The violent savage west - The wild bunch

The wild bunch, U.S.A., 1969, 134 min

D: Sam Peckinpah

With: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Emilio Fernandez, Robert Ryan

When thinking about the western, maybe the first people that come in our mind is Clint Eastwood and the magnificent Sergio Leone. The famous couple offered the cinema classic like For a fistful of dollars and The good, the bad and the ugly. We shouldn’t forget, of course, John Wayne. But this image shows only the western nicknamed “spaghetti”, not only because of the director’s Italian origin, but also for the naïve style of treating the theme. We all know that type of western in which the “bad guys” die without hope as in video games and the hero doesn’t get shot even if it rains with bullets. It is a kind of movie for our children and the ones within, without blood or manifest violence, which was already dying in the late 60’s.

Sam Peckinpah tries something else. The bad guys die in series again, but the blood flows not only from them, but also from the heroes, who are not moral examples anymore. In fact, Sergio Leone was sensing himself the turn in perception, introducing the shades of grey in The good, the bad and the ugly. The Wild bunch comes from Butch Cassidy’s gang, which terrorized the wild west and were thus nicknamed by the press.

The first scene presents a cavalry detachment heading towards a bank, most likely to escort a money transport. Surprise or not, the soldiers are in fact bandits who rob the bank and don’t have the slightest intentions of redistributing the money to the poor, Robin Hood style. Another surprise: the bandits are actually the good guys, ambushed and nearly decimated, getting away with a few sacks of worthless metal rings instead of pure gold or money.

Pike Bishop and Dutch Engstrom are old hounds; you can read on their faces a life full of crimes, robberies, brothel expeditions, but all with a limit: “we don’t hang people!” They are veteran bandits with a spine and minima moralia, which you cannot help not liking. But it is about another kind of empathy a strong one, not an identification with the character like in the “spaghetti” western, where we are happy when the bad guys are killed as if the bullets were coming from our rifles. We are not them, nor with them, on horses in the Texan and Mexican semi-desert, but we do understand them and their motives, even if they are selfish.

Against them stand the federal army, bounty hunters hired by the railroad company and the rebel Mexican army led by general Mapache (a fantastic Emilio Fernandez). Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) is the forced leader of the bounty hunters, an ex fellow of the bandits. He has to choose between capturing them and going to prison. The choice is hard, but Deke is no saint, no one in the movie wants to be.

It is the beginning of the XX century, in a industrialized American state, mature and strong, where the law is in command and the cowboy bands have largely disappeared. At the south of the Texan border the chaos of the civil war between Mapache and Villa is in command, after the assassination of the president Francisco Madero by the general Victoriano Huerta. Our outlaws do not have space to move in pursuit of their usual way of life, nor motives to renounce the extreme sports, because they do not have families to return to.

Further on there is no need to talk about the action, I resume to say that it is a lot, maybe even to much. We would better concentrate on the brief moments of tranquility, in which the heroes do not use highly flammable liquids for Molotov cocktails because they are too busy drinking them. The old man Sykes is the principal source and – alternative – target of the drinking jokes, with the help of large caliber rifles or dynamite. He has no teeth left, his beard is completely white, he’s senile and he has prostate problems, although we could bet he’s no mare than 60. When they are not busy drinking, the bandits visit diverse American and Mexican brothels, to avoid monotony. When the weapons of classical or occasional enemies are silenced, the music makes its presence felt, with the great soundtrack signed by Robert Lowry, with elements of Mexican folklore.

Without spoiling too much about the final scene, I only say that it needed 12 days of filming and over 10.000 fake bullets. The extreme violence and the ruthless manner of depicting the battle made John Wayne say that the movie had broken the myth of the wild west. The final choice honors the characters and offers a battle of a rare noblesse of violence very hard to define or meet elsewhere. As Deke used to say to the worthless bounty hunters he leaded: “we’re after men, and I wish to God I was with them.”