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Wild Bunch (1969) [VHS] 
Actors : William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates
Studio : Warner Home Video
by Warner Home Video
Release Date : 1997-10-14
Publisher : Warner Home Video
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780790725031
UPC : 085391403432
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 245 reviews)
List Price : $19.98
Our Price : $1.96
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Cooltechelectronics.com |
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Here's how director Sam Peckinpah described his motivation behind The Wild Bunch at the time of the film's 1969 release: "I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. The Wild Bunch is simply what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." All of these statements are true, but they don't begin to cover the impact that Peckinpah's film had on the evolution of American movies. Now the film is most widely recognized as a milestone event in the escalation of screen violence, but that's a label of limited perspective. Of course, Peckinpah's bloody climactic gunfight became a masterfully directed, photographed, and edited ballet of graphic violence that transcended the conventional Western and moved into a slow-motion realm of pure cinematic intensity. But the film--surely one of the greatest Westerns ever made--is also a richly thematic tale of, as Peckinpah said, "bad men in changing times." The year is 1913 and the fading band of thieves known as the Wild Bunch (led by William Holden as Pike) decide to pull one last job before retirement. But an ambush foils their plans, and Peckinpah's film becomes an epic yet intimate tale of betrayed loyalties, tenacious rivalry, and the bunch's dogged determination to maintain their fading code of honor among thieves. The 144-minute director's cut enhances the theme of male bonding that recurs in many of Peckinpah's films, restoring deleted scenes to deepen the viewer's understanding of the friendship turned rivalry between Pike and his former friend Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who now leads a posse in pursuit of the bunch, a dimension that adds resonance to an already classic American film. The Wild Bunch is a masterpiece that should not be defined strictly in terms of its violence, but as a story of mythic proportion, brimming with rich characters and dialogue and the bittersweet irony of outlaw traditions on the wane. --Jeff Shannon |
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Bloody Sam at his best!! |
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It's long and the whorehouse scene really bogs down the narrative flow, but no Western's best list can be complete without this movie. Hitchcock has nothing on Peckinpah when it comes to editing a movie. The Academy made one of the biggest mistakes in history by not at least nominating this movie for best editing. Of course the moral ambiguity themes, the demystification of the West and the end of the era of the aging gunfighter are themes that have been explored before, but it's the controversial handling of violence, slow-motion bloodletting and the parallel with the Vietnam War that makes this a provocative Western that stands along with other great movies. Bloody Sam comes through in living color. |
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Great Visuals OF Great Movie |
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The Wild Bunch is a top shelf early 20th Century western. Those who have seen it do not need my accolates to encourage them to view it once again or to consider it as a top of the line action movie. What you may want to hear about is the quality of the Blu-Ray version. Excellent. This is as good a "print" as I have seen since viewing the original uncut version when it opened in New York City. As the price continues to fall, this restored director's cut has become a real bargain. The extras are a treat but the quality of the visuals make this as good as it gets for the western action fan. |
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Overrated |
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When this supposedly "landmark" film was released, it was known more for its controversy than for its quality. By today's standards, it's formulaic, predictable, and boring. It's filled with trite dialogue, awkward flashbacks, and forced laughter. The famously bloody scenes that bookend the film are lame by today's standards. Only the train robbery sequence is really worth watching - you can forget the rest. The cinematography is good, but no better than many other westerns. When people talk about this film, they usually bring up all kinds of platitudes about the "death of the Old West" and the forgotten "code of honor" that went with it; but these themes are badly, often awkwardly, developed here. A number of MUCH better westerns came out around the same time as this superficial "masterpiece" - including both "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," in the same year as this one. And if this film is supposed to be a "commentary" on violence - well, I'm just not sure what the commentary is. |
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A wake, not just for the Western, but for the West? |
The Wild Bunch is a representative of a cinematic subgenre which started appearing in the late 1960s known as the "anti-Western" or sometimes the "revisionist Western."
What this means is that it's ugly, cynical, nihilistic, vulgar, gratuitously violent, and morally ambiguous, with the good guys being hard to distinguish from the bad.
While I found this movie, in contrast to classic Westerns of the John Wayne variety, depressing and unpleasant, and while I wouldn't say I liked it, I can't deny that it was powerful. A lot of movies you forget about almost the minute after you've seen them, but with this one, it was the opposite: while watching it I was bored and couldn't wait for it to get over, but the following day I couldn't stop thinking about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I was filled with a sense of dread and sorrow.
There is an ominous scene during the opening credits in which children of different races feed white scorpions to an army of smaller but numerically superior brown and red ants, which sets the tone for the rest of the film. On a superficial level, this scene is a clever allusion to how the movie ends, but one has to wonder if it wasn't also intended as a broader sociopolitical metaphor.
There's more going on under the hood of this one than might at first appear.
For a Sam Peckinpah film that comes closer to a classic Western, check out 1962's Ride the High Country. Ride the High Country could be fairly described as a "twilight Western," being set in the decline of the Old West and having an old man as its principal protagonist, but not as an anti-Western. It's Peckinpah's best, at least out of the four I've seen. |
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Wild Bunch is a masterpiece |
Sam Peckinpah's Wild Bunch 1969 is a modern masterpiece
that should be seen with Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven 1992 as
two sides of the coin of explorations of violence and the
code of loyalty in the West. |
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