Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ is savage poetry; one of the great masterpieces of world cinema — cinephiliabeyond.org

Indulging a creative and, to a degree, noble and socially responsible desire to shatter the nurtured illusion of violence in the westerns as idealized, innocent cowboys-versus-Indians gunfighting, Sam Peckinpah decided to take the subject in his own hands and show the world a piece of stylistically enhanced truth about what it meant to be an outlaw in the bloodthirsty days of the old West. Peckinpah’s idea of The Wild Bunch was to put the audience right in the middle of the brutality, bathe the viewers in blood and gore, terrify them and make a statement on the hunger for violence that hides somewhere deeply ingrained in human nature. Written by Walon Green and the director himself, developed from a story designed by Green and Roy N. Sickner, and starring the great William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan at their all-time best, The Wild Bunch is a groundbreaking masterpiece of revolutionary historic value. The film’s inspiringly creative editing conducted by Peckinpah and talented youngster Lou Lombardo influenced the next generation of filmmakers, while the original use of cameras with different frames per second, with their footage later cut together like nothing the world had seen before, gave some crucial scenes the feeling of elasticity of time. Throughout the film Peckinpah weaves an underlying idea of the western era coming to an end, just like John Ford masterfully did in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and he does it so efficiently that you get the feeling in your gut that what you have before you is the final relevant chapter in the history of the genre, the acutely disturbing and surprisingly honest closing lines of a story that gave us so many pleasures over the years.

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