“We gotta start thinking beyond our guns. Those
days are closing fast.” – Pike Bishop
No one made films like Sam Peckinpah. Tough, uncompromising, violent, nihilistic. He was a filmmaker
unafraid to explore the darker aspects of human nature and often with a
romantic streak. The Wild Bunch
(1969) is all this and more – a no holds-barred western about a group of men
being pushed to the margins of society because of the changes of the modern
world circa 1913. Their way of life was no longer tolerated by the powers that
be – if it ever was. The film follows a tight-knit group of outlaws with
nowhere to go, pursued by one of their own to the inevitable bloody conclusion.
When The Wild Bunch debuted in 1969, Peckinpah’s innovative use of
multi-angle, quick-cut editing that mixed normal and slow motion imagery was
recognized as revolutionary. Along with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Peckinpah’s film also helped usher in a
new era of explicitly-depicted on-screen violence – something that we take for
granted now but shocked audiences at the time. More importantly, The Wild Bunch is a romantic lament for
an era that was no more – the life and times of the Outlaw Gunfighter.
Right from the get-go,
Peckinpah establishes a cruel and uncaring world as symbolized by a group of
children that delight in torturing a scorpion by immersing it among hundreds of
ants. This imagery is meant to foreshadow the film’s protagonists who will soon
find themselves surrounded on all sides by forces determined to destroy them.
The film cuts back and forth from the children to a group of outlaws disguised
as soldiers robbing a bank, the posse of bounty hunters waiting to ambush them,
and a temperance union parade.
Peckinpah cleverly uses
editing to increase the tensions until the inevitable confrontation when
everyone is caught up in the ensuing chaos of the shoot-out. He doesn’t shy
away from the ugliness of the violence even if the slow motion carnage gives it
a stylish, cool vibe. We get innocent civilians gunned down (one is shot
multiple times) in the middle of the street. Both outlaws and bounty hunters
meet untimely ends. Amidst all the pandemonium, Peckinpah lingers on one outlaw
– Clarence “Crazy” Lee played with memorable zest by Bo Hopkins – who forgets
about the carnage raging outside the bank and decides to lead his hostages in a
song. By the time he realizes what’s going on he’s killed but not before taking
a few bounty hunters with him.
Unlike many of his imitators,
Peckinpah lingers on the aftermath of the shoot-out. There are bloody dead
bodies littering the street while women cry and wail over loved ones. He even
injects some grim gallows humor as two of the bounty hunters (Strother Martin
and L.Q. Jones) argue over who shot whom and therefore entitled to the spoils
only to quickly make-up (“C’mon, T.C. Help me get his boots.”). They take great
delight in pillaging the dead bodies.
Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan)
leads the bounty hunters and gets into a heated argument with Pat Harrigan
(Albert Dekker), the railroad representative who sprung the hired gun from
prison to catch the outlaws he used to ride with, and gives him an ultimatum:
“You’ve got 30 days to get Pike or 30 days back to Yuma. You’re my Judas goat,
Mr. Thornton.” I love the fiery exchange between these two men because it not
only illustrates Harrigan’s naked greed but also that Deke isn’t an amoral
mercenary like the other men in his crew. He follows his own code or at least
tries to as it conflicts with Harrigan’s mandate. At least Deke has the balls
to tell Harrigan what he thinks of the man: “How does it feel? Gettin’ paid for
it? Gettin’ paid to sit back and hire your killings with the law’s arms around
you. How does it feel to be so goddamn right?” Harrigan gives a smug smile and
simply replies, “Good.”
Emerging from the deadly
shoot-out is Pike Bishop (William Holden), the leader of this tight-knit group
of outlaws, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), his right-hand man, the Gorch
brothers – Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson), and Angel (Jaime Sanchez), the newcomer. They attempt to put as much distance between them and
the bank robbery as possible with Deke and his bounty hunters in hot pursuit.
They cross the border into Mexico and take refuge in Angel’s village. Peckinpah
not only uses these sequences to convey his love for the Mexican people and
their way of life but also make a political commentary on how the corrupt
government, as represented by General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), exploits and
oppresses the people.
