The Wild Bunch: An unapologetically polarizing masterpiece

Sam Peckinpah’s pivotal and controversial late ’60s film helped define New Hollywood with gratuitous violence.

As “The Wild Bunch” opens, Pike Bishop and his gang ride past a group of children and look down from their horses with a scowl. The children are watching as a swarm of fire-red ants overwhelm two struggling scorpions. They giggle and laugh before piling brush on top and engulfing both ants and scorpions in flames.

It’s the wicked consuming the wicked as the next generation wipes the slate clean with an even more casual act of desensitized violence.

Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” is a Western with no redemption or morality. It ravishes the romantic vision of the Wild West and the sanitized Old Hollywood template through a gratuitously violent, emotionally drained portrait of real outlaws.

Peckinpah is going for something in which the uncomfortable act of violence in the West is not a cathartic, exciting spectator sport but a brutal look at where the world is moving. In the film’s infamous final showdown, Pike and company are the scorpions, the ants are the army of Mexican soldiers under a corrupt general, and those kids looking and laughing are the ones who have no trouble dealing Pike the killing blow.

“The Wild Bunch” was premiered to uproarious controversy and rapturous acclaim at Cannes in 1969. It was arguably the most violent film ever made and a definitive pillar in the New Hollywood movement slowly rising in Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino and Peckinpah himself.

If nothing else, “The Wild Bunch” is a polarizing masterpiece. Some will see it as an exercise in style over substance, trading in excessive bloodshed and elaborate set pieces rather than flesh out its characters, and others will find it slow and empty as a result of its existential execution. Its plot of old souls and wounded warriors just looking for a way out is forlorn, but not nostalgic and sentimental in the ambiguously elegant ways of something like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.” Continue reading “The Wild Bunch: An unapologetically polarizing masterpiece”