The Wild Bunch (1969)

The first movie shown at the new movie club I’m in that I hadn’t actually seen before. It was a bit of an experience watching this film, it’s not what most of us were expecting. Though I was aware of the films reputation for being quite violent and was thusly braced for that, I must say that I found the first 20-30 minutes or so extremely off putting. The violence must have been quite a shocker for its time, and today still registers as particularly nervy. The shear audacity of the opening sequence, a robbery attempt in which who the good guys and who the bad guys are never feels clear (a theme actually throughout the movie) and civilians are viscously slaughtered in the streets. The film memorably comments on its self with images in the opening showing little children settings scorpions amid a colony of fire ants, and later setting burning sticks atop the insect conflict; children playing with violence, quite a metaphor, but who director Peckinpah is indicting is not entirely clear, though he himself would be a good candidate.

The film starts to get a little humanity when the defeated group of outlaws make their way down to Mexico for safety, and we start to get a little character development, with William Holden’s Pike Bishop getting the most attention. None of the characters are particualry likable and this is intentional because as I see it the film is about amorality and its consequences. Pike and his gang take a job stealing a shipment of guns from an American military train to supply a Mexican warlord and his German backers with further means of inflicting misery on others (the train robber in fact is the most fun scene in the movie). Even after having spent time in villages raided by this warlord, knowing him to be an awful man, his backers to be suspect, and in effect being asked to engage in treason against there own government, Pikes gang does the deed (only their Mexican member Angel expresses real reluctance, and he agrees on the condition that he can deliver one of the crates of guns to the Generals enemies). The conflicted feelings that arise from the evil they know they have done in aiding General Mapache, and his subsequent torture of Angel for his ‘betrayal’, leads to the films bloody climax (which resembles in many ways a bloodier version of the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). An intense, in many ways unlikable movie, it does have a fair bit to say, contains some rather nuanced performances, show’s great technical skill, and gives us a sense of what a western by Tarantino might look like. So while I was far from sold at first, in the end I was impressed, challenged and entertained, so I give it a thumbs up.