As much as I love The Getaway and Straw Dogs, I consider this to be Sam Peckinpah’s true masterpiece. I think the first time I saw this film was back in the late 80’s and I remember being completely blown away that this film was released in 1969 with this amount of remorseless violence. Can you imagine some dirty fucking hippie sitting in the theater coming down from an acid trip and seeking refuge in a dark movie theater for a few hours only to be bombarded with this film?

That first viewing was great, I remember being giddy with the amount of carnage. Something special happened with this film for me though, the more I saw it and the more I read reviews from the era and several books on Peckinpah, I began to understand the movie, and Sam’s subsequent movies, in a different light.

The story is simple enough.

Pike, Dutch, Angel, and the Gorch brothers are criminals in some unspecified year after 1911(we know this because they carry Colt 1911 semi-automatic pistols which were created, y’know, in 1911). After killing their way out of a town only to find they’ve stolen nothing but washers, they make a run for the border, all the while being chased by Pike’s former colleague Deke and his band of “egg suckin’, chicken stealin’ gutter trash”.

They strike up a deal with the drunken General Mapache to hijack a load of guns from the U.S. Army in exchange for ten thousand in gold. Angel gets a case of guns instead of his share for his village, which proves to be his downfall. Angel is kept by Mapache for taking the guns(not for killing Mapache’s current, and Angel’s former, girlfriend) and tortured. The Bunch goes into Mapache’s fortress to get drunk and laid, but decides to get Angel back. The General kills Angel, and The Bunch lays the fortress(and themselves) to waste in a final, bloody battle. Deke, disillusioned from the start, joins up with Sykes in effect starting the whole film over again.

It’s in the characterizations that this film not only deconstructs the Western genre in terms of heroic bloodshed but virtually destroys it.

These men are not heroes, in fact, they are reprehensible. Every word out of Pike’s mouth is either in direct contradiction to his actions or a flat out lie. Take for instance “When you side with a man you stay with him or you’re finished” and then later when Angel asks him if he would sell guns to somebody to kill his Mother he says “Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties”.

Pike is not alone in these contradictions. Dutch says at one point “We’re different from the General, we don’t hang anybody” then in the final shootout he uses a hooker as a human shield. Well, theoretically he’s right, he didn’t hang her but you get the gist. Their “code” is essentially bullshit, it just helps them sleep at night.

These men are not heroes by any stretch. They kill civilians at an alarming rate without hesitation or regret. The one time you see any kind of a reaction is when Pike looks down from his horse to see the woman his horse has trampled to death. But then later on he sees her scarf stuck in his his stirrup and throws it away as nothing but a passing annoyance.

It eventually wears on them to the point that by the end, when they decide to get Angel back and knowingly commit “suicide by Mexican Army”, it is with total resignation that this was the fate that was always in store for them, no matter how many times they say they’ll back off after their last job.

Like Dutch says, “Back off to what?”

Children figure heavily in this film. The kids at the beginning watching with glee as the ants kill the scorpion mirror our own(mine anyway) voyeuristic giddiness at violence in film. It’s a child who ends up killing Pike in the final shootout.

Even the Bunch revert to being children when they are goofing around. Almost a feeling of innocence that’s long gone obviously. Their laughter is infectious, you can’t help but laugh with them, even though you the viewer(and the Bunch themselves) know that they are basically fucked.

The final gunfight though, is where things really get interesting for us. It takes the remorseless killing from the opening gunfight and multiplies it a thousand times. From the point where Pike blows away the General(one of the most tense pauses in cinema, they burst out laughing pretty much at the same point we do from the tension) to the death of basically everyone, the violence turns in on itself and becomes repulsive, a rarity in films I think. Mexicans shoot each other by mistake, unarmed bystanders are killed because they are simply in the way. As a huge fan of violence in film, I’m not turned off by it(almost), but I get it. Like, I’ll watch Commando and laugh my ass off at the coolness of the kills, but this is more like how it would’ve really gone down. Everything I’ve ever read on The Wild Bunch brings up how this film was Peckinpah’s allegory for the Viet Nam War. Just flat out futility on all sides. The wrong people are in charge, the wrong people are killed because they were simply in the way.

From a technical standpoint, the film is breathtaking. Peckinpah readily admits he pinched from both Kurosawa and Eisenstein’s theory of collision montage but to me he mastered it and basically created the template for how an action scene should be shot. See John Woo for further details.

Thing is really, no Western has ever been made like this before or since. There is no romanticism like in the Westerns of Ford or Leone. And there certainly hasn’t been one as dark. As good as Eastwood’s Unforgiven is, it ain’t like this. These guys are Evil William Munny from beginning to end, with no regret whatsoever. They simply do not give a fuck.

In the end though, this is a Man’s movie about Men, no doubt about it.

It’s also one of the greatest films ever made.