The following notes on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch were written by Garrett Strpko, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW–Madison. The Wild Bunch will screen on Saturday, March 8 at 7 p.m., the first of three screenings offered in celebration of Sam Peckinpah’s centennial. All Peckinpah screenings will be at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is Free!
By Garrett Strpko
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is about a changing world—both within and outside the film itself. The eponymous protagonists, a band of misfit outlaws led by the aging Pike Bishop (William Holden), find themselves in a world that seems to have nearly passed them by. They no longer carry six-guns, but automatic pistols. Fancy generals no longer strut around on massive horses, but ride in motor cars. Armies preparing for war now field massive machine guns. Constantly pursued by a posse led by Pike’s former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan, in one of his greatest performances) and reeling from a robbery gone wrong, the gang sets out to do what gangs do when it seems the jig is up: pull off just one last job.
Yet critics have been quick to note, even since the time of its release, that The Wild Bunch seems to be about more than this story. The film released in 1969 at a time of massive social, political, and aesthetic upheaval in the United States and around the world. Resultingly, one finds in the film an accumulation of reflections, some dull and some stark, of a changing industry and a new attitude toward the world for a Hollywood film, one which confronts it not as just and sensible, but confused, violent, and almost over.
Perhaps nowhere has the film been more influential or more controversial than its depiction of violence, which acts as something of a constellation of these changes. At the time of its release, it was the latest subject of debate in a continuing discussion about violence in the movies, having followed similarly controversial films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Dark of the Sun (1968), each of which had seemed to increasingly up the ante on blood, gore, and brutality in American film. Unlike those three films, however, The Wild Bunch was released in a new era of censorship for Hollywood film.
In late 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code was replaced with the ratings system—much like the one we have today. Since its implementation in 1930 (with stricter enforcement beginning in 1934), the Code sought to censor depictions of sexuality, violence, and other controversial subjects for any film produced by a major studio seeking wide release. It explicitly forbade “brutality and possible gruesomeness,” and required that criminality always be properly punished by the law. Though the strictures of the Code had certainly come to wane starting as early as the 1950s, its replacement with the ratings system allowed Hollywood filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah to depict violence in its causes, enactment, and consequences with much greater freedom.
The Wild Bunch does just this. Viewers will notice the film’s gunfights are replete with bloody bullet impacts and rapid editing which the brutal force of each shot. Yet this rapidity is often augmented with what is perhaps Peckinpah’s most well-known technique: the use of slow-motion, in which the impact of a bullet or a blow is dragged out in detail, allowing the viewer to savor, or perhaps recoil at, the shock of violence on the human body.
Furthermore, even if the gang’s violent criminality is not necessarily celebrated, neither is the righteousness of the law even nominally upheld. Deke’s posse of pursuers is employed by the railroad, though it is heavily implied that they act with the law’s blessing, if not its collaboration. Nevertheless, Pike’s gang and Deke’s posse appear like two warring sides of equally negative moral valence. During the opening shootout, in which Deke’s group attempts to stop a bank robbery by the Bunch, civilians are caught in the crossfire of both sides. If anything, the Bunch at least operates according to a certain code of honor, however tenuous. They do what they do, so to speak, for the love of the game. Deke, on the other hand, resents that his task is driven by financial gain. At one point in the film, he berates his employer Harrigan (Albert Dekker) for shoving off the responsibility of killing to him and his men: “How does it feel,” he asks, “getting paid for it? Getting paid to sit back and hire your killings with the law’s arms around you? How does it feel to be so goddamn right?” Harrigan answers him simply and calmly: “Good.”
These reflections on violence and criminality suggest the implications The Wild Bunch has for the Western as a genre, which has often taken the law and justice as central themes. The heroes of many classic Westerns are themselves often lawmen: John Wayne in Rio Bravo (1959), or Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952), among many others. And even in the darkest or most morally ambiguous Westerns of the classical era, such as The Searchers (1956), by the end it seems that the forces of good, the law, the taming of the wild land of the West still win out. Ethan still brings Debbie home.
Roger Ebert was one of many critics who sensed the moral outlook of the Western had changed with The Wild Bunch. Tying together these strands of violence and morality, he wrote that in the traditional Western, “the bad guy doesn’t die. Not really. He grabs his shoulder and shouts ‘aargh!’ and staggers around and falls and lies still. But he doesn’t die… he simply agrees to be shot and to lie down in surrender to the superior moral force of the good guy.” In The Wild Bunch, by contrast, “there are no heroes; only some bad guys we know killing some bad guys we don’t know.” Ebert figured that what Peckinpah’s stylizing of violence might allow us to do is recognize that the latter is not so different from the former, that clutching one’s shoulder and falling to the ground is no less stylized than watching a spurt of blood in slow motion. And if we are so quick to celebrate this less bloody stylizing when John Wayne or Gary Cooper dispatches the villain, what is it that we are celebrating? Perhaps The Wild Bunch shows us what we were really cheering for.
“It ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do.”