The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah’s epic western shoot’em up. Highly controversial when first released in 1969, this is still quite a violent offering. It marks the departure from the Western of old where gunfights produced not so much as a skerrick of blood and there was a nice clear delineation between goodies and baddies (often down to the colour of their hats). In The Wild Bunch it is fairly hard to take sides. The robbers, led by William Holden, reveal themselves to be men with a fair degree of heart and integrity, whilst the law, represented here by a band of incompetent bounty hunters led by Robert Ryan, seem to lack any degree of backbone and display reprehensible behaviour. The exception is Robert Ryan’s character, but it turns out he used to operate on the wrong side of the law himself and would probably feel more comfortable back in the saddle with the bunch. Finally, we can at last all unite in hatred of the truly despicable Mexican generalissimo and take delight as he and his army are summarily and bloodily dispatched by the Wild Bunch, before they too join the seemingly endless litter of dead bodies on the ground at the end of the movie. William Holden is particularly effective as the ageing gunslinger, looking for a way to earn a living “beyond his guns”.