#629: The Wild Bunch
The Old West may be over, but Sam Peckinpah revolutionized the Western
Initial release: June 18, 1969
Director: Sam Peckinpah
By the 20th century, the era of the Old West was effectively over. Sure, there still persisted pockets of wild space, isolated and far from civilization; but functioning society and the ever-lengthening arm of the law gradually made it impossible for the gunslingers — good and bad — to play their trade. An age of violence by hard-bitten individuals looking to survive was over; soon was to begin an age of exponentially crueler, nationalist violence around the world. Somewhere in the middle was the Mexican Revolution; for rough-riding men (and women), it was an opportunity to relive the old days — or, for some, to participate in a cause worth fighting for, especially once the dictator Victoriano Huerta took power. It was a time of brutality and ambiguity; what better backdrop for Sam Peckinpah’s legendary western, The Wild Bunch?
The Wild Bunch starts off quietly enough. A small town not far from the US-Mexico border is possessed of a bank. A group of men in Army uniforms arrives just as a meeting of the local temperance union gets underway. Children play in the street. The men are not soldiers, but outlaws, arriving in disguise with intention to rob the bank of a large quantity of silver. Unbeknownst to them, the whole thing is a trap, planted by one of their own, now under the gun and controlled by a corrupt railroad agent. The robbery goes poorly, several of the gang are killed as are multiple citizens (mostly by the railroad’s posse of mediocre bushwhackers) and the few that escape discover their loot to not be silver but instead worthless steel washers.
The rest of the film centers around the Mexican Revolution, with the gang traveling south of the border in need of money and involving themselves in the local politics, with friction between aiding the anti-Huertista rebels hiding in the hills and working for the cruel, venal General Mapache to steal guns from the U.S. Army to arm Mapache’s men with. Distrust and paranoia are the order of the day, with the gang’s leader Pike taking every measure not to get cheated by Mapache; the train robbery goes well despite the intervention of the posse, but when gang member Angel — whose village has been raided repeatedly by Mapache’s troops and who sought to buy a crate of weapons for the rebels in exchange for his share of the payment — is captured and tortured by Mapache, Pike and his men are driven by guilt to rescue him in a finale that doesn’t end well for anyone.
After all, these are not good men in Pike’s gang. They do things like use human shields, shoot hostages, argue whether the lone Hispanic member deserves an equal share, and of course commit robbery and murder. They leave Angel to die, only coming back because their guilty consciences compel them to. But this isn’t a film about redemption, Red Dead or otherwise; it’s a film about men of a dying age coming to realize that the world they grew up in is gone, and the world they’re in now doesn’t want them anymore. Pike (William Holden), Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), and the rest, are relics and they know it.
While Europe had been cranking out cynical, bloody westerns for some time throughout the 1960s, The Wild Bunch was Hollywood’s acknowledgement of the so-called spaghetti western. Like the films of Sergio Leone, The Wild Bunch is a lengthy epic, shot through with humor and yet quite grim and emotionally powerful when it needs to be. Like the films of Sergio Corbucci, it is shockingly violent by 1960s standards, with the final sequence being an exceptionally bloody affair that alienated audiences and inflamed critics. There are no heroes here, only villains of differing shades of gray. John Wayne — who forever considered himself a defender of American mythmaking and so had a singular vision of westerns should be like — even went so far as to say that Sam Peckinpah “destroyed the western.”
But as you’ve probably guessed from whenever I talk about John Wayne, I don’t particularly hold his opinions about westerns (or much else) in high regard. Rather, I think The Wild Bunch was Hollywood finally deciding to stop lying to itself about what the Old West was like — rather than a period of righteous American conquest, it was a dark time of lawlessness at the fringes of civilization. Placing the film against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution only further cements this intention, with its murky politics and state-sponsored cruelty at the eve of the War to End All Wars. There are no simple answers, no distinction between right and wrong.
But it’s also worth considering that the film’s violence is in an important message in and of itself. For years, Hollywood had been engaging in bloodless carnage, where characters would just fall over and have lengthy, dramatic death scenes. Peckinpah reacted strongly against this; in one famous incident, he grabbed a real revolver and unloaded it into a wall, screaming that that’s what he wanted — real impacts and real consequences for the kind of gunfighting that westerns were about. The Wild Bunch is consequently a bloodsoaked affair. Pike shoots a critically wounded man before he can even finish begging to be put out of his misery. Children rush en masse into the street after the failed bank robbery and go “bang! bang!” at the corpses. It’s a smiling child who delivers the killing blow on Pike. And of course the final sequence kills off nearly everyone present. Peckinpah is making a statement on the artifice of movie non-violence; that the film released in the same year as Robert Aldritch’s The Dirty Dozen (which itself took no quarter in its upending of expectations of war-movie violence) and a year after George Romero’s paradigm-shifting Night of the Living Dead was no accident: the restrictive, censorious Hays Code, long a thorn in the side of filmmakers, was effectively dead by the late 1950s, and 1968 was the year it was replaced outright by the MPAA rating system, rendering it deader than dead.
And that’s the real legacy of films like The Wild Bunch — the final nail in the coffin for the mid-century era of Hollywood, mythic and sentimental. Now was the time of cynicism and honesty; now was the time for, if not the truth, then something closer to it than John Wayne would ever have been comfortable with.
The western is dead; long live the western.
