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 is technically revolutionary and morally serious at the same time, which is a rarer combination than the reputation suggests. The slow motion was not a flourish, it was an attempt to make an audience look at something they had been watching comfortably for fifty years.
What it is not is a celebration, and it is routinely misread as one. Every man in this film is worse than the one he replaced, the cause they die for is not 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 is 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 registers 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.
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, which is the part almost nobody has managed to copy 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 have 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 genuinely innocent group is a village that gets robbed by everybody in turn. Angel is from that village, which is why he is 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 is nobody to stand behind, which means the violence cannot 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 will not 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 is not about giving your word but about who you give it to, which 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 is the best sequence Peckinpah shot and it contains no action at all. The audience knows what is going to happen, the four men know, and nobody says a word about it.
What precedes it is the decision, which takes about eight seconds. One of them says a word, the others get up, and that is the entire deliberation for a choice that kills all of them.
The walk works because of everything the film has withheld. These men have not 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 is 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 would write. The condition is that the characters must have earned the ambiguity, so the reader is genuinely 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 is coming, is unbearable at no cost.
Withhold the statement of the theme. Nobody in this film says anything about loyalty, which is why the walk is about loyalty.
The Time Is Running Out
It is 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 are not outlaws in a frontier, they are men whose profession has been overtaken by industry, 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 is not accidental. The men with the professional skills lose to the men with the equipment.
Robert Ryan carries the other half of that argument. Thornton is the best man among them and is working for the railroad under threat, leading a crew of scavengers he despises, and Ryan plays somebody who has been made to hunt the only people he ever respected.
What It Cost and What It Left
Six million dollars, a violently divided reception, walkouts at previews, and a studio that cut it substantially for its American release before the full version was eventually restored.
The criticism at the time was that it glorified violence and the criticism has not aged well. A film in which the protagonists murder civilians in the opening reel and die pointlessly in the last is not a celebration, whatever the slow motion is doing.
What is fair is the treatment of women, which is genuinely 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.
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, which is 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 is 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 does not 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. A film about men whose profession has been made obsolete by machinery, cut at a speed nobody had attempted, ending with four of them walking down a road in silence toward something none of them discuss.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists