The Wild Bunch | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The Wild Bunch (1969) was the definitive film, and only true epic, by one of Hollywood's greatest directors, Sam Peckinpah; and when it came to movie violence, it set the bar higher than it had ever been set before. Earlier Westerns had good guys and bad guys as clearly demarcated as the sides in World War II, but The Wild Bunch came out during the Vietnam War, and it better reflected that war in both its complexity and carnage. Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which ended with its two protagonists being riddled by bullets, was the first major Hollywood film to show graphic violence—to suggest that shooting someone had consequences, that it was messy and painful—but nothing could have prepared 1960s audiences for the hundreds of deaths, the wave after wave of unrelenting carnage—shown in slow motion and freeze-frame sequences—that climaxed The Wild Bunch. Seven years before the film premiered, Peckinpah was deer hunting when he shot a buck and was struck by the fact that the bullet going in was the size of a dime, yet the blood on the snow was the size of a bowling ball. He concluded that was the way violence and death were, and that was what he wanted to put on film. During filming, Peckinpah had the technicians lay thin slices of raw steak across the bags of stage blood, so when they exploded it looked like the bullets were ripping out of bodies mixed with blood and chunks of flesh. "Listen," Peckinpah said, "killing is no fun. I was trying to show what the hell it's like to get shot." He believed people would shun violence if he showed what violence was really like.

But violence in movies without flesh-and-blood characters (see almost any slasher film) is meaningless. Fortunately, Peckinpah had great characters, played by superb actors, in a strong story, acted out before beautiful vistas gorgeously photographed. As the movie opens, the audience sees a tiny band of soldiers riding into a small town, then walking into the local railroad office, as scruffy, armed men flit back and forth on the rooftops overhead. It looks as though the bad guys are about to ambush the good guys, though the reverse is true. The railroad office manager asks the lead soldier, Bishop Pike (William Holden), "May I help you?" and Pike grabs the manager, pulls him out of his chair, shoves him and another against the wall, and tells the other soldiers, "If they move … kill 'em!" These aren't really soldiers at all, but the Wild Bunch in disguise, and the men on the roof are bounty hunters, there to ambush the outlaws and collect the prices on their heads. Leading the bounty hunters is former Wild Bunch member Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan)—whose feud with Pike stems from the time they were busted by Pinkerton agents, with Thornton being shot and captured and Pike running away. Realizing they're about to be ambushed, the Wild Bunch times its departure to coincide with the passing of a parade of temperance marchers, and the resulting carnage is fairly intense.

The gang escapes to Mexico with the bounty hunters in hot pursuit. In the town of Agua Verde they cross paths with Mapache, a ruthless general at war with revolutionary Pancho Villa who has been oppressing the local natives, even murdering the father and stealing the fiancée of the Wild Bunch's one Mexican member, Angel. The gang agrees to rob a military supply train loaded with munitions for Mapache in exchange for gold, and the robbery itself is a slickly done caper, a Western Topkapi! Worried about helping Mapache get more guns, Angel agrees to participate if, instead of gold, he can take one case of guns for the revolutionaries. But Mapache finds out, and when the gang returns to Agua Verde to trade the arms for the gold, Mapache keeps Angel. At the end, the remaining outlaws decide to rescue Angel, and their fight against the soldiers provides the climactic bloodshed.

More complex than it first appears, The Wild Bunch is ultimately about redemption. Early in the film, Pike tells a gang member who wants to kill another, "We're gonna stick together, just like it used to be. When you side with a man you stay with him, and if you can't do that you're like some animal, you're finished!—we're finished!—all of us!" Yet Pike betrays this code again and again. During the original railroad office job, when Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins) tells Pike he'll hold the hostages until Pike says different, Pike just leaves him behind to die. This is brought home when Pike's oldest friend, Sykes (Edmund O'Brien), tells Pike that Crazy Lee is his grandson. When another gang member is wounded and might slow them down, Pike shoots him; even Sykes himself is expendable when he becomes wounded. At first, Angel is abandoned to Mapache and his men, but Pike has finally had enough, and, against impossible odds, he and the rest of the Wild Bunch decide to redeem themselves. They go down in a blaze of glory—and, joining the revolutionaries, the one remaining gang member and the one remaining bounty hunter ride off to fight the good fight.

Bliss, Michael. Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Carbondale, Ill., Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.

Fine, Marshall. Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah. New York, Donald I. Fine, 1991.

Seydor, Paul. Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration. Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Weddle, David. If They Move … Kill 'Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. New York, Grove Press, 1994.

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