Pauline Kael of the New Yorker wrote in 1978 that “The Wild Bunch” is “a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya’s.” Sam Peckinpah, who co-wrote and directed this existential allegory on self-destructive masculinity and imperialism, has practically enshrined himself into this film, as Michelangelo carved himself into the grainy texture of “David.”
Obsessive, warm, ferocious, compassionate, violent, elegiac and human in the harshest sense, even its failure is indispensable to Peckinpah’s own failure as a man of taste and temperament. Watching the film gives you the feeling that he had poured his guts into its making, and some may have trouble bringing themselves onto its tempestuous wavelength. But if you respond at all, you may go all the way to exaltation.
Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads his bunch of armed criminals into Mexico after a railroad office robbery, planning to make one last score and back off. A lawman type in an outlaw’s part, Holden’s rough-hewn straightness is as commanding as John Wayne’s, but he also shows great vulnerability. Pike’s power shines through in his stature, as ruggedly textured and stubbornly upright as an old pine, and you feel the old wounds underneath that worn trunk of his.
Meanwhile, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) is stuck with a gang of imbecilic bounty hunters hired by the railroad company to hunt Pike’s bunch down, but he has an unresolved history with Pike that runs deep. Plump and sturdy, railroad agent Harrigan (Albert Dekker) glares and grins with Peg Leg Pete’s sadistic gleam, twists his face to one side of his walrus mustache and blackmails the weary-eyed oldtimer: “You’ve got thirty days to get Pike, or thirty days back to Yuma. You’re my Judas goat, Mr. Thornton.”
Holden and Ryan had no reason to give their career best here. Nicknamed “Bloody Sam,” Peckinpah thrived off tension and antagonism. It’s he who wrung that energy out of them. In J.R. Jones’ biography on Ryan, the actor was said to have once “grabbed Peckinpah by the shirtfront and growled” after he was refused time off.
“I’ll do anything you ask me to do in front of the camera, because I’m a professional. But you open your mouth to me off the set, and I’ll knock your teeth in,” he said, and you might just mistake it for one of his lines. You can feel his teeth grate. Well, if there’s bark, there’s bite: it’s the same ire of his we see on screen.
Hot on the gory heels of “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Wild Bunch” aims for the jugular. It became part of a generation of movies that gave way to Quentin Tarantino and a new aesthetic of ultraviolence. But where Tarantino’s violence is pre-moral power-fantasy by way of Grand Guignol slapstick, Peckinpah gives his violence meaning, a human dimension.
As a World War II veteran, the arbitrary killings and torture traumatized Peckinpah. You get the sense from seeing his films that he needed to indulge himself in the voluptuous beauty of fictional violence to escape from his own trauma, as if he’s grown dependent on its emotional pull and cathartic release.
Raised in a family of judges, Peckinpah has a sharp, hardened sense of morality, which lends itself to the good-evil-and-gray world of the Western. Every character here is honorable in the grossest of ways and vulgar in the most sympathetic ones. Set against the dawn of a World War and a new century, the film is Peckinpah’s personal work of impression on a new America where the expansive beauty, dangerous freedom, frolicsome coarseness and the flawed, simple codes of honor of the Old West die away.
Peckinpah’s instinct for filmmaking is as sensuous and eloquent as Kubrick and Kurosawa at their best, but throughout his career, he’s been turned down scripts, blacklisted from projects and had his films butchered. Yet like his romanticized killers, he doesn’t know where and when to back off. Time after time, he would get back on the job and chew on tinfoil, with all his illnesses and addictions. Filmmaking was all that he knew, and it’s the only way of life for him. In the end, the stonework drenches in his blood, that’s been boiling in the crucible for as long as he’s lived –– the essence is all that remains. A tormented masterpiece, the failure of “The Wild Bunch” is its triumph.
