The Wild Bunch (1969)

“Arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s — a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.” — J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

“It’s a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya’s…It’s no accident that you feel a sense of loss for each killer of the Bunch: Peckinpah has made them seem heroically, mythically alive on the screen.” — Pauline Kael

“The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.” — Roger Ebert

SYNOPSIS

Sam Peckinpah’s operatic take on the Revisionist Western pushed screen violence into startling new territory, but few of its many imitators have matched the emotional and moral gravity on display here. Produced amid an era increasingly shaped by the mythic excess of Spaghetti Westerns, The Wild Bunch may be one of the few American Westerns to earn the adjective “Wagnerian.” Featuring an all-star cast of craggy-faced tough guys (including William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Robert Ryan), Peckinpah’s bloody opus unfolds at the twilight of the Old West, where aging outlaw Pike Bishop and his former partner Deke Thornton, now coerced into hunting down the gang he once rode beside, find themselves on opposite sides of a dying frontier. As Pike and his men flee toward Mexico in pursuit of one last score, loyalty, betrayal, and the remnants of an increasingly outmoded code of honor collide in a world rapidly leaving them behind. At once elegy and blood-soaked reckoning, Peckinpah transforms the Western into a meditation on violence, masculinity, and obsolescence.