THE IFC's selective season of films directed by Sam Peckinpah concludes with day run (from today) of the director's fourth film, his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, first released in 1969 and now showing in a restored version.
This is the quintessential Peckinpah movie: a western which mourns the passing of the Old West and scorns the intrusion of technological advances, set among men who, like the maverick film maker himself, were philosophical outsiders living by their own credos. And the startlingly explicit use of cathartic violence, which caused such an uproar when the film was first released, registers just as deliberately unsettling today.
The film is set in violent times, 1913, during the Mexican Revolution with the world on the verge of a major war, and it shows the tyrannical Mexican general, Mapache, in cahoots with a German army officer and weapons expert. It was shot in violent times, too, as Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated and the Vietnam war escalated.
The Wild Bunch opens as a mostly ageing group of outlaws ride into a southern Texas town to rob a railroad office. They are led by the tough, weather beaten Pike Bishop (William, Holden) whose former partner in crime, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), is leading a rag tag bunch of bounty, hunters to ambush them. To emphasise the human being's innate capacity for cruelty, the camera cuts to a group of giggling children as they drop scorpions on an anthill before setting it on fire. Peckinpah's cyclical plotting invokes that opening, scene in the finale when Pike Bishop is shot first by a woman and then by a boy.
Bishop advocates a code of loyalty - "If you side with a man, you stick with him" - but he's worried by his betrayal of this code when he leaves the youngest of the bunch (Bo Hopkins) behind to face certain death. Later, when his other young outlaw colleague, Angel (Jaime Sanchez) a Mexican whose village is siding with Pancho Villa against General Mapache's army is brutally tortured by Mapache's men, Bishop and his three surviving gang members decide to take a stand, despite the impossible odds, and the film culminates in a shockingly powerful sequence of choreographed carnage.
Sam Peckinpah died of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 59. His virtuosity as a film maker has never been 5 abundantly evident as in The Wild Bunch, whether in the dynamically orchestrated crowd scenes or in its rare intimate and thoughtful moments. However, thy clearly, dangerous treatment of horses in the film would never be allowed today.
The set pieces are breathtaking, in particular the elaborately plotted and grippingly staged robbery of a munitions train and the subsequent chase across a rickety, explosives rigged wooden bridge. The dextrous work of lighting cameraman Lucien Ballard is clearly influenced by, and builds upon, the landscape westerns of John Ford; the editing by Louis Lombardo is razor sharp and has proved highly influential down the years; and Jerry Fielding's dramatic score, melancholy when appropriate and heavily Mexican influenced, adds immeasurably to the movie's moods and tensions. The incisive screenplay was written by Walon Green (now an executive producer of NYPD Blue) and substantially embellished by Peckinpah.
The fine cast includes Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Edmond O Brien, L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin. As the former friends turned bitter rivals, William Holden and Robert Ryan have rarely proved so effective on screen, and the restored scenes include two flashbacks which amplify their relationship. The colour, quality of the print of The Wild Bunch on show at the IFC is variable and the print is scratchy at times, but sufficiently satisfactory to make this restored reissue an essential experience.
