I wouldn't have it any other way
We
can’t do justice to this great movie in a short blogpost. It would need a whole
book. And indeed books have been written on it. For example:

Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will know in what high regard I hold Holden as a Western actor. The Man from Colorado, Streets of Laredo, Escape from Fort Bravo, The Horse Soldiers, Alvarez Kelly, Wild Rovers, there wasn't a bad performance among them.
Ryan too was outstanding. The Naked Spur, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Professionals, Hour of the Gun, grief, he could even elevate a junker like Lawman. These were two magnificent Western actors and The Wild Bunch was them at their very best.
Then you have Ernest Borgnine (Dutch Engstrom) and Ben Johnson (Tector Gorch). Borgnine never quite did it for me. He did 32 Westerns but unless you count Bad Day at Black Rock (in which he was superb) as a Western he never really quite cut it. He looked the hard man alright but for some reason never really convinced. An Easterner of Italian extraction, he was OK as a heavy in crime pictures. Maybe the Delmer Daves Badlanders which he did with Alan Ladd was his best, Ladd’s weakness favoring his strength. But mediocre or not as a cowboy, in The Wild Bunch he too is superb (they all were actually). He is the very epitome of the grizzled old gunman at the end of his career. And as for the mighty Ben Johnson, well, again we’d need a book.

As
for the lesser parts, the acting is outstanding: just follow Strother Martin (Coffer)
and LQ Jones (T.C.) through the movie. For me, after Holden and Ryan, the
laurels go to Edmond O’Brien (Sykes) and the larger-than-life Emilio Fernandez
(General Mapache). But you can’t forget the performances of Warren Oates (Lyle Gorch,
Ben Johnson’s brother). So many of these players were in 1969, appropriately, old
Western troupers towards the end of their careers. But there isn’t a bad actor
here.
What many people think of first when talking about The Wild Bunch is the blood. Even now, after all these years and all these viewings, the stunts and the almost cartoon violence shock. At the time it was jaw-dropping. I will never forget the moment in the movie theater (I was 21) when I first saw what Mapache did to Angel. But the violence is balletic, terrible, beautiful, abstract. Technically stunning with brilliant editing (Lou Lombardo), the (then) unprecedented blood and death scenes still have a power to awe.

The climactic gun battle took 12 days to film, used 90,000 blank rounds and 10,000 squibs and the movie cost $6m, a huge sum then. The IMDb trivia page is 2,481 words long and most of it isn’t trivial at all. Check it out.
The Walon Green/Roy Sickner/Sam Peckinpah screenplay is masterly. The direction by Peckinpah is of course great, inspired: original and powerful. This was his finest hour.
The
film is elegiac, moving, stirring, exciting and beautiful by turns.
Actually,
come to think about it, there’s nothing wrong with this movie. “I wouldn’t have
it any other way”.
Mel Gibson plans to remake this film for Warner Brothers. It better have the violence right. I hope to hell that it is not PG-13
ReplyDeleteYes, I heard that too. I'm afraid I'm rather dubious. Gibson has produced some dreadful tripe.
DeleteJeff