Sam Peckinpah (1969)
The opening credits are unnerving and the first few minutes of action impressive. Somewhere in Texas, in 1913, a group of horse soldiers rides into town. Their approach and arrival there are intercut with shots of Latino children, laughing as they torture scorpions by pushing them towards hordes of fire ants, and a temperance union parade in the street outside a railroad office. The uniformed men on horseback are actually the film’s title characters in disguise – a gang of outlaws, headed by the aging Pike Bishop (William Holden) and Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine). They’re about to rob the railroad office. This will be Pike’s last job before he calls time on his life of crime.
As usual in stories centred on lawbreakers on the verge of retirement (law officers too, for that matter), things don’t go according to plan. The gang is ambushed by a posse of bounty hunters, led by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s former partner in crime. In the gun battle that follows, several of the outlaws are killed. So too are a larger number of law-abiding citizens, including members of the temperance brigade, used by Pike as a shield to enable the getaway of what remains of his gang. The loot from the robbery turns out to be a hoard of metal washers rather than the silver coin the robbers expected. Pike’s retirement is put on hold. He, Dutch, the brothers Tyle and Tetchor Gorch (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson respectively) and Angel (Jaime Sánchez), the ethnic outsider in the group, team up with an old-timer called Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) and head towards the border with Mexico, the civil war being waged there, and the country’s corrupt militia.
Because Sam Peckinpah prepares for it so well, the explosion of gunfire, when it begins, isn’t just startling – it feels like a release of pent-up tension. But the mayhem goes on for what must be ten minutes; a comparably extended bloodbath occurs in the closing stages. According to Michael Wilmington[1], the opening slaughter ‘is a scene of extraordinary art and impact, exploding off the screen with such force and affecting audiences so viscerally, they sometimes reel back in shock’. For this viewer, the art eclipsed the impact, here and in most of what followed. I was shocked by the evident ill-treatment of horses[2] and, late on, when Angel has his throat cut. For the most part, though, Peckinpah’s bravura aestheticisation of carnage had a distancing effect. That said, the film was hard to watch – not because it’s exceptionally violent but because it’s a Western. I’d never seen The Wild Bunch before; as I watched, I soon realised this viewing was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was disengaged from what was happening on screen. I still had to see the ‘Götterdämmerung of Westerns‘ (Michael Sragow) through because I’ll never see it again.
I could admire Peckinpah’s compositional sense, Lucien Ballard’s lighting, Lou Lombardo’s editing and Jerry Fielding’s score. But you need to have watched and liked many more Westerns than I have to appreciate the revisionist originality and force claimed for this ‘decline of the American west’ classic. These are qualities lost on someone routinely dispirited by traditional Western heroes and heroics. The distinction I made in the previous paragraph between The Wild Bunch’s violence and genre is, to some extent, a false one: the obligatory homicide in Westerns, however morally codified it may be, is part of what gets me down about them. But only part.
When men in Stetsons and on horses emerge from a big, bare landscape and line up to face the camera, they quicken many pulses but reliably make my heart sink. This Western weltschmerz goes back as far as I can remember, to watching films or series on television as a young child. I obviously couldn’t analyse it then – I can’t really do that even now – but what remains of these distant memories are (with the honourable exception of High Noon) a succession of unpleasant feelings – emptiness and vague antipathy which, after a while, merged and hardened into boredom – a boredom I couldn’t admit to because elders and betters in the same room definitely approved of cowboys and Indians.
Technically imaginative and innovative it may be but The Wild Bunch includes plenty that’s tediously familiar from other Westerns. Prime examples are the salty name-calling and raucous, maniacal cackling, from Hispanics and gringos alike. The women are either idealised images or sex objects (or both) – though I guess the baring of Mexican breasts is a Peckinpah trope rather than a Western one. I’ve only seen three other films by him, one of them Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), about forty years ago. I remember nothing about it except for thinking a more apt title would have been ‘Show Me the Boobs of Isela Vega’. The violence in The Wild Bunch was widely seen as paralleling what was happening in Vietnam at the time – an interpretation confirmed by the director himself (according to Wikipedia). But although he gives full vent to the (self-) destructive tendencies of his American characters, Peckinpah, who also shares the screenplay credit (with Walon Green), also seems to romanticise their doubly moribund way of life.
He does this largely through the senior actors in major roles, especially William Holden and Robert Ryan. In moments of reflection, Pike Bishop looks deep in thought and steeped in regret; he’s compelling to watch, thanks not to his own backstory but to the texture of Holden’s screen history. But it’s Ryan’s handsome, intelligent face that takes the camera like no other here: Deke Thornton seems to observe and assess what’s going on even as he’s strongly involved in it. At the end of the film, with most of the rest of the cast killed off, Freddie Sykes, with a band of Mexican rebels, invites Deke to team up with them and he assents – a kind of if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em decision. For the first time in the film, Robert Ryan smiles, ruefully. But he stops short, thank goodness, of joining in the chorus of malicious laughter that is heard in The Wild Bunch as often as gunshot. Well, maybe not quite as often.
19 December 2019
[1] In The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films (ed Jay Carr, Da Capo Press, 2002).
[2] An article at https://ilovehorses.net/history-2/the-humane-movement-goes-to-hollywood-to-protect-horses/ says there were no equine fatalities on the shoot but implies this wasn’t overseen by the American Humane Association.
