——The Wild Bunch——

(A)

I’m not really sure why I didn’t take to this movie the first time I saw it. Maybe I have become so desensitized to violence that the groundbreaking sequences in this film didn’t impress me because everyone does now what they started in this film. Maybe it was because it has taken me a while to warm up to the Western genre and only now can I appreciate a film like this. This was one of the first (if not the first) Western I’ve seen in my more mature period of film viewing (i.e. since starting college). Maybe I was in a bad mood that day, I don’t know; the point is that I really missed out the first time around because this is a truly great film. As Peckinpah says several times on the documentary on the DVD, The Wild Bunch is just an adventure movie, but an adventure movie that deals realistically with its characters’ motivations. Peckinpah apparently built the film around the premise of taking a pretty standard plot (outlaws do the right thing in a climatic shoot-out) and making it work so that you actually believe these characters would have done what they did in the real world.

On second viewing the opening sequence became much more impressive in my mind. In it the Wild Bunch ride into town dressed as Army personal in order to rob a bank. What they don’t know is that it is a set up, and several men sent by the railroad are waiting to take them out. The Bunch figures out men are waiting for them and decide to shoot their way out when a temperance parade makes its way in front of the bank (which is made extremely ironic since the Bunch consumes obscene amounts of alcohol throughout the film). This shoot-out turns into a massacre as the town gets caught in the middle with seemingly no discretion taken on the part of the “good guys”. In fact they seem to be purposefully shooting the civilians, or at the very least not caring who they shoot, and in the ensuing chaos the majority of the bunch escape. This scene is meant to disgust the audience right from the get go. Right from the start Peckinpah is trying to tell us this is not a normal Western. As if to make this point double clear the opening sequence is framed by some children throwing scorpions onto of the nests of fire ants to watch them fight. This cruelness combined with the fact that, like the scorpions and fire ants, there are no clear “good guys” lets us know what kind of film we are about to see. Finally the children throw hay on the bugs and burn them, subtly letting us in on how the film is going to end.

So why do the Wild Bunch march to their death at the end? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that there is still honor among thieves. The Bunch’s pursuer once rode with them. There is an admiration between the two main men. And yet the pursuer is on the outside now, a betrayer of their cause, and that relationship becomes a metaphor for the attitudes of the whole bunch. “We do it right and we do it together, or we don’t do it at all.”

And yet that mentality only takes them so far. They don’t rush to help their captured Mexican ally right away, and feel more that they owe it to him more than anything else. And then once they shoot the general and everyone else holds up there hands there is this moment between the Bunch where they laugh because they know at this moment they could get away without anything happening to them. But then they also know they can take it all too. In a blaze of glory they try to achieve the impossible, and almost do it too, killing an impossible number of Mexican troops before finally succumbing themselves. It’s all about the symbolic nature of the act. These are men who time has passed them by. Industrialization and modernization is coming to the West, and Texas is suddenly getting smaller. Mexico is in the middle of a revolution itself. They are running short on time, and their kind isn’t long for the world. They know this so they try to take one last grab at glory. They need that one last score. Most of these men want to retire anyway, and they need to make one last stand to show that they are the best. It doesn’t turn out well for them, but their point has been made in a brilliantly stunning film filled with exquisitely composited scenes, amazing uses of lenses (including probably some of the best use of a zoom lens I’ve seen) and editing that still impresses today with its ferocious intensity.