Classic Movie Review:
The Wild Bunch
By Josh Spiegel
March 7, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
To some extent, it is. I admired — there’s that word again — the pensive nature of the protagonists and antagonist. Pike (William Holden) is...well, he’s not really a good person, but in this movie, if you are rooting for anyone, you are rooting for Pike. He’s done some horrible things in the past, and continues to do so, but with a heavy heart. He and the titular crew of the story are being chased down by a posse formed by the railroad company, who want to take the wild bunch to task for their various robberies. The posse of bounty hunters is headed by Deke (I know it’s petty, but the names are ridiculous, right?), who used to be Pike’s old partner. The tables have turned a bit, but Deke doesn’t much relish working for the railroad company, as he’s surrounded by lowbrow fools and money-grubbing superiors.
The Wild Bunch has a brain, and does use it some of the time. The film is certainly grittier and tougher than most American Westerns, though if you’ve seen any of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, the toughness isn’t that surprising. (Yeah, I’ve seen the Man with No Name trilogy, and I’d put The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly over just about every American Western I’ve seen, no question.) What doesn’t work for me is what anyone who’s heard of The Wild Bunch but hasn’t seen it thinks of: the violence. If you haven’t seen The Wild Bunch and know nothing about it, know this: the film, directed by Sam Peckinpah, is well known for its intentionally gratuitous violence. When characters die in this movie, you know it.
Remember how, in The Dark Knight, the various characters who get killed onscreen are offed in notably bloodless ways? Even the magic trick scene with the Joker is clearly not bloody. Christopher Nolan acknowledged that this was intentional; even though the film is dark for a PG-13 rating, he didn’t want to deter kids hovering around age 13 from seeing it, so there’s no blood in the film. The Wild Bunch is the diametrical opposite of The Dark Knight in terms of gore. There are plenty of horror movies with more blood and guts, but most action movies aren’t nearly as graphic. Characters get shot in The Wild Bunch — a lot of characters — and when they do, we see blood explode from their bodies. What’s more, many characters who get shot, at least in the first action sequence, are innocent bystanders.
I get that Sam Peckinpah is making a point with this violence. I am aware of it, and again, I admire The Wild Bunch for trying to be much more than the average, typical Western. I applaud the filmmakers. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Honestly, after a point, I almost threw up my hands and said, “I get the point. Move on.” The action here is visceral, and the opening sequence, where the wild bunch rob a bank but are beset upon by the bounty hunters, is an expert example of how to create and maintain suspense for a prolonged amount of time. But the message Peckinpah is delivering regarding how we treat violence in real life and in the movies, and how desensitized we all are only goes so far. I wouldn’t argue the point; however, we go from being desensitized to movie violence to acutely aware of it to just plain bored.
What The Wild Bunch has going for it, more than anything else, is a strong cast. Holden is, of course, one of the great American actors of the 1950s and 1960s. His versatility is what makes him so memorable here and in other films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Sunset Boulevard. Pike’s painful memories may be explained in quick flashbacks (unnecessary ones, in my opinion, and also pretty ridiculous), but you can read the anguish this man experiences on his face. As his second in command and best friend, Ernest Borgnine as Dutch is also especially good, managing to have some form of honor even as he desires to do one last, potentially suicidal job, if only to get revenge. Edmond O’Brien and Ryan, as a grizzled old-timer and Deke, respectively, are also worthy of praise.
But The Wild Bunch is a film led by its director’s sensibility. If you can’t buy into the mythos of Sam Peckinpah (and at least for this movie, I’m not sure I can), the level of enjoyment you’ll have for The Wild Bunch goes only so far. The toughness exuded by the man - and this movie - is pretty cool, and some of the sequences here are genuinely tense and fraught with peril. But each of the sequences explodes in death, and after a while, the intentional shock value wears off, leaving behind pointless death for the sake of making a point about how pointless violence is. The film does argue strenuously, I think, about how the typical American Western skews the reality of the time it depicts to nostalgia. Again, I agree with the point, but the execution is repetitive and somewhat sloppy. It may be sacrilege to some to criticize Peckinpah, but the level of skill only goes so far here.
One day, I’m going to watch an old Western and I’m going to love it. Whether or not it makes a statement regarding how the world really was back then is beside the point. Most of the classic Westerns from this country — notably The Searchers, which I really loathe — are not movies I want to see again. I can’t say I hate most of them (The Searchers excluded), but a lot of Westerns do a great job of putting me to sleep. Stagecoach is so entertaining and the height of what the Western tried to achieve, that I wish every other film in the genre that I’ve watched could even come halfway to its achievements. The Wild Bunch, in many ways, gets very close to Stagecoach — I’ll say it again, the action, by itself, is pretty good — but it lies flat after a while, and extends itself to make a normal story feel overlong.