Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) must be a bit of black sheep for a lot of Western fans. When this genre started out morality was portrayed in a very binary way, with the bad buys wearing black hats and getting shot during an honourable duel by the good guys who were of course wearing white hats. As cinema grew, so did the Western. The line between right and wrong became blurry, especially when Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone introduced Clint Eastwood as a more or less good guy doing bad things to even worse people. However, in Peckinpah’s ultraviolent take on the Western the protagonists are irredeemable bad guys and the people chasing them are definitely not wearing white hats. I’m guessing John Wayne would not have been a fan.
We are now almost a
year into the global pandemic and in my part of the world things are so bad I’m
not even allowed to go in the streets at night. The good news is at-home
entertainment is years away from drying up, and I even found yet another way to
watch movies from my list. Cineplex is a cinema chain, and their doors are
currently closed, but their website gives users the option to buy or rent
movies. This includes classics like The Wild Bunch, which lucky me I had
enough points to watch for free. I still look forward to paying to see movies
on the big screen though. Westerns are typically filled with sweeping desert
shots, train robberies, and horseback chases, which is best experienced on a screen
the size of a small house.
The Wild Bunch has a lot of the typical Western elements, but the
opening shots of children playing with scorpions being overrun by fire ants
quickly lets viewers know things are going to go off the beaten path. For one
thing the action is set in 1913, when the cowboys and gunslingers were becoming
a thing of the past. Pump action shotguns, automatic pistols, machine guns,
grenades, and fancy automobiles have made their way to the West. One character
has even heard of a machine that can fly off the ground, as though it was some
sort of myth.
With all this new
technology comes more bloodshed, and a lot of blood is shed in the movie’s
opening gun fight when a gang of bandits tries to rob a railroad office. There
is no silver-star wearing sheriff there to stop them, but rather a bunch of
trigger-happy bounty hunters who have no qualms about shooting civilians who
get in their way. The outlaws are not much better, since throughout the movie
they either use women as a human shield or shoot them out of jealousy.
If the outlaws, led by the
ageing Pike Bishop (William Holden), have a redeeming trait it is their sense
of camaraderie. This is a gang of killers who have been robbing their way
through the West for years, and they try to live by a certain code. Bishop’s
best friend Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) places a lot of importance on giving your
word and much more to who you give your word. The gang’s ex-partner Thornton (Robert
Ryan) gave his word to the railroad company that he would help capture the gang
to stay out of prison, which is Dutch’s idea of immoral. The old phrase “no
honour among thieves” is pushed to the limit in this movie.
Something else you don’t
usually see in Westerns is the age of most of the members of the gang. For a bunch
of thrill-seeking outlaws, they are getting a bit long in the tooth. A pain in
the leg is getting so bad for Pike that he is having trouble getting on his
horse. He knows his best days are behind him, so naturally he wishes to pull off
the proverbial one last score and back off. Dutch however wonders “Back off to
what?”. It’s not like outlaws in Westerns usually have retirement plans.
I read that Peckinpah’s
goal with the onscreen violence, which is significant, was to shock audiences
with a raw depiction of gunshots and their effect. Unlike the bloodless
Westerns he was watching on TV, he didn’t want viewers to have a good time when
a character got shot repeatedly. You can’t say he achieved his goal since today
there are much more violent movies out there, and audiences do enjoy watching
them.
What he did manage to do is make a Western like no other. I have seen a lot of Westerns, both with the old school morality of John Wayne and the grey morality of Clint Eastwood, and I had never seen anything like The Wild Bunch. Through Peckinpah’s camera lenses the American West is not filled with noble sheriffs and cartoonish bandits, but with violent criminals and bounty hunters who will pick the pockets of the civilians they shot by accident. It’s not a poetic depiction of the West, but it’s certainly a bold one.
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