The Wild Bunch (1969)

John Wayne was dismayed by the release of The Wild Bunch, because he thought that it destroyed the myth of the Old West. He was perfectly correct to feel this way. In place of the traditional westerns where even many of the outlaws had their own codes of ethics and standards, we were now entering a world in which there are no more noble men to look up to.

Wayne once refused to carry out a scene in which his character shot a man in the back. In Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist western, his outlaws are quite happy to use human shields, and to shoot unarmed civilians, including women. Sam Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch as a reaction against the unreality of the sanitised westerns of his day which glamorised violence while simultaneously being entirely bloodless.

That is not a criticism that could be levelled at The Wild Bunch, which begins and ends with a bloodbath, and features a number of indiscriminate, gory killings caught on camera in highly stylised slow motion shots. Peckinpah deliberately sought to show the ugliness of real violence, and to give audiences a feel of what it was like to be really shot. The movie was intended to show that killing is brutal and not glamorous. Unfortunately, many people drew the opposite conclusion, and the film opened the way for other moviemakers to exploit the public’s new found taste for extreme violence.

This is a world in which shootouts are not honourable affairs where both sides wait for the streets to clear before firing on one another. At the start of the movie, a religious procession gets caught in a crossfire between bank robbers and hired mercenaries. Nobody is safe anymore.

Peckinpah may have been influenced by the mood created by the war in Vietnam, where non-combatants were just as likely to be victims as soldiers. This had been true of wars for some time, but the Vietnamese war and all its atrocities were recorded in newspapers and on television in a manner that had not been seen before.

In this misanthropic take on the Old West, there are no longer any heroes, and we have the outlaws on one side, and mercenaries and sadistic Federal Army soldiers on the other. The outlaws that we are asked to identify with are crude men who visit whores, squabble over their takings, threaten to kill one another and gun down anyone who gets in their way.

When the outlaws hold up a bank at the beginning of the movie, the instructions of their leader Pike Bishop (William Holden) are clear: “If they move, kill ‘em”. A similar ruthlessness follows when they are ambushed by men paid by the railroad company, and they are obliged to shoot their way out. Pike leaves behind a slow-minded and sadistic member of the group, knowing that he will be shot. Later he shoots a badly injured member of his party.

However we still feel that they are better than the men who hunt them down. Hired by a harsh and unrelenting railroad official, the mercenaries lack any dignity or decency. Watched over by vultures, they squabble over the bodies of the men whom they claim to have killed, knowing that each body carries a reward.

The situation is summarised by a symbolic image at the beginning of the movie. As the outlaws head into town to rob the bank, they pass a group of children who are laughing as they watch a few scorpions being over-ran by ants. Perhaps the children put the scorpions in with the ants. Certainly they decide to top their pleasure by setting the creatures on fire. This is a world where children are becoming desensitised by violence, and it is a young boy who kills an important character at the end of the movie. The story takes place just before World War One when many young people were to be caught up in an unusually vicious conflict.

The incident with the scorpions and the ants also anticipates the ending of the movie. As the more powerful scorpions represent the Wild Bunch (not so-called in the movie), and the ants represent the Mexican army, triumphing by numbers alone, we might detect a certain sense of racial superiority in this metaphor. It does however show us an ugly world with no justice, and a choice between two unpleasant alternatives.

The opening bank robbery proves to be a futile disaster. The outlaws walk into a trap set by the railroad company, and only a few make it out alive. Worse still, when the loot is opened it turns out that the bank has substituted the coins for washers. With the bounty hunters still chasing them, the outlaws decide to hide out in Mexico.

However they merely escape switch one danger zone for another. Mexico is in the midst of a revolution against its government. The Mexican Federal Army is ravaging the countryside, robbing locals, and killing those who resist. While they are detested by the people, some are willing to collaborate with them. These include a former lover of Angel (Jaime Sanchez), one of the outlaws, and he struggles to cope with feelings of jealousy and anger.

Any final hopes of a quiet stay in Mexico are ended when Angel is enflamed by the sight of her kissing General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), and he shoots her dead. This action will set in chain the events that lead to the deaths of all the outlaws. For now, they persuade Mapache to spare their lives in exchange for stealing a weapons shipment from a U.S. army train and passing these onto the General.

The robbery goes well, but the mother of the woman that Angel killed tells the General that he passed a crate of guns and ammo to the opposing rebels. While the rest of the outlaws go free, Angel is detained and tortured by the malicious Federal soldiers. The rest of the outlaws return to demand Angel’s return, even though they know it means certain death for them.

As the plot summary suggests, there is more to Pike’s gang than mere thieving and outlawry. They may not have the Old West code of honour that made John Wayne so misty-eyed, but they have values of their own. This is reflected in one sentimental exchange between Pike and Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine):

Dutch: They’ll be waitin’ for us.

Pike: I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Dutch: Pike, I wouldn’t have it any other way either.

The filming of this scene brought a tear to the eye of the tough-minded Peckinpah. The two men hold old-fashioned values that are beginning to disappear. The gang is led by two older men who were hoping to retire after the bank job. Pike struggles to get on his horse, and wants his men to find a life beyond guns. When the men look at Mapache’s automobile, they realise that the days of travelling by horse are coming to an end.

It is perhaps appropriate that their most implacable and ruthless enemy is a railroad company, another sign that they are fighting against progress, or at least against any change that is unwelcome to them. The amorality of Mapache and his soldiers also repels the two men:

Dutch: Eh, Generalissimo, hell. He’s just another bandit grabbin’ all he can for himself.

Pike: Like some others I could mention? [laughs]

Dutch: Not so’s you’d know it, Mr. Bishop. We ain’t nothin’ like him. We don’t HANG nobody. 

There are two areas in which we especially see the code of honour by which these otherwise coarse men live. The first is in the way that they behave towards the Mexican people. It is natural that Angel should side with countrymen. He is intensely proud of his heritage and threatens to kill anyone who disrespects them. The American members of the gang are more prosaic, but they agree to let Angel take a case of ammo and weapons to the rebels on condition that he gives up his share of the gold promised by Mapache.

It is one of the curious things about 1960s westerns that even the most tough-minded of movie directors presents the Mexican rebels and people in a sentimental and idealised way. The people whom the outlaws reside with are kind and friendly, and their life would be seemingly idyllic if it was not for the Federal Army.

Meanwhile the rebels are fighting a noble cause in which they are held back only by their lack of adequate weaponry. The army are given almost supernatural powers, descending on the outlaws like ghosts to collect their case of ammo. It is the rebels who rescue the wounded Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) from certain death after he is wounded.

The code of honour among the outlaws mostly applies to the idea of solidarity among members of the group. When Pike has to restrain the younger members of the gang from killing the elderly Sykes, he sternly insists, “When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can’t do that you’re like some animal.”

The mercenaries are led by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a former member of the outlaws, who has agreed to hunt them down in exchange for his freedom. A flashback showing Thornton being sadistically whipped in the prison at Yuma helps to establish why he reluctantly turns Judas on his friends.

Nonetheless he despises the other mercenaries and wishes he was with Pike’s gang. When he gets a clear shot at his old friend Pike he is unable to take it. Thornton’s willingness to turn against his old friends produces mixed responses from them:

Pike: What would you do in his place? He gave his word.

Dutch: He gave his word to a railroad.

Pike: It’s his word.

Dutch: That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to!

Pike’s response is less harsh because it was his own complacency that got Thornton caught, and he feels that he betrayed his former friend. His decision to leave behind one of his gang during the robbery also sits badly with him when he discovers the boy was Sykes’ grandson. Dutch too feels bad when he is obliged to leave Angel to the mercies of Mapache’s men.

It is this sense of guilt about betraying their own ideal of solidarity that explains why the men feel that they must go back and face Mapache at the end. The men have their money and could easily leave behind a comrade who brought his fate on himself. However they realise they cannot let down another member of the gang, whatever the cost.

When Mapache refuses to let them buy Angel back, there is only one option left. By now the unity among the men is so strong that words are not needed. “Let’s go,” Pike tells Lyle and Tector Gorch (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson). “Why not?” replies Lyle. Dutch needs no words. A look is enough.

The men know that they face inevitable death, but they no longer care – staying together as a group is what matters. When Mapache cuts Angel’s throat, Pike shoots him dead. When even this fails to provoke the Federal Army, he carries on shooting. The four men blast away at the entire army, even turning a machine gun on them, the gun that they themselves brought for Mache’s use. However they are overwhelmed by numbers.

At the movie’s end, the bounty hunters arrive and take their bodies away, only to be murdered in their turn by the rebel army. Free at last, Thornton chooses to stay behind. There he meets Sikes who has joined the rebels, and Thornton agrees to become part of their number too. The film closes with scenes of the men riding away after finding a new group to identify with while the scene is intercut with shots of earlier scenes of their dead comrades laughing, a final image to stress their unity.

The Wild Bunch was a remarkable movie for its day. It balanced a more realistic approach to the western with the stylised techniques of moviemaking. The realistic approach can be seen in the amount of bloodletting in the shootouts, and in other little touches. For example, Peckinpah paid careful attention to reproducing how each gun would sound, rather than applying the standard western technique of using one sound so that guns of all varieties sounded the same.

The opening credits pause in artistic freezes that make the character look like drawings. The action scenes are shot with rapid, multi-angle cross-cutting interspersed with occasional slow motion effects. A telephoto lens was used to ensure that both foreground and background were clear.

These techniques are common in films now, but were still fresh and new when The Wild Bunch was made. These methods allowed for greater elasticity and fast- moving action. There are also scenes of breath-taking audacity such as the scene where a bridge is blown up with men and horseback on it, and the horses and men fall into the water.

I have mixed feelings about The Wild Bunch. There is a part of me that sympathises with John Wayne’s view. The revisionist and violent westerns of the 1960s did not merely kill off the myth of the Old West. They also helped to kill off the western as a popular mainstream genre. At one time westerns were widely-loved and could be happily watched by the entire family on a wet afternoon.

With the incoming of directors such as Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, westerns became too violent and ugly to allow wider family viewing. The western became an adult genre, but a number of adults were repelled by them too. However this new approach to the subject matter meant that westerns made in the traditional style began to look old and tired. It is hardly surprising that after the 1960s the western ceased to be a major movie genre.

On the other hand, this is not to detract from Peckinpah’s achievement. He made a movie that was innovative in both style and content, and offered something that was powerful and thought-provoking.