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 This isn't an obscure movie but I didn't get around to watching it until last year and it quickly became one of my favourites. Released in 1969 by Warner Brothers and directed by Sam Peckinpah, The Wild Bunch is a violent as hell Western about an aging gang of outlaws working in the Texas-Mexico border and the band of bounty hunters chasing them. It stars William Holden  and Ernest Borgnine  along with Ben John, Warren Oates, Jaime Sanchez and Edmond O'Brien as the titular Wild Bunch, chased by bounty hunters led by their former comrade in arms, played by Robert Ryan. This movie has a reputation for being extremely violent, and it is, but most of it is concentrated in the opening and closing sequences, which are fantastic. They both have a great suspenseful buildup, and they're relatively short but extremely intense because of Peckinpah's montage shooting style. He filmed the action from a bunch of angles with cameras at different speeds and the results make time feel very elastic as the action cuts back and forth, and it went on to influence directors like John Woo.  The action bookends 2 hours of great character drama and (sometimes very dark) humour that I don't want to spoil for anyone who is new to it. William Holden in particular gives a great performance as the gang's leader Pike, an old man of honor and natural leader but also a terrible hypocrite. I was surprised to find out he was nowhere close to the first choice to play Pike because he seemed to fit the role perfectly. The movie ended up being nominated by the Academy for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score but lost both to its direct competitor, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There are some other versions of the movie floating around but I've only seen the 145 minute "uncut" version, which I've heard is the definitive one. If you haven't seen this movie please seek it out because it is really cool.  ---- The Complete Movie of the Month Listing: 1776 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | 24 Hour Party People | 8 1/2 | The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension | Aguirre: The Wrath of God | All That Jazz | American Movie | Baraka | The Battle of Algiers | Being There | Beyond the Valley of the Dolls | Bicycle Thief | Black Hawk Down | Blade | Branded to Kill | The Brave Little Toaster | Breaking Away | The Bridge on the River Kwai | Bullet in the Head | Charade | Chitty Chitty Bang Bang | The Conversation | The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover | Day For Night | The Court Jester | Death Race 2000 | Dead Man | Darkman | Detour | Devils on the Doorstep | Double Indemnity | Downfall | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | El Topo | Falling Down | A Face In The Crowd | Fanny and Alexander | Fat City | Funny Bones | Galaxy Quest | Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai | Glengarry Glen Ross | Gremlins 2: The New Batch | Horor of Dracula | La Haine | The Ice Storm | The Intruder | It's a Wonderful Life | Judgement at Nuremberg | Jumanji | The King of Comedy | Last Train From Gun Hill | The Leopard | The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp | Little Shop of Horrors | Living in Oblivion | The Long Goodbye | Love & Death | M | Masculin Féminin | Man on Fire | The Man Who Would Be King | Modern Times | Mousehunt | Mulholland Drive | My Best Friend's Wedding | My Darling Clementine | My Own Private Idaho | Naked | Outland | The Panic in Needle Park | Peeping Tom | Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Play Time | The Proposition | Punishment Park | The Pusher Trilogy | Rififi/Rashômon | The Ref | Rock 'n' Roll High School | Ronin |The Rules of the Game | Safe | Schizopolis | Son of Frankenstein | The Squid and the Whale | The Super Inframan | Sunset Boulevard | Surviving The Game | The Sweet Hereafter | The Third Man | Titicut Follies | Vampyr | The Vanishing | Videodrome | Withnail & I | The Young Girls of Rochefort | Zardoz |
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Jun 3, 2014 01:09
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 18:12 |
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 (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 3, 2014 02:00
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Greatest Western of All Time. Peckinpah is probably my favorite director, and he's really unparalleled in the genre between the likes of this, Major Dundee and Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid.
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Jun 3, 2014 22:56
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The Wild Bunch is a drat great film, especially the brutal opening and closing shootouts. Not just brutal in content, with a level of squibs that gave it an NC-17 rating upon rerelease in 1993, but in style as well. The constant cutting between action beats, with nary an instant to digest what just happened, leads to exhausting, confusing, and exciting scenes that capture just how violent these gunfights are. The film does a great job of showing how the titular bunch are the last of a dying breed, their horses and six-shooters no match for the updated firepower of cars or machine guns. Their way of life is over, but they refuse to go down without dragging as many people with them as possible.
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Jun 3, 2014 23:13
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It's an odd one too. I remember not liking it when I originally watched it. Then I saw it again a couple years ago in a theater and still wasn't feeling it until the halfway point. Suddenly, during the train robbery scene, it felt like the movie just clicked with me. I have this theory that the extras are more important characters than the main gang. I feel like Peckinpah has a lot of sympathy for these innocent people constantly caught in the crossfire of these ruthless men.
