The Wild Bunch

Brutal and elegiac masterpiece.

Outlaws led by Pike Bishop on the Mexican/U.S. frontier face not only the passing of time, but bounty hunters (led by former partner of Pike, Deke Thornton) and the Mexican army as well.

In 1969 Sam Peckinpah picked up the torch that Arthur Penn lit with 1967's "Bonnie & Clyde", and literally poured gasoline on it to impact on cinema to the point that the shock wave is still being felt today. The death of the "Motion Picture Production Code" in 1967 ushered in a new era for cinema goers, it was a time for brave and intelligent directors to step up to the plate to deliver stark and emotive thunder, and with "The Wild Bunch", director Sam Peckinpah achieved this by the shed load.

The Wild Bunch doesn't...

There are no good guys in The Wild Bunch, only bad guys and worse guys. The titular bunch are thieves and killers, but at least they wont rob a dead man unlike the posse of bounty hunters, led by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), sent by the railroad company to bring the bunch in dead or alive. Deke, himself a former bunch member, is considerably more evolved than the mercenaries railroad man Harrigan (Albert Dekker) has saddled him with (chicken-stealing gutter trash, Deke calls them).

There is no love lost between Deke and bunch leader Pike Bishop (William Holden), but the former has only accepted the task of capturing the latter because success means freedom (Deke has been temporarily released from jail expressly to track down the bunch; ...

A good Western, with some problems that prevent it from being excellent.

Personally, I think that Western is a genre of cinema focused on entertainment and action, and I think that is generally correct. I haven't seen many Western films that can be said to be great (although they exist). This film is good, it is beyond average, but it is not free from problems and imperfections.

The plot is based on a gang that carries out its latest bank robbery. They know that, in the 20th century, they are part of a dying world and times are changed. Things go wrong: it was a trap set up by the authorities, and this forces them to cross the border into Mexico and spend an insane amount of time looking over their shoulders while a group of blood...