 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. Director Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch, a powerful tale of hangdog desperados bound by a code of honor, rates as one of the all-time greatest Westerns. In 1994 it was restored to a complete, pristine condition unseen since its July 1969 theatrical debut - and this digitally remastered anamorphic transfer showcases it to renewed blood-and-thunder effect. Watch William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan and more great stars saddle up for the roles of a lifetime. Storyline: In the Wild Bunch the movie opens with a group of aging outlaw's final score, a bank robbery. The event concludes with a violent and overtly bloody shootout that would generally mark the finale of a movie. This is correct in that it marks the finale of an era, for the characters and the world they live in. They simply can no longer keep up, the times are changing, technology advancing, and they're style of life is getting left behind in the dust that they spent so long galloping through. They abandon their careers for the simpler life of retirement. They enjoy this time, they live their fantasies. During this time the law is always on their tracks, bounty hunters. The further into their fantasy they get, the closer their demise seems to get. When one of their own is captured they are faced with the choice of escape or what is certainly a suicide mission to attempt and free their fallen behind comrade. For them it is not a choice. They all die in what can only be described as a ... Written by VilanTrub@gmail.com Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben on August 31, 2011 -- What can one say about The Wild Bunch that hasn't already been said? Like Citizen Kane, 2001 and other cinematic masterpieces that have so transformed the way we look at films that there's almost a visible line between their before and their after, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch has been pored over, written about, dissected frame by frame and so thoroughly absorbed into world cinema that it's inescapable. Take any major filmmaker from the last forty years, and chances are that Peckinpah is in there somewhere, either directly or through someone he influenced. Admire Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Oliver Stone or (God help you!) Michael Bay, and you're a Peckinpah fan, whether you know it or not. Not that Peckinpah would necessarily be pleased with his reputation. A notoriously irascible and contradictory man, he was already objecting to being so firmly linked in the public mind with fast editing and graphic violence while he was still making films. He was capable of so much more, but whenever he tried to branch out, no one bought tickets. (I yearn for the day when we get a Blu-ray edition of the criminally underseen Junior Bonner.) And while Peckinpah's goal in The Wild Bunch may have been to show the ugly consequences of violence, filmmakers who followed have seldom been as deliberate as he was when it came to melding his techniques with a morality tale teeming with biblical overtones (Peckinpah's mother was devoutly Christian). In The Wild Bunch, the adrenaline jolts are always followed by a sickening aftermath. Today they're more likely to be followed by a joke. The Wild Bunch tells its story at numerous levels, and part of the film's brilliance is that it does so with such seeming ease that much of it is received subliminally. You're not always fully aware of everything you're being told, but you feel it all the same. As much as both the film and its director are commonly associated with the cinematic expression of violence, in fact there are only three major action sequences in the nearly two and half hour running time. Viewers looking for a non-stop thrill ride may be disappointed, because what occurs between those action sequences is often steady, deliberate and focused on character interaction of the kind that has largely disappeared from mainstream moviemaking today. The action sequences, when they occur, chart key points on a dramatic arc -- several of them, in fact -- for which the character interactions provide essential build-up. At its most basic level, the film tells the story of an outlaw gang led by Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his faithful second-in-command, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine). Other key members are the Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), plus a Mexican national, Angel (Jaime Sanchez). The gang is larger when the film opens, but it loses a lot of members in an attempted holdup of a railroad office, when they're ambushed by a mob of bounty hunters hired by a railroad security man named Harrigan (Albert Dekker), who has a grudge against Pike after years of successful robberies. The ambush leads to a bloody shootout, killing railroad employees, local law enforcement and numerous innocent civilians from a temperance meeting, but Harrigan doesn't care. All he cares about is that Pike got away. He orders the top bounty hunter, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), the only one who has a clue what he's doing, to lead the remaining bounty hunters to pursue Pike. Meanwhile, Pike and the survivors have rendezvoused with their supply man, Sykes (Edmond O'Brien), and are riding toward Mexico, where they will try to find "work" and stay one step ahead of Thornton. Thornton's presence adds an additional level. It's no accident that Harrigan wanted him for this job, because Thornton and Pike used to be partners. In a remarkable piece of editing that falls shortly after Thornton begins his pursuit, the two men "share" a recollection of how their partnership ended when they were surprised by detectives while celebrating a score in a hotel room. Pike escaped, but Thornton was injured, captured and sent to jail. Harrigan bailed him out and will send him back unless he gets Pike, dead or alive. Thornton would rather be riding with Pike than with "gutter trash" (one of his favorite phrases) like Coffer and