What struck me, and shook me, wasn't that specific
. It had to do withthesize of the characters and the gnarly individualism of the
storytelling;thetonal blend of effrontery, tenderness, and Rabelaisian gusto; t
heunprecedented combination of virtuosity and heartbreaking passion.By thetime t
he Bunch had annihilated a Mexican warlord and his army inresponse tothe torture
and murder of one of their own, I had accepted them astainted,improbable heroes
. But the real hero was Peckinpah, because heinfused everyframe with his complic
ated, fractured, and impassioned spirit. Hisanti-authoritarianism went beyond ra
dical chic--he curried favor withno one,whether movie mogul, ideologue, or taste
maker. Giving himself overto thegamiest possible example of an aesthetically wor
n out and sociallydisreputable genre, he came up with a piece of art whose power
couldn't beshrugged off or explained away. The Wild Bunch is irreducible. Themov
iedemands that you establish an original relation to it.
It is rare for a
contemporary artist to rouse fanatical loyalty, butmost ofthe filmmakers and cri
tics I respect who came into their own aroundthe timeof The Wild Bunch gave Peck
inpah their fullest measure of devotion--andcontