Monday Movie Review: The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch (1969) 8/10
Aging outlaws (including William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) have outlived the Old West, but still cling to a life of bank and train robberies, even as cars and machine guns make their appearance. Directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Sometimes you’ll see a fanboy say that so-and-so must “hate comics” (or whatever the subject matter is) because so-and-so criticized them fiercely. I saw this recently in Bond fan circles when those opposed to Daniel Craig’s casting were dismissed as “haters” and “not real Bond fans” by enthusiasts of the choice. But to criticize something in minute detail, you have to love it. There’s simply no way to absorb and understand the minutia without affection.

Peckinpah must have loved Westerns, and he must have loved violence, but The Wild Bunch is also a bitter criticism of both.

I’ve never seen The Wild Bunch before, but it’s impossible to be a film fan without reading both the praise and the criticism. Peckinpah, it’s said, adores and adulates violence; he makes it a dance, and he makes it gruesome to an unprecedented extend. Even in 2006, it’s obvious when watching The Wild Bunch that it depicted a violence the genre had not seen before. And while it is easy to be offended by the spurting fountains of blood, it’s impossible not to know that the film seeks to acknowledge a truth about brutality. Peckinpah wasn’t the first to see a kind of poetry in a dying lawman falling off his horse, that had been around for years; instead he was the first to see (and film) both the poetry and the ugliness in the same lawman falling off his horse. This is a message to those who love to watch the deaths of those lawmen, a message about what it might really be like. Indeed, I have no idea if big gushes of blood are any more realistic than no blood at all, never having seen an actual lawman shot off his horse, but the blood sends a message that bloodlessness does not.

There are no beautiful outlaws in The Wild Bunch. William Holden was certainly beautiful as a young man, but he is not glamorized here. Indeed, our outlaws are introduced in World War I era Army uniforms, and if ever there was an uglier, more sexless uniform, I don’t know it. It’s like a mockery of (and reference to) John Wayne wearing his iconic Civil War uniform in The Searchers. If Holden is unbeautiful, try standing him next to Borgnine, and that’ll really drain the pretty out. Ain’t an Eastwood in the bunch, I tell you.

There are no good guys here, and indeed, it’s hard to know for whom to root. The opening shoot-out is like an ode to the meaninglessness of choosing a side. In a later extended sequence across multiple battles, Mexican general Mapache fights it out with Pancho Villa. Our outlaws are working for Mapache, but he is a brute, and is hated by a Mexican outlaw whose village he destroyed. Meanwhile the U.S. Army, our outlaws, bounty hunters, and railroad men are all in a gun-battle in which nobody seems to be on anybody’s side.

Our “heroes” are definitely not heroic either. Certainly Holden’s Pike has a sense of honor, as does Borgnine’s Dutch and Edmond O’Brien as Sykes. But they also leave their dead for the buzzards and brutalize whores, whom they then underpay. (This is a very misogynist movie.) We are meant to sympathize with these men, but not to like them.

Peckinpah avoids iconic scenes. [SPOILERS AHEAD] Our heroes are not killed heroically. Pike gets his in the back from a woman he has used and then abused. Dutch is shot by a child. The nasty bounty hunters are killed in a way that would be iconic, except that it happens off-screen, and is uncelebrated.

To me, all this adds up to a dark critique of the Western mythos, of celebrating gunfighters, whether outlaws or lawmen, and of imagining there is any romance in their lives.

Interestingly, The Wild Bunch was made the same year as another movie about outlaws seeing the end of the Old West, pushed out by determined railroads and new technology. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a comedy, but the theme is the same, and the title “The Wild Bunch” was, historically, coined by Cassidy himself.

(I think we’re gonna need a bigger cross-post.)