Released in 1969, considered Hollywood’s response to the spaghetti western wave, Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” is an absolute masterpiece of the genre. A sumptuous and twilight film, unsurpassable.
At the beginning of the century, in a small town in South Texas near the Mexican border, a band of looters prepare to attack the offices of the Railroad Company. But bounty hunters are keeping watch… The confrontation degenerates and only five survivors manage to reach Mexico, then devastated by a civil war. The final settling of scores will only be more brutal…
“The deep drama of Sam Peckinpah, is that he was born too late. A descendant of famous pioneers, Peckinpah was born at the time when his ancestors were entering into Californian legend: unable to live their epic story, he had to be content to collect its echoes.
And it was still too late, ten years too late, that he came to the cinema, beginning a tumultuous career, punctuated by lost battles because they were doomed to perpetual misdirection.” wrote film historian Michael Henry Wilson in the superb book “At Heaven’s Gate: 100 years of American cinema”published by Armand Colin in 2014.
This reflection naturally applies to his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, a twilight western rightly considered Hollywood’s definitive response to the wave of spaghetti westerns.
Warner Bros.
“I made a film about America’s guilty conscience”
It is a dying West corrupted by modernity (we are in 1911, we are witnessing the first automobiles…) that the filmmaker depicts, within which the leader of this gang, Pike Bishop (admirable William Holden) seems to want to take leave from a world he no longer understands. Just like Peckinpah.
The filmmaker gave his film extreme violence that was extremely rare for the time. “I want the viewer to feel in the strongest, most terrible way possible, the cataclysmic, irresponsible violence that can take hold of man”declared the filmmaker. “I made this film because I was very angry against a whole Hollywood mythology, against a certain way of presenting outlaws, criminals, against a romanticism of violence (…). C “is a film about America’s guilty conscience.”
The bet succeeded beyond his expectations: spectators at the time were revulsed by this surge of violence, which even ended up becoming apocalyptic in an anthology final sequence, sublimated by Peckinpah’s skill in editing.
55 years after its release, The Wild Horde remains an absolutely insurmountable film.