That’s not to say there aren’t moments of levity as we see the Gorch brothers enchanted by a beautiful Mexican girl, which even makes Pike laugh. The town elder wisely tells him, “We all dream of being a child again. Even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all.” These scenes are important because they humanize Pike and his gang and show that they are much more than just hardened killers. They are capable of enjoying the simple pleasures in life.
One of the most fascinating
aspects of The Wild Bunch is the
dynamic between the outlaws. With the exception of Angel, these men have been
together for a long time, through thick and thin and this is evident in the way
they interact with each other. For example, Lyle and his brother feel that they
should get more of the loot than Angel because he’s new to the group. It goes
against the way they’ve always done things and Pike confronts them by saying,
“I don’t know a damn thing except that I either lead this bunch or end it right
now.” As dangerous as Lyle is, not even he dares cross Pike and the look he
gives him leaves little doubt that Pike can back up his threat.
Pike is barely keeping his
gang together and life isn’t getting any easier as they discover that their
“loot” is a bunch of steel washers instead of silver coins. Pike realizes that
they have to re-think the way they do things as he tells his gang, “We gotta
start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast.” The situation eventually
defuses itself and everyone ends up laughing about it all. These guys bicker
and fight amongst themselves but at the end of the day they are loyal to each
other because in this world that’s all they have. These men have spent their
lives killing and robbing – it’s all they know but they have no regrets about
it either.
The Wild Bunch becomes a battle of wills between two former
friends now antagonists, both with their own personal code and something to
prove. With Pike, it is the desire to pull off one more lucrative score like he
did back in the day. For Deke, it’s to prove that he can outsmart his former
cohort in crime and a chance to be a gunfighter for a little longer.
William Holden does some
excellent work in this film as a tough man struggling not only with his own
mortality but keeping a group of Alpha Males together. In private moments, the
actor portrays a man who has doubts and fears. Pike is a dying breed. He’s
getting old and knows that he doesn’t have many heists left in him. He has to
make these last ones count. He is a man who’s led a tough life but on his own
terms. He also has his own personal code, which he says during another dispute
with the Gorch brothers: “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 kind of animal. You’re finished! We’re finished! All of us!” It is this personal
code and a strict adherence to it that ultimately leads to the demise of him
and his gang for he’s bound by a sense of honor.
Ben Johnson and Warren Oates
are very good as the fun-loving Gorch brothers. They love drinking and
carousing with women almost as much as they love stealing money with one
feeding off the other. Always the memorable performer, Oates, in particular, is
quite colorful as the irascible, unpredictable half of the duo and just as
adept at spouting period dialogue as he is using body language as evident in
the scene where everyone in the gang takes a swig from a bottle of alcohol
while he watches in mounting frustration until he’s finally given it – now
empty. Ernest Borgnine turns in another solid performance as Pike’s confidante
and best friend. He also acts as a sounding board, not afraid to give Pike an
honest opinion. Like his friend, Dutch believes in loyalty and the actor’s
natural charisma helps make his character likable.
Special mention goes to L.Q.
Jones and Strother Martin as the dirtiest and most cowardly mercenaries. They
attack their respective roles with gusto and without a hint of vanity. They
look horrible and provide a lot of comic relief, always blaming each other when
their gang makes a mistake, which is often. Bo Hopkins has a memorable cameo as
an enthusiastic psychopath working for Pike. He’s unhinged in a darkly humorous
way and it’s fun to watch the actor chew up the scenery for his brief amount of
screen-time.
The climactic battle is a
master class in editing and an impressive orgy of slow motion carnage that is a
spectacle to behold. From the point of Angel’s death, there is little dialogue,
no catchy one-liners or cheesy puns – just full-on, unadulterated mayhem as
only Peckinpah could orchestrate. The body count is extensive: people are shot
and blow-up with men and women killed – some intentionally and some caught in
the crossfire. It is also a fitting conclusion for men that led violent lives. There’s
something simultaneously fatalistic and heroic about the Wild Bunch’s march
towards certain death. It is also very influential, going on to inspire similar
epic showdowns in action films like John Woo’s Hard-Boiled (1992) and Christopher McQuarrie’s The Way of the Gun (2000), but they all pale in comparison.
