The Wild Bunch

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Tagline

Suddenly a new West has emerged. Suddenly it was sundown for nine men. Suddenly their day was over. Suddenly the sky was bathed in blood.

Outlaws on the Mexican-U.S. frontier face the march of progress, the Mexican army and a gang of bounty hunters while they plan a robbery of a U.S. army train. No one is innocent in this ultraviolent western, gritty tale of desperation against changing times.

Internet Movie Database • Cult Movie List •

Movie: The Wild Bunch

Date: 1969

Category: Classic

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Big Stars: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates

The Wild Bunch starts off with a bunch of kids placing scorpions in the middle of a colony of ants. At first the scorpions struggle, but are eventually overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the ants. This is a few years before World War 1 and the end of an era, the lawless wild west. Ironically, when the movie was released in 1969, the Hollywood western was also dying, even if Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was riding high. The few, old scorpions were being swarmed by the more industrous ants.

Pike (Holden) and Dutch (Borgnine) are the leaders of the Wild Bunch and, as old men, want nothing more than to retire. Hence the need for one last big payoff. Trying to stop them is Thornton (Robert Ryan) - a member of the Bunch who was captured and sentenced to track them down or to spend the rest of his life in prison. Pike takes his men South to Mexico and, against his better judgement, agrees to provide arms for the army in its fight against the revolutionaries. Thornton keeps his distance, knowing that Pike’s downfall is almost inevitable. The Bunch have to be canny to avoid both capture by the US posse and double-crosses by the Mexican soldiers, but eventually a showdown must happen.

Two extremely violent gunfights bookend the film. And while, The Wild Bunch may signal an end to the western, the film helps usher in an age of graphic violence onscreen. Violence that is neither gratuitous or for show, but as the results and consequences of the actions of men. In a different era, the men of The Wild Bunch would have been folk heros, but in a modern age, they're relics and not without guilt.

Director Sam Peckinpah, know for his depictions of violence in films also directed Straw Dogs and Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.