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The Wild Bunch
Technique!
1969
Review: January 8, 2007
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Starring: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates
I would recommend that.
THE SETUP:
Outlaws find that the Old West of their day doesn’t exist anymore.
DISCUSSION:
I thought long about whether I should write about watching this movie at all, because I wasn’t particularly thrilled and there are 70 million other, better things written about it. I even wrote the first few paragraphs, then tossed them out. Then I decided that the wonderful thing about reading is that if you don’t want to read it, you don’t have to, so if you don’t want to read this, by all means, go off and find some more meaningful source of information about this movie.
We open with these guys in Army outfits coming into town. This is during an extended credit sequence that takes up the first five minutes. They pass by a bunch of cute kids playing—and we see that what the kids are doing is putting a scorpion atop an anthill, so the powerful scorpion is overpowered by all the smaller, lesser animals. Wait a minute—metaphor sense is tingling!
After about seven more shots of the scorpion than we need we also see that there is some religious revival or whatnot going on. The guys go into the train station and—they’re robbers! They hold up the station, but see folks with guns on the building across the way. At last they run out and there is a huge shootout that lasts five minutes. It is full of exciting editing and crosscutting between different film speeds, the kind of thing that was hugely influential and has become common in almost every action movie that has come since. Most of them escape.
Then these two scavengers come out to steal from the bodies, and we are a little shocked at the low mental level of these folks, and also that the movie is “realistic” enough to include them. Then the crooks collect themselves and find that—it was a setup! All they got was bags full of washers! So they went through all that for nothing. “We gotta start thinking beyond our guns,” William Holden as Pike says, announcing the theme of the movie: that the time of the outlaw is dying out, the world is modernizing and has no more room for them.
We have also met Duke Thornton, played by Strother Martin [of Cool Hand Luke and Sssssss], who used to be Pike’s partner but was abandoned, went to jail, and now is being forced to help hunt Pike.
Around this time they settle in for an extended sojourn in Mexico. Now, I haven’t mentioned this yet [and I didn’t mention it to the friend I was watching it with until the movie was over], but this version of the film had 25 minutes that were re-inserted because it’s just such a classic. I’m absolutely sure that some of those 25 minutes were here in this Mexico scene, and so I feel a little bad that this is where the movie lost me [and my friend]. It’s just sit around and yak, sit around and yak, sit around and yak. And it goes on forever. I got really bored, and I never fully regained interest in the movie. I would have been MORE than happy to watch the version without the extra minutes put back in.
So there’s this whole Mexican general—you know what, I’m not even going to go into it. Soon enough there is a car, and the guys give their responses to seeing their first automobile [replacing the horse, ways of the outlaw dying out, etc.], and get hired to steal a bunch of artillery from a train. The train heist was great—suddenly the film starts getting tight and interesting again—although for me, I had pretty much been lost for the remainder. In the train heist, which is done very well and contains a lot more of that very exciting editing I was telling you about, the guys pick up a machine gun, which is something no one else except the Army has. The whole sequence from the beginning of the train heist to the mechanics of the Bunch’s escape is just A+ action filmmaking. I totally fell for it when the cart the Bunch is escaping on gets stuck on the bridge where the dynamite has already been lit and is going to blow at any moment. And during suspense sequences like that, one becomes aware that this movie can be seen as a statement on all of the Western films and serials that have come before.
When they guys come back they are in the middle of this war, only I could not tell who was fighting whom and what it was all about. That’s another distancer for the first-time viewer here: there are long stretches where one has no idea what is going on. Or at least me and my friend didn’t. It all build to this big showdown that features more of the quick cuts and variable film speeds this thing has been showcasing all along.
Neither me or my friend were moved. A lot of this is due to the fact that neither of us are really subject to the allure of the Western, which tend to be a lot like gangster movies: it’s all about honor and strength and betrayal, with a million minor characters all angling to get ahead, and numerous plot complications. And personally, I just don’t find that compelling. I listened to bits of the commentary, and one of the guys quotes another critic who says that in order to appreciate the film, you need to be intimately familiar with the history of the Western, and I suspect that to be true, and this seems to be such a revision and commentary on everything that has come before—which I am not familiar with. And don’t really care to become familiar with.
The main thing to know, I understand from reading stuff about this movie later, is how influential it was on all action filmmaking that followed. The whole thing where you’ll have a quick shot of a gun followed by a slow-motion shot of a character falling, followed by a sudden long shot, followed by… you’ve seen it in a thousand movies since, and we are to understand that it all originated here. Yay.
The commentary presents about four guys all competing to offer the very best bon mots and outdo each other with their unique understanding of the film. You get insights such as the black and white of the credits speaks to views of the world as good and evil, right and wrong. Woah. We also hear that “the train represents the corruption of the West” and such things that may make some groan and roll their eyes. One of the commentors has a theory that the film is an “epic simile,” and loses no opportunity to tell us that, prattling on, without really saying much, as we build up to the climax of the credits and the other guys are obviously itching to get a word in. It’s the kind of commentary that tells you that this film has its fanatics, but goes less far to convince the uninitiated why they should care.
So there ya are. If you’re into Westerns—go for it. If not, there are other Peckinpah movies, like The Getaway, that can give you a taste of the technique in a story some might find a bit more compelling. It’s always disconcerting when a film is supposed to be great-great and one just doesn’t see what the big deal is. Nevertheless, I say: big deal.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you can get into Westerns.
