][21]
He set out to make a film which portrayed not only the vicious violence of the period, but also the crude men attempting to survive the era. Multiple scenes attempted in Major Dundee, including slow motion action sequences (inspired by Akira Kurosawa's work in Seven Samurai (1954), characters leaving a village as if in a funeral procession, and the use of inexperienced locals as extras, would become fully realized in The Wild Bunch.[20][21]
Themes[edit]
Critics of The Wild Bunch note the theme of the end of the outlaw gunfighter era. For example, the character Pike Bishop advises: "We've got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast." The Bunch lives by an anachronistic code of honor that is out of place in 20th-century society. Also, when the gang inspects Mapache's new automobile, they perceive it marks the end of horse travel, a symbol also in Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970).[33]
The violence that was much criticized in 1969 remains controversial. Peckinpah noted it was allegoric of the American war in Vietnam, the violence of which was nightly televised to American homes at supper time. He tried showing the gun violence commonplace to the historic western frontier period, rebelling against sanitized, bloodless television Westerns and films glamorizing gunfights and murder: "The point of the film is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut ... it's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing, and yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we're all violent people." Peckinpah used violence as a catharsis, believing his audience would be purged of violence by witnessing it explicitly on screen. He later admitted to being mistaken, observing that the audience came to enjoy rather than be horrified by his films' violence, which troubled him.[34]
Betrayal is the secondary theme of The Wild Bunch. The characters suffer from their knowledge of having betrayed a friend and left him to his fate, thus violating their own honor code when it suits them ("$10,000 cuts an awful lot of family ties"). However, Bishop says, "When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can't do that you're like some animal."[35] Such oppositional ideas lead to the film's violent conclusion, as the remaining men find their abandonment of Angel intolerable. Bishop remembers his betrayals, most notably when he deserts Deke Thornton, in flashback, when the law catches up to them and when he abandons Crazy Lee at the railroad office after the robbery, ostensibly to guard the hostages. Critic David Weddle writes that "like that of Conrad's Lord Jim, Pike Bishop's heroism is propelled by overwhelming guilt and a despairing death wish."[36]
Critical reception[edit]
Critical reaction in New York was mixed, with four reviewers with favorable reviews and three with unfavorable opinions, although there was debate as to whether the New York Post's Archer Winsten's review was mostly favorable despite asking "was this violence necessary?".[45] Vincent Canby began his review in The New York Times by calling the film "very beautiful and the first truly interesting American-made Western in years. It's also so full of violence—of an intensity that can hardly be supported by the story—that it's going to prompt a lot of people who do not know the real effect of movie violence (as I do not) to write automatic condemnations of it."[46] He observed, "Although the movie's conventional and poetic action sequences are extraordinarily good and its landscapes beautifully photographed ... it is most interesting in its almost jolly account of chaos, corruption, and defeat". About the actors, he commented particularly on William Holden: "After years of giving bored performances in boring movies, Holden comes back gallantly in The Wild Bunch. He looks older and tired, but he has style, both as a man and as a movie character who persists in doing what he's always done, not because he really wants the money but because there's simply nothing else to do."[46]
Time also liked Holden's performance, describing it as his best since Stalag 17 (a 1953 film that earned Holden an Oscar), noting Robert Ryan gave "the screen performance of his career", and concluding that "The Wild Bunch contains faults and mistakes" (such as flashbacks "introduced with surprising clumsiness"), but "its accomplishments are more than sufficient to confirm that Peckinpah, along with Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn, belongs with the best of the newer generation of American filmmakers."[47]
William Wolf for Cue magazine found no merit in the film and gave it a two sentence dismissal and Judith Crist of New York magazine was also negative about the film.[45]
In a 2002 retrospective Roger Ebert, who "saw the original version at the world premiere in 1969, during the golden age of the junket, when Warner Bros. screened five of its new films in the Bahamas for 450 critics and reporters", said that, back then, he had publicly declared the film a masterpiece during the junket's press conference, prompted by comments from "a reporter from the Reader's Digest [who] got up to ask 'Why was this film ever made?'" He compared the film to Pulp Fiction: "praised and condemned with equal vehemence."[48][49]
"What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969," wrote film critic Michael Sragow, who added that Peckinpah had "produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa: the Gotterdammerung of Westerns".[50]
Today, the film holds a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 8.8/10 based on reviews from 66 critics with its consensus stating, "The Wild Bunch is Sam Peckinpah's shocking, violent ballad to an old world and a dying genre".[51]
The Wild Bunch was cited as cinematographer Roger Deakins's favorite film,[52] and film director Kathryn Bigelow named it as one of her five favorite films.[53] In the 2012 BFI poll for The Greatest Films of All Time, The Wild Bunch received 27 votes from critics and directors such as Michael Mann, Paul Schrader and Edgar Wright.[54]
Decades later the American Film Institute placed the film in several of its "100 Years" lists:
The film is ranked No. 94 on Empire magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Films of All Time.[4] In 1999, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.[59] In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed The Wild Bunch as the 23rd best-edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership.[9]
In 2006, the script for the film was selected by the Writers Guild of America as one of the 101 best screenplays of all time.[8] The Wild Bunch is also ranked as the 63rd best-directed film of all time by the Directors Guild of America.[7]
In 2003, The New York Times ranked the film as one of The 1000 Best Movies Ever Made.[5] The National Society of Film Critics also included The Wild Bunch on their list of 100 Essential Films.[6]
Documentary[edit]
Sam Peckinpah and the making of The Wild Bunch were the subjects of the documentary The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage (1996) directed and edited by Paul Seydor. The documentary was occasioned by the discovery of 72 minutes of silent, black-and-white film footage of Peckinpah and company on location in northern Mexico during the filming of The Wild Bunch. Michael Sragow wrote in 2000 that the documentary was "a wonderful introduction to Peckinpah's radically detailed historical film about American outlaws in revolutionary Mexico—a masterpiece that's part bullet-driven ballet, part requiem for Old West friendship and part existential explosion. Seydor's movie is also a poetic flight on the myriad possibilities of movie directing."[60] Seydor and his co-producer Nick Redman were nominated in 1997 for the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).[61]
Remake[edit]
In 2005, David Ayer was reported to be in final negotiations to direct and write a remake of The Wild Bunch. Jerry Weintraub would produce and Mark Vahradian would executive produce. The remake would be a modern reinterpretation of the original, involving heists, drug cartels and the CIA.[62]
On January 19, 2011, it was announced by Warner Bros. that a remake of The Wild Bunch was in the works.[63] Screenwriter Brian Helgeland was hired to develop a new script. The 2012 suicide of Tony Scott, who was scheduled to direct, put the project in limbo.[64]
On May 15, 2013, The Wrap reported that Will Smith was in talks to star in and produce the remake. The new version would involve drug cartels and follows a disgraced DEA agent who assembles a team to go after a Mexican drug lord and his fortune. No director has been chosen, and a new screenwriter is being sought.[65]
In 2015, a Hollywood insider website announced that Jonathan Jakubowicz was set to write and direct a remake. "Our sources also tell us that the remake will update the story to a contemporary setting, revolving around the CIA, dangerous drug cartels, and a thrilling heist against the backdrop of the Southern California-Mexico border. Jakubowicz will be working from previous drafts submitted by David Ayer and Brian Helgeland."[66]
In 2018, it was announced that Mel Gibson would co-write and direct a new version of The Wild Bunch.[67][68]