Featured Movies
Partners
Wild Bunch, The
Quintessential essay in violence and masculine virtues from Sam Peckinpah. A bloody, incredibly orchestrated revisionist western that sees William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and sundry desperado colleagues facing up to the passing of the raw world they know
After nearly five years in the Hollywood wilderness, having fallen out with the studio during the shooting of Major Dundee, Sam Peckinpah returned to directing with this bloody tribute to his beloved West. Pike (William Holden), Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), the Gorch brothers (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), Angel (Jaime Sanchez) and Sykes (Edmond O'Brien) are the doomed outlaws of the title. The film captures their last hurrah, with the lengthy pursuit by a posse of bounty hunters led by Pike's old friend-now-rival Deke (Robert Ryan), bracketed by two of cinema's great action sequences. The final shoot-out in particular, employing a dazzling montage of perspectives, glorious slow-motion footage and an absurd quantity of blood-squibs, is an unmatched scene of glorious cinematic violence. Peckinpah would never again quite reach the heights of this, his elegiac masterpiece, but with it he managed to breathe some life into the flagging western genre, and counter the traditional western mythology of Ford, replacing it with a revisionist mythology of his own making. This is a haunting, beautiful and moving film and has lost none of its potency over the years. (And any film that makes members of a test audience actually vomit with shock and disgust, as The Wild Bunch reputedly did, must be something special.) Verdict One of the great artistic achievements of the 20th century. And a bloody awesome western to boot! |
