54) The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Starring: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sanchez, Emilio Fernandez

Kate and I have an understanding where I am to use the times when she is out to watch films I know she will have zero interest in seeing, that way she doesn't feel like she's missed out. So I figured I was in the clear today with Sam Peckinpah's famously violent western The Wild Bunch.

After a robbery gone wrong results in the death of a number of their gang, the Wild Bunch, led by Pike Bishop (Holden), head across the border to Mexico to hide out. They are being pursued by a rag-tag bunch of bounty hunters led by ex-Wild Bunch member Deke Thornton (Ryan), who has been let out of prison on the condition he help catch them. Bishop and his close friend Dutch Engstrom (Borgnine) decide their time is almost up and they decide to do one more big job and then retire. Mexican tyrant General Mapache (Fernandez) offers the Wild Bunch 10,000 dollars in gold to cross over the border and steal a train load of weapons from the American military. The outlaws accept the offer but then have to grapple with the notion they are providing the means by which this tyrant will continue to oppress the Mexican people.

There are a number of similarities between the story lines of The Wild Bunch and another great Western which came out in 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was much lighter in tone and glorified the film's two protagonists, The Wild Bunch took a much darker, grittier and confronting approach. While both films have been hailed as classics, Peckinpah's film was swept up in a cloud of controversy upon it's release.

What really made The Wild Bunch so controversial was the film's depictions of violence. Bonnie and Clyde had come out two years earlier and had raised the bar to a degree in terms of on-screen violence, but Peckinpah took things to a whole new level with The Wild Bunch. The film is bookended with two large scale shootouts; the first taking place in a busy street after a bank robbery and resulting in the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the last a bloodbath battle between the Wild Bunch and the Mexican army. These shootouts were on a scale unseen in films at the time. The film's final shootout used an estimated 90,000 rounds of blank ammunition (marketing for the film boasted that The Wild Bunch used more bullets than the real Mexican revolution).

But it was not just the scale of the gun battles that made them significant, it was how graphic they were. Peckinpah was determined that the gunshots look real. He insisted the actors wear squibs (small explosives filled with fake blood used to simulate gunshots) on both sides of their body so that the camera could capture both an entry and an exit wound. Unsatisfied with the look of the squibs he then had them packed with more fake blood plus small pieces of raw meat to make the explosive wounds more substantial. His confronting use of violence earned Peckinpah the nickname 'Bloody Sam' and was a feature of not only The Wild Bunch, but many of his notable films including Straw Dogs, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (the film for which Bob Dylan wrote Knockin' on Heaven's Door) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

In my blog on The Last Detail I talked about Hal Ashby as being a director who really personifies that 1960s/1970s Hollywood Renaissance era, but who's drug addiction (arguably just as much as sign of the times) ultimately destroyed his career. Sam Peckinpah is a similar figure. Peckinpah's vice was alcohol (which perhaps adds some significance to the opening scene of The Wild Bunch in which a Temperance Union group unknowingly march into the middle of a bloody gun battle). His alcoholism, and later drug issues, made him quite difficult to work with and there are a number of accounts of on set altercations between Peckinpah and his crew (22 crew members were sacked during the making of The Wild Bunch alone). As respected and admired a talent as he was, much like Ashby his unreliability which stemmed from his alcoholism started to become an issue for studios who were uncomfortable with the notion of handing the reins over to him. He died at the age of 59 from heart failure.

The influence of The Wild Bunch can be strongly felt in films like Scorsese's Taxi Driver and De Palma's Scarface, both of which culminate in a bloody shootout, and when watching the opening credits of The Wild Bunch it is hard not to draw parallels with the opening titles of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Sam Peckinpah was a hugely influential director, arguably a director whose true importance to the history of cinema lies in the works that he inspired even more so than the works he created. Without Peckinpah would Scorsese be Scorsese? Would Tarantino be Tarantino? To quote the Italian director Carlo Carlei, "The influence of Peckinpah comes to me filtered by other directors I like who were influenced by him... There is a chain of inspiration like The Bible. Everything comes from Peckinpah when talking about shooting scenes. Other prophets tried to perfect it and are part of an evolution."

Obviously on-screen depictions of violence have come a long way since 1969, so the big shootouts that bookend the film don't quite have the same shock value today that they did in when the film first came out. In general, the things which made The Wild Bunch shocking aren't shocking to us today. But fortunately the things which made The Wild Bunch an excellent piece of filmmaking; the well constructed set pieces, the rapid editing style, the strong characters, remain in tact.