"The Wild Bunch" is still an ambiguously bloody masterpiece 50 years later

Violence had long been a staple of American movies by the time Sam Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch" clopped into cinemas on June 18, 1969. For Westerns, violence was the primary draw. Audiences expected shootouts, showdowns and saloon brawls and felt cheated if they didn’t get to witness at least two of these obligatory bits of business. 

What they absolutely did not want to see were the real-life repercussions of these bloody national pastimes. One half-hour dose of the nightly news — with updates on the escalating Vietnam War, antiwar protests and civil rights unrest — brought home more than enough actual death and chaos to last most people a troubled lifetime.

Judged merely by the names on the promotional poster (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien and Ben Johnson), moviegoers had every reason to expect "The Wild Bunch" would be a standard-issue oater devoid of the edginess that had been creeping into studio films since Warren Beatty blasted that bank teller point-blank in the face in "Bonnie and Clyde." What they got in the first 20 minutes, though, was a breathtakingly sustained and overwhelmingly ferocious gunfight between Holden’s aging outlaws and Ryan’s railroad-hired posse — which does not abate for one second despite the presence of the stray-bullet magnet that is the town’s temperance union parade. 

By employing multiple cameras shooting at a variety of speeds, Peckinpah was able to capture authentic reactions from his actors (particularly from the children caught in this horrifying melee) while inserting his trademark slo-motion shots of carnage — e.g. a horse crashing through a storefront window and a bounty hunter tumbling off the roof of a building to his dirt-road death. 

At one point he cuts to the frantic POV of a bandit astride a freshly shot horse. It is loud, it is disorienting and it is bloody. And when it’s over, Peckinpah hangs around to let us watch the traumatized survivors wander through the street and mournfully call for their loved ones. "Hope you had a ball," he seems to be saying. "These poor bastards sure didn't."

Those who didn’t flee the theater during the film’s initial barrage of gun violence beheld the first mainstream-skewing New Hollywood Western, a masterpiece in which world-weary murderers give their lives for the one virtue they still respect: loyalty. These are not good men; the principled Angel (Jaime Sánchez) almost seems like an honorable thief. But then, in a jealous rage, he shoots his ex-lover for taking up with the burgeoning dictator who murdered his father. Through slightly clunky flashbacks (Peckinpah’s only creative misstep) we learn that every member of the bunch — and, in essence, their way of life — has it coming. And yet we root for them at the end because the men rising up to replace them are perhaps more monstrous. 

Perhaps.

This preference for thematic ambiguity would get Peckinpah in much hotter water two years later with “Straw Dogs” (which is probably why it hasn’t become a repertory theater mainstay). But there’s a sentimental, go-out-with-a-blaze-of-glory appeal to "The Wild Bunch" that renders the extreme violence somewhat palatable (though it’s still plenty "extreme," as Warner Bros. learned when the 25^th Anniversary Director’s Cut got slapped with an NC-17 in 1994). And yet Peckinpah always keeps the viewer morally engaged by intermittently cutting to families and children cowering amid the torrent of gunfire. He then plunges the dagger by having a rifle-wielding child soldier shoot Holden in the back. The firefight is over, but the future is lost.

Dispiriting though this may be, it's all so brilliantly orchestrated that we can’t look away. And 50 years later, we still can’t shake it off. Now that men with guns can turn a city street into a killing box on a vicious whim, it’s more important than ever that movie violence leaves a mark. This doesn’t mean the heavily armed action epics of the ‘80s and ‘90s all the way up to the “John Wick” trilogy should be consigned to a vault; it’s just that there needs to be a more vivid understanding of what bullets do when they exit the chamber and tear through human flesh. Peckinpah understood this. The act of shooting the life out of another human being takes a horrible psychic toll on the person pulling the trigger; it's messy, it's shocking and even if it's a "righteous kill," it's something assailants generally wish they hadn't had to do in the first place. 

Yet it's far too easy to do today. 

One of the most thrilling (and comparatively unbloody) moments in “The Wild Bunch” finds the gang pulling off a daring train heist to acquire a massive arsenal for the aforementioned general. If Mel Gibson were to change his mind and set his forthcoming remake in the present day, this would require nothing more perilous than hitting up a local gun show.