Blood & Glory

A look at The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s classic Western,on its 50th anniversary. Violence would never be the same again

- Mary Kaye Schilling

W.K. STRATTON WAS 13 WHEN THE WILD BUNCH was released in 1969. Like a lot of kids living in small towns in that pre-internet time, he found that movie theaters were a prime option for escape. And in director Sam Peckinpah’s radical Western, he was transported to a landscape of “agony and dirt,” says Stratton, author of the new book, The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film (Bloomsbury). “The way the violence was portrayed really got my attention.”

Visceral, bone-crunching brutality is so common today that it’s hard to fathom the effect The Wild Bunch had on its first audiences. The film was polarizing—equally reviled (a few early viewers reportedly left the theater to throw up) and celebrated. Many in a new generation of filmmakers, including George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, were thrilled and inspired by it. Quentin Tarantino has called the final shoot-out “a masterpiece beyond compare.”

Peckinpah’s innovative quick-cut editing (of a mind-boggling 330,000 feet of raw footage) and his use of slow motion introduced a new vocabulary to violence, with that final sequence a near ballet of bullets and blood. And though Sergio Leone had introduced in 1964 what’s come to be called the dirty Western—with A Fistful of Dollars starring Clint Eastwood— Peckinpah’s Oscar-winning screenplay (written with Walon Green and Roy N. Sickner) added existential layers: the angst of encroaching corporate America (via the railroads) and the ultimate meaninglessness of the lives of the film’s central outlaws: Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), the Gorch brothers (Ben Johnson and Warren Oates) and Angel (Jaime Sanchez)—as merciless a bunch of “heroes” as American cinema had produced.