In 1967, Sam Peckinpah needed
work. Producer Kenneth Hyman asked him to rewrite a screenplay entitled The Diamond Story. If his work was
accepted he could direct it as well. Instead, Peckinpah submitted another
script he had re-written to Hyman entitled The
Wild Bunch, written by Walon Green from a story by Roy Sickner, a stuntman
and a longtime friend of Peckinpah’s. Green and Sickner had spent a couple of
years trying to get their script made with no luck until the latter gave it to
Peckinpah. Warner Brothers decided to have Peckinpah direct The Wild Bunch rather than The Diamond Story.
According to Green, Peckinpah
polished the dialogue, making it “saltier,” and gave it a “more authentic
Western ring.” Green wasn’t happy with the changes Peckinpah made to the
Mexican village scene, which was originally done entirely in Spanish and
featured Angel without the rest of the Wild Bunch. Peckinpah also added two
flashbacks: the capture of Deke in a whorehouse and Pike’s love affair with a
married woman.
When it came to casting,
Hyman wanted Lee Marvin to play Pike and Peckinpah agreed. According to the
director, the actor wanted to do it but was offered a “fucking million-dollar
contract to do Paint Your Wagon,” and
did it instead, much to Peckinpah’s chagrin. The director liked William
Holden’s performance in Stalag 17
(1953) and cast him as Pike. For the role of Dutch, Hyman wanted Ernest
Borgnine and at first Peckinpah disagreed because he hadn’t worked with him
before and wanted to “be sure of everybody,” but the producer convinced him to
cast the actor.
Peckinpah hired Lucien Ballard for director of photography and together they screened footage of the
1913 Mexican Revolution so that when they scouted locations they picked ones
that captured the dry, dusty look he wanted. Another crucial collaborator was
editor Lou Lombardo who had worked on an episode of the television show Felony Squad that featured a death
sequence rendered in slow motion. Peckinpah liked that and the two men talked
about shooting gunfights at various speeds and intercutting normal speed with
slow motion.
At the end of February 1968,
Peckinpah left for Mexico to finish up casting and a last few production
details. This included meeting his good friend Don Emilio Fernandez who
suggested Jorge Russek and Alfonso Arau to play Mapache’s lieutenants. Even
more significantly, Fernandez read the script and offered a suggestion for the
opening scene as Peckinpah recalled: “…suddenly he says to me, ‘You know, the
Wild Bunch, when they go into that town like that, are like when I was a child
and we would take a scorpion and drop it on an anthill…’ And I said, ‘What!’
And he said, ‘Yes, you see, the ants would attack the scorpion.’” Peckinpah
loved this idea and rewrote the opening scene to incorporate it.
Not surprisingly, Peckinpah
was a demanding director and there are many anecdotes of his antics during
principal photography. Strother Martin remembered before the opening shoot-out
Peckinpah wanted him to kiss his rifle. Martin refused because he thought it
had been done too many times in films and the director yelled at him to do it.
Martin did what he was told and when he finally saw the finished scene realized
that “Sam had managed to get a different kind of kiss of a rifle than anybody
else has ever gotten. He got it, of course, because I was scared shitless and
mad at the same time.”
For the opening shoot-out, Peckinpah
used as many as six cameras at the same time with some going 24 frames per
second and some going faster to create the slow motion effects. Lombardo began
editing a work print of this sequence and when he was finished it ran 21
minutes! Peckinpah took a pass at the sequence and cut it down to five minutes,
retaining “the essence of every action we had but fragmented and intercut it
all,” Lombardo remembered.
Peckinpah was a director that
didn’t suffer fools gladly as William Holden recounted in an interview
regarding a scene that featured Pike and his gang, which was particularly
challenging. It was a long scene and everyone had dialogue but nobody knew
their lines, assuming there’d be plenty of time to get it right on the set.
Holden recalled:
“Sam said in this very calm
but menacing voice: ‘Gentlemen, you were hired to work on this film as actors,
and I expect actors to know their lines when they come to set. Now I’m willing
to give you twenty minutes, and anyone can go wherever he wants to learn his
lines. But when you come back, if you can’t be an actor, you will be
replaced.’”
Holden remembers that this
sent the cast scurrying to learn their lines and it was a memorable example of
Peckinpah’s demand for professionalism.
The climactic shoot-out took
11 days to film. Peckinpah employed five cameras at the same time. It was very
challenging because of the interlacing action that involved filming the
foreground and then repeating it again for the background so that everything
would match up. It was a very complex sequence to orchestrate due to the amount
of action and the large number of extras.
Initially, the MPAA gave The Wild Bunch an X rating but Peckinpah
and Lombardo argued that if they took a “particular segment out, it thrown off
something else. They somehow understood most of that and allowed much of what
we argued for to remain.” The studio previewed the film in Kansas City and
Lombardo remembered, “The crowd turned out to be either completely for or
completely against the film. And the ones who were against it were more violent
than the film itself!” The Wild Bunch
underwent final editing before general release.
The film was then shown at a
special screening for the press in the Bahamas in June 1969. Not surprisingly,
it polarized the audience with some people walking out in protest during the
screening. At the press conference the next day, it continued to garner divisive
reactions with Roger Ebert calling it “a masterpiece,” while Reader’s Digest’s Virginia Kelly saying,
“I have only one question to ask: why was this film ever made?’ The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote,
“In The Wild Bunch, which is about
men who walk together, but in desperation, he [Peckinpah] turns the genre
inside out. It’s a fascinating movie.” In his review for Time magazine, Jay Cocks wrote, “The Wild Bunch contains faults and mistakes, but its
accomplishments are more than sufficient to confirm that Peckinpah, along with
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn, belong to the best of the newer generation of
American filmmakers.” The New Republic’s
Stanley Kaufman wrote, “[There is] a kinetic beauty in the very violence that his
film lives and revels in…The violence is
the film.”
After The Wild Bunch was given a general release, the studio decided to
cut 20 minutes out because it wasn’t doing as well as they had hoped. All the
flashbacks were cut, removing “the thing which humanized the characters. I
couldn’t believe it,” Peckinpah said. In 1995, the flashbacks were restored to
the film thereby allowing audiences to see his intended vision.
The Wild Bunch is about a group of men facing their own
mortality. Their way of life is rapidly ending and they plan to go out doing it
their way or die trying. In contrast, Deke’s gang are a bunch of filthy liars
and cowards that are loyal to no one but money. They’re lazy and Peckinpah
makes a point of showing close-ups of their leering faces full of grungy,
missing teeth and beady eyes.
The Wild Bunch has all the elements of a rousing western:
exciting gun fights, chases on horseback, a daring train heist, colorful
characters, and the shoot-out to end all shoot-outs. Epic shoot-outs bookend the film. The first one sets the tone for the rest of
the film and establishes the protagonists and the antagonists. The last one is
their last hurrah – aging gunfighters with nowhere else to go and making a
choice to go out on their terms. In the first one, they killed for money and in
the last one they killed for one of their own. This is summed up beautifully
towards the end when Pike decides to rescue Angel from insurmountable odds and
tells the Gorch brothers, “Let’s go.” Lyle sizes him up for a beat and then
replies, “Why not?” That’s all that needs to be said because we’ve watched
these men through the entire film fight, laugh and get drunk together. They’ve
been in life or death situations that bond them forever.
The Wild Bunch is about men willing to die for what they
believe in and for Pike it is loyalty. His gang of outlaws are like brothers.
That’s why nothing explicitly has to be said at the end. It is understood that
when Pike says, “Let’s go,” that means let’s take on General Mapache and his
army knowing that they will die in the process but at least they will do so on
their own terms.
SOURCES
Simmons, Garner. Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage.
Limelight Editions. 1998.
