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Directed by: Sam Peckinpah Starring: William, Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan Undoubtedly Peckinpah's greatest work, THE WILD BUNCH is a reworking of the classic western narrative. Like THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, it shows technology's intrusion into the West and the dying breed of western outlaws. William Holden plays Pike, an ex-Army officer who has turned to the life of an outlaw (the good-bad man). The aging Pike, along with a great ensemble (Borgnine stands out with his performance as Dutch), plan one last heist before retirement. Sparing the results, the group goes out on their own terms, a fitting end. The film was released right around the time of the My-Lai massacre in Vietnam and was viewed as a caustic condemnation of the war, which is easy to see when looking for it in the film. For 1969, there is tremendous amounts of violence, but the violence looks almost like a ballet, and it is not gratuitous. Ultimately, I think this film can be viewed as a quasi-pacifist film. The editing in this film is astounding packing in a crazy amounts of shots (3000+) into the manageable length. The quick cuts also served the film well during the shootouts to give the sense of confusion that war has. I also really enjoyed the opening scene where the credits roll in a stop-frame polarization effect. If Warner remakes this film, I'll be very angry. RATING: 5 PROS: Editing, Action, Reinvention of the west CONS: A tad long, hard to follow at times ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065214
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Feb 23, 2005 05:10
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 04:35 |
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I don't think this is Peckinpah's best (either Straw Dogs or Alfredo Garcia could qualify), but it's become the film that is most associated with his style and his way of thinking about violence. The opening sequence is brilliant, but I feel the rest of the film fails to keep up with it. He was trying to condemn violence, but I think he ended up glorifying it through the mythology of the western by accident. He definitely learnt his lesson though, because his later films were much more unapologizing in the way they depicted violence, and there really can't be any mistake about what he was trying to say with them. This was really the first film of his "Peckinpah" films, where he got really creative and intelligent with his filmmaking, but it's not quite as accomplished as some of his work from the seventies.
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Feb 23, 2005 05:26
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