Directed by: Sam Peckinpah
Starring:William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan
Genre: Western
IMDB
This short review may be the object of some controversy. As a disclaimer, all the films on this list are on it because they are great, so my reviews can’t help but compare them together a bit. A film may be great, but in the scheme of a list of the 1,000 greatest films of all time, it may be only good in comparison. So here’s the crux of this review; The Wild Bunchis a ‘great’ Western, yet it is merely a ‘good’ film. Let’s begin with the first part. Peckinpah is the man. There really is no way around it. The Wild Bunch makes you the man. Straw Dogs instills you with the ability to bed any woman on Earth. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia gives you the strength and balls to wrestle and subdue a grizzly bear… and this man made those three films within 5 years of each other (with Junior Bonner thrown in for good measure). The Wild Bunch has badass, slightly unhinged men engaging in epic gun battles, swearing like sailors and drinking like fish. The desert scenery is shot absolutely beautifully and the story moves along at a lightning pace. It is in my top 5 Westerns ever made and if it’s not in yours, there is something wrong with you. “If they move, kill em”… it doesn’t get any better than that!
But… a great film it is not; and here’s my take on why. The Wild Bunch is one of the most controversial films ever made because when it came out, it horrified moviegoers. Picture living in the U.S. in the summer of 1969. The previous week you had seen Sergio Leone’s new Western Once Upon a Time in the West. “It was great”, you think to yourself, “but the violence was a bit over-the-top”. You see a poster in the window for another Western by a director you don’t recognize. “Maybe I’ll try that one”, you say to yourself. If this was you in the summer of 1969, you walked out of The Wild Bunch within the first 2 minutes, and you weren’t alone. The slow motion deaths and realistic bullet damage were unheard of at the time. Not to mention that more people bite it in the first 5 minutes of The Wild Bunch than in the entirety of Once Upon a Time… But here’s my point, what thrilled and, yes, repulsed audiences back then seems commonplace and tame to us now. The violence no longer pulls us in as it did audiences at the time, and for us, the rest of the film becomes more vivid; and it stumbles because of it. Because we aren’t shocked by the violence, we can better see that the characters aren’t really all that fleshed out and the plot muddles in the last 45 minutes. Sure Holden and Ryan are great, but they’re no John Wayne in The Searchers. They’re certainly no Clint in Unforgiven. And that’s really the difference. The Searchers and Unforgiven are great Westerns, but they’re also great films. None of this is to disparage The Wild Bunch though. It’s a better film than probably 85% of the films ever made, but we’re dealing with the cream of the crop here and I feel I should judge the films with that in mind. Despite that, I have a great time every time I pop this in, and it remains one of my favorites.