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Jun 4, 2014 13:46
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The Wild Bunch was one of the more violent westerns I've seen. And it was set in a time period where the west was ending so we see stuff like pump-action shotguns and semi-auto pistols in a genre where normally those items wouldn't be present. So they set in Mexico where, at the time, there was not only a revolution going on led by Pancho Villa but the US Army was present trying to quell the rebellion. I think this movie was a huge influence on the game Red Dead Redemption in terms of setting, themes, and tone.
Benny the Snake fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 23:07
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The violence is one of the best aspects of this movie. Westerns were, mostly, morality plays where a good guy shoots a rapacious injun who at last has the decency to die a bloodless death. Peckinpah always depicted violence as it exists: it's disgusting and decidedly *not* transformative. The thread that runs through many of his movies is that a protagonist kills to "be a man," but at the end it seems that he's not "good." I think that that's a refreshing take on *true* violence, even today. It can read as nihilistic, but I'm not sure why we accept that violence is a positive force.
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Jun 6, 2014 00:48
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The blu-ray release of this real pretty. I highly recommend getting it if you're a fan of the movie. One of my main motivations for getting a blu-ray player were westerns, and this one didn't disappoint.
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Jun 6, 2014 19:21
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nocal posted:The violence is one of the best aspects of this movie. Westerns were, mostly, morality plays where a good guy shoots a rapacious injun who at last has the decency to die a bloodless death. Because sentiments like "it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun" come from people who watched Westerns as children and internalized them as actual history.
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Jun 8, 2014 18:43
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raditts posted:Because sentiments like "it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun" come from people who watched Westerns as children and internalized them as actual history. And also that anyone can be John Wayne or Clint Eastwood with perfect aim who can shoot the gun out of an outlaw's hand from 200 feet away.
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Jun 9, 2014 18:50
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nocal posted:The violence is one of the best aspects of this movie. Westerns were, mostly, morality plays where a good guy shoots a rapacious injun who at last has the decency to die a bloodless death. The opening bank robbery is great in that regard - there's this slow build up in tension that feels like the Bunch might get away in the crowd or have some sort of traditional western shootout, but nope, the two sides just start gunning down bystanders and hostages without a second thought, and several characters on either side die before the opening even finishes. It's like a game of cinematic chicken where instead of the expected last minute swerve the heroes and villains end up dead in a head-on collision. Random thought, it always feels weird that the Wild Bunch is set almost in the exact same year as the start of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, particularly since both start with the protagonists in turn-of-the-century Army/Scout uniforms.
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Jun 10, 2014 03:49
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The opening scene, before the robbery, might be my favourite part of the entire movie. There is just this great fealing of unease as you watch the gang make their way through the town and you don't yet know who you are watching and what to think of them and then that all becomes cler with the line "If they move, kill 'em". I really love that movie.
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Jun 11, 2014 07:52
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This is on Turner Classic Movies tonight along with a number of other Peckinpah westerns worth watching.
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Jun 11, 2014 20:41
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Looks like it's on Sundance this afternoon too, but I don't get either of those channels  Guess I'll have to get it on DVD from Netflix. Like a chump.
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Jun 15, 2014 19:14
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Terrifying Effigies posted:
You are right, around 1912/13. It was obviously not intended but the end of one era, the beginning of another.
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Jun 16, 2014 15:38
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TrixRabbi posted:And also that anyone can be John Wayne or Clint Eastwood with perfect aim who can shoot the gun out of an outlaw's hand from 200 feet away. If its Eastwood he'd probably just shoot the guy instead of the gun, at least in the westerns I've seen him in anyway.
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Jun 16, 2014 19:21
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I just watched this film for the first time and I have to say that I really liked it. Personally, I absolutely loved the buildup to the final battle, with the snare drum pounding against the traditional mariachi music. You could feel that the protagonists knew what they planned to walk into. TrixRabbi posted:I have this theory that the extras are more important characters than the main gang. I feel like Peckinpah has a lot of sympathy for these innocent people constantly caught in the crossfire of these ruthless men.
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Jun 17, 2014 03:35
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I have to say one of my favorite scenes is at the very end where Deke and the rest of the bounty hunters are strolling through the carnage of the final gunfight and he finds Pike's body, his dead hand still gripping the machine guns handle and his revolver left untouched in its holster. I kind of wonder what was up with the decision to have the scene of the people in Angels village giving them a musical send-off as they ride away though? The movie telegraphs their deaths throughout the course of the story pretty hard, but that scene was just sort of beating you over the head with the idea that they were riding through their own funeral procession.
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Jun 20, 2014 17:40
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