The Wild Bunch (1969)

Sam Peckinpah's revisionist Western epic is venerated for its astute end-of-an-era nostalgia, the hard-boiled action spectacles, a trenchantly felt brotherly camaraderie and the go-for-broke self-assurance that bluntly depreciates mortality into triviality. Bestriding the frontier between USA and Mexico, THE WILD BUNCH takes place in the early 20th Century when a modern revolution is heralded by the advancement of railroads, a novel machine gun and an archetypal automobile, that soon will drive horse-riding to the verge of obsoleteness. The Mexican desert is still expansive and awe-inspiringly impressive, particularly against the golden rays of a westering sun in a panoptic arrangement, but its inhabitants are dogged by civil wars, and our titular bunch of gringo trigger-happy gunslingers (save for one Mexican, Angel) are aiming for one last bountiful swag before time is running out on their old games. Opening with a grandiosely rowdy shootout when the bunch robs a railroad office, Peckinpah makes on bones about decimating innocent bystanders during the helter-skelter crossfire, and often shows the carnage through children's excited eyes, cross-cut with the shots of a scorpion dropped onto an anthill, devoured by ants, then set on fire altogether by these rubbernecking kids, Peckinpah hammers home to us that violence is an elemental impulse that resides inside every human being, a constituent of our original sin, the process of deglamorizing and demystifying it is very much against the tenet of the genre it denotes, and contributes a perspicacious tonic to give the dying form one last hurrah!After the ambush, only six living souls have survived, with a posse of bounty hunters breathing down their necks, led by Deke Thornton (Ryan), the erstwhile parter of the gang's leader Pike Bishop (Holden), it all seems like the usual cat-and-mouse chasing game, but it isn't. The sextet crosses the Rio Grande and soon hatches a plan to steal a shipment of weaponry from a USA army train and sell them to General Mapache (Fernández, crassly rebarbative) of Mexican Federal Army in exchange of gold coins, a time-honored ploy of selling massive-killing weapons to an embattled country for monetary gains, a scourge attendant with the entire human history. The team makes a triumphant derring-do to wrest the arms even with Thornton's posse giving chase unexpectedly (culminated by a bridge detonation money shot), but bad blood (both personally and politically) between the young Angel (Sánchez, doesn't degrade his character into a racial cliché) and General Mapache turns their success into a jittery impasse when Angel is captured and physically tortured under the order of the callous Mapache, with paycheck securely in their hands, will the rest of the bunch leave one of them in the lurch? At one point, Peckinpah archly teases us that it would be the case, since Pike has no qualms in deserting his long-time gang member Freddie Sykes (O'Brien) when the latter is shot (not fatally) by one of Thornton's men. But inexplicably, or maybe under the influence of post-coital blues, the remaining gang of four: Pike, his right-hand man Dutch Engstrom (a game Borgnine) and the two Gorch brothers (Oates and Johnson, often saddled with comic crassness), valiantly makes their final request of releasing Angel, which ultimately set off a kamikaze 4-versus-200 pitched battle (consonant with Peckinpah's philosophy on violence, human shields are frequently employed, a luscious girl can be liquidated if she dares to shoot behind one's back), but before all that, an utterly left-field moment crops up which perfectly elucidates what is the unthinkable and almost droll calm before the tempest, this is Peckinpah's most staggering coup de maître! A robust ensemble made of nearly exclusively by men, William Holden exhibits a true leader's flair competently and compassionately, weather-beaten, bedeviled by the guilty of choosing expediency in the face of danger, he makes the death wish roundly poignant and rousing which otherwise very likely would plunge into empty heroism if someone hams it up. Robert Ryan, counterpoising his ostensible villain designation, is pregnant with a sublime tint of self-resignation, world-weariness and fatalism, only seeps a vestige of hope amid the plaintive coda, of a pièce-de-résistence which finds the perfect equilibrium between idealism and praxis.

Yawn... It was a struggle to sit through this film - two and a half hours of nothing. The shootout is about as exciting as it gets, and even then it is incredibly dull and uninteresting.I honestly can't understand the 'classic' label that this Western has seemingly earned. I confess that I'm not a great fan of Westerns, but the others I've seen have at least been somewhat engaging - this one was just plain boring.Some people may love this sort of film, but it just wasn't my cup of tea. I could have watched paint dry for two and a half hours and found it just as interesting.

Bill Holden is by far the star of this picture, he delivers and absolutely outstanding performance. Truly Legendary. Bill has for the most part of his career if not all of it played a laid back can't be bothered who cares what the hell type of character. The wild bunch is a film about some outlaws who are fully aware that their time has run out. When somebody says he knows somebody with a new fangled flying car they know their time has passed and the new world is not for them. The film is all about the value of a man's loyalty to his companions. If you find it hard to like a person you ride with your nothing more than an animal because at the end of the day all they have is the loyalty toward each other. The try to rescue one of their Mexican comrades but it just goes to show that those who live by the gun die by the gun. I will say some additional good performances by the support cast including O'Brien, Ryan, Borgnine, Oates and Johnson.

I've been looking forward to this one a long time, expecting a brutal western full of senseless bloodshed and what not... and I can't really say I'm disappointed!Putting William Holden in the lead was a great idea - looking like a civil enough guy. Ernest Borgnine has always been one of my favorites 'old-timers' anyway, so it was fun to see him here as well. Warren Oates played a terrific role, even if (or exactly because) he got the short end of the stick here all the time.The opening scene is instantly classic. I don't know if anyone had done such a thing before (freezing frames and switching between present and past), but I'm sure lots of directors got their inspiration here.Apparently, some people don't care for the heavily accentuated characters and humour at times (who gets that last drop of whiskey?), but it didn't feel out of place to me. The finale could be dismissed for the same reasons, but I don't think it deserves to be - at all.A big 8 - or a small 9 out of 10... what do you think?