T.C. (Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones), surely the most repugnant duo of comic scavengers ever to grace the screen. But Thornton gave his word, and like Pike he believes in keeping it. (Pike and Dutch have a heated argument about this.) Pike has his own pair of troublesome doubters questioning his leadership in the Gorch brothers. The relationship between Pike and Thornton, both literally and as mirror images of each other, raises difficult questions that bounce back and forth throughout the film. Is Pike hunting himself? Is he trying to outrun himself (if that's even possible)? What will Thornton do when he catches up to Pike, join him or kill him for abandoning Thornton to the law? Indeed, Thornton's presence is a constant reminder that Pike, for all of the loyalty he seems to inspire in people like Dutch and Sykes, has leadership skills on a par with General Custer. He's constantly leading people into terrible situations, whether it's Thornton in the hotel room, or the gang in the railroad office robbery (from which they gain nothing), or the train robbery that occupies the middle of the film. The robbery is a job they undertake for General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), a would-be Mexican strongman who needs U.S. army weapons to fight Pancho Villa. The robbery goes fine, but Pike agrees to give some of the weapons to Mapache's enemies, which doesn't go so well. If you start scrutinizing Pike's decisions, a whole different level of The Wild Bunch emerges, and it's one that's largely unspoken. Much of it plays out across William Holden's expressive features in such scenes as the extended sequence where the gang visits Angel's village, which has been devastated by Mapache's troops. It is the only place where we see them welcomed with warmth and genuine emotion, even though, as a village elder (Chano Urueta) makes clear, everyone knows who and what they are. In these brief hours, Pike glimpses (and perhaps considers) a different kind of life than the one he has led, a phenomenon that is not uncommon as people feel the years slipping by. Some of the major decisions that Pike makes in the latter half of the film are best understood in light of Pike's consideration of these roads not taken and the resulting determination to hew more closely to the road that he did choose. And finally, as if to reinforce the sense of time slipping away that a man of Pike's age feels, there's a general sense in the film of a new era that's rapidly eroding the only way of life that this gang of outlaws knows. One of the most interesting scenes is General Mapache's first entrance . . . in an automobile. After the general exits the vehicle, Pike and the bunch slowly approach the foreign object with wonderment and curiosity. Only Pike recognizes what it is, and he has to explain it to the others. The American West they knew is quickly being replaced by the age of ever-expanding railroads, cars and, shortly, airplanes ("It'll do sixty miles in an hour!" Pike exclaims). Shortly there will no more place for outlaws of their breed, which is why, at the end of the film, the few who have survived remain in Mexico, where things are still disorganized and chaotic enough to provide opportunities. "It ain't like it used to be", says one of them. "But it'll do." As much as I would like to see an entirely new transfer of The Wild Bunch with the latest technology and techniques, the current version is perfectly serviceable and certainly bests any version I've seen theatrically or at home in the last two decades. It comes with a wealth of fine supplements and represents the film far better than can be said of many great world classics. It's a film that every film enthusiast should see and that every serious collector should own, especially at current prices. With the caveat that someday you will be buying this film again (and it will be worth it), this Blu-ray edition is highly recommended. [CSW] -2.2- I was completely put off by the director's decision to have the Mexicans speak a lot of Spanish and to purposefully not include subtitles for them. Also the gang members seem to be the only expert marksmen. Time and again they survive against overwhelming odds, as their opponents cannot seem to shoot straight, while they pick off bounty hunters and Mexicans with ease, until only the sheer numbers against them eventually do them in. We also get the false stereotype of the gang somehow being 'noble' killers, even though they gun down innocents left and right- merely if they get in the gang's way, while Mexican Mapache (meaning raccoon) and the bounty hunters are 'bad' killers because they are simply not part of the gang- the film's focus. It was beautifully shot by the cinematographer, which probably added tremendous value at the time, and even though later films did a better job it still holds up well. I feel that many perceive it as a great film simply by virtue of the fact that for the first time with the amount of blood and skin shown it allowed for a full view of the misogyny, racism, and gratuitous violence that had so long lay beneath the surface of the old-style western. It is on the American Film Institute's top 100 American films for 1998 and 2007, with ratings or 80 and 79 respectively and as such I will keep it in my library, but for me this is a once-is-enough film. Cast Notes: William Holden (Pike Bishop), Ernest Borgnine (Dutch Engstrom), Robert Ryan (Deke Thornton), Edmond O'Brien (Freddie Sykes), Warren Oates (Lyle Gorch), Jaime Sánchez (Angel [as Jaime Sanchez]), Ben Johnson (Tector Gorch), Emilio Fernández (Gen. Mapache [as Emilio Fernandez]), Strother Martin (Coffer), L.Q. Jones (T.C), Albert Dekker (Pat Harrigan), Bo Hopkins (Clarence 'Crazy' Lee), Dub Taylor (Rev. Wainscoat), Paul Harper (Ross), Jorge Russek (Maj. Zamorra). IMDb Rating (07/25/14): 8.1/10 from 54,937 users IMDb Rating (02/13/12): 8.1/10 from 39,178 users Top 250: #212 IMDb Rating (10/15/07): 8.1/10 from 18,756 users Top 250: #152 IMDb Rating (08/01/04): 8.1/10 from 4,632 users Top 250: #142
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