The Wild Bunch (1969) Review
9/10
Men in army uniforms ride into a Texas border town in 1913 to rob a railroad office. Bounty hunters are on the roofs. A temperance parade is coming up the street. Everybody opens fire and the parade is in the middle of it.
The 9 is for a film that’s technically revolutionary and morally serious at the same time, and that’s a rarer combination than the reputation suggests. It overwhelms me. Peckinpah used slow motion to make an audience look at something they’d been watching comfortably for fifty years, and it still affects me: I come out of the opening robbery feeling like the film has made me stand in that street and watch every body hit the ground.
What it’s not is a celebration, and it’s routinely misread as one. Every man in this film is worse than the one he replaced, the cause they die for isn’t a cause, and the picture is explicit about both.
The Editing Changed Everything
The opening robbery runs about five minutes and contains several hundred cuts, intercutting footage shot at normal speed with footage shot at higher frame rates, so bodies fall slowly inside action that’s moving fast. Nobody had assembled violence that way. The technique came from Kurosawa and Peckinpah pushed it considerably further, and the finished film reportedly contains more individual cuts than any color picture made to that point.
What it achieves is duration. A man shot in a conventional Western falls over in half a second and the audience tones an event. A man shot here takes four seconds to reach the ground and the audience has time to watch it happen.
Every action film made since is downstream of this, and almost all of them took the technique and left the purpose. Slow motion now signals that something is cool, and here it signals that something is taking longer than you want it to. That drives me up the wall about modern action movies, because they borrowed the most morally serious editing idea the genre ever had and turned it into a greatest-hits reel.
Lou Lombardo cut it and deserves as much credit as the director. The opening sequence reportedly took months to assemble, and the achievement is that several hundred cuts produce clarity instead of confusion. You always know where everybody is standing, and almost nobody has managed to copy that since.
Manipulating the speed at which a reader experiences violence is the whole tool. Fast prose makes an event, and slow prose makes the reader look at it. The choice communicates your attitude whether or not you intend it, so make it deliberately.
The rule is that the technique must serve discomfort instead of pleasure. If your most lyrical, most extended writing arrives during the killing, you’ve told the reader you find it beautiful. Notice what the imitators dropped. A device invented to make an audience uncomfortable became a device for making them cheer, purely by attaching it to a hero instead of to a consequence.
Everybody Is Contemptible
Pike’s gang murder bystanders during the opening robbery and the film shows the bodies. Thornton, hunting them, is doing it to stay out of prison and leads a group of bounty hunters who loot corpses while he watches.
Mapache is a general in name, running a garrison on stolen wages, and the film’s one innocent group is a village that everybody robs in turn. Angel is from that village. That’s why he’s the only member of the gang with anything at all at stake beyond whatever his share of the money comes to. That arrangement removes the audience’s usual position. There’s nobody to stand behind. That means the violence can’t be enjoyed on somebody’s behalf, and the discomfort is structural instead of tonal.
What the film gives instead is loyalty. These men are appalling and they won’t leave each other, and the entire last act proceeds from four of them deciding to get one back. The line about giving your word is where the code gets stated and immediately complicated. Pike says it’s not about giving your word but about who you give it to. That sounds like a principle and is really an admission that they have no principles available beyond each other.
The Walk
Four men have decided to retrieve Angel from a garrison of two hundred soldiers. They walk down a road, side by side, in silence, and the film holds on them for a long time.
It’s the best sequence Peckinpah shot and it contains no action at all. The audience knows what’s going to happen, the four men know, and nobody says a word about it.
What comes before it is the decision, and it takes about eight seconds.
One of them says a word, the others get up, and that’s the entire deliberation for a choice that kills all of them. Those eight seconds and the walk that follows are why this film sits at 9 for me. I can’t think of a Western that trusts its audience more at the moment that matters.
The walk works because of everything the film has withheld. These men haven’t discussed loyalty, have betrayed each other repeatedly, and have spent two hours being awful, and then they do this without needing to explain it.
What they walk past is also the point. They have their money, a clear route out, and no obligation to anybody, and the film makes sure the audience knows there’s a working exit before any of them stands up.
A decision made in eight seconds after two hours of setup is worth more than any amount of deliberation. The reader supplies the reasoning, and what they supply is stronger than what you’d write. The condition is that the characters must deserve the ambiguity, so the reader is unsure until they move. Silence before the climax is the most reliable tension device available. Four people walking and not speaking, when the reader knows what’s coming, is unbearable at no cost. Withhold the statement of the theme. Nobody in this film says anything about loyalty. That’s why the walk is about loyalty.
The Time Is Running Out
It’s set in 1913. There are motor cars in it, a machine gun, and an army officer from Germany taking notes, and the Great War is eighteen months away.
That dating is the film’s real subject. These men aren’t outlaws in a frontier, they’re men whose profession industry has overtaken, and the film keeps putting machines in the frame next to them. The machine gun is where it becomes explicit. Pike ends the film behind one, killing at a rate no gunman could approach, and the weapon is turned on him within seconds by somebody with no skill at all. Peckinpah made it in 1969, into a country watching a war on television every evening, and the film’s attitude toward organized slaughter isn’t accidental. The men with the professional skills lose to the men with the equipment.
Robert Ryan carries the other half of that argument, and after the walk he’s my favorite thing in the film. Thornton is the best man among them, working for the railroad under threat and leading a crew of scavengers he despises, and Ryan plays somebody who has been made to hunt the only people he ever respected. The weariness on his face does more than any line he’s given.
What It Cost and What It Left
Six million dollars, a violently divided reception, walkouts at previews, and a studio that cut it considerably for its American release before the full version was eventually restored.
The criticism at the time was that it glorified violence and the criticism hasn’t aged well. A film in which the protagonists murder civilians in the opening reel and die pointlessly in the last isn’t a celebration, whatever the slow motion is doing.
Where the film deserves criticism is its treatment of women, and it’s the one thing that keeps this from a 10 for me.
It’s poor even by the standards of its year. There are almost no female characters, several are killed casually, and the film has no interest in any of them. Each time the camera passes over them on its way back to the men, it’s a shabby habit.
The ending is the answer to the glorification charge. Thornton sits in the dust outside the ruined village, the bounty hunters ride off with the bodies, and a laugh on the soundtrack belongs to men who are all dead. It was released the same year as Butch Cassidy, and the pairing is the whole state of the genre in 1969. One film makes obsolescence funny and freezes before the bodies. The other makes it unbearable and shows every one of them.
A work that depicts something unflinchingly will be accused of endorsing it, and the defense is structural instead of rhetorical. Show the cost, refuse the reward, and give nobody a victory. Readers still misread it and the text holds up under examination. That’s all you can control.
Date your setting precisely when obsolescence is your subject. Motor cars, a machine gun and a German officer taking notes tell the reader what’s coming without a word of exposition. Be honest about what a work does badly. This one is close to indefensible on its women, and that doesn’t cancel what it achieved, and pretending otherwise costs you the reader’s trust on everything else.
Should you watch The Wild Bunch?
Yes, and watch the restored version. It gets a 9 from me because it did something nobody had done with violence on screen and did it for a reason, and because four men walking down a road in silence hit me harder than any shootout I can name. The way it treats women costs it the last point, and I won’t wave that away. Everything else about it belongs near the top of the genre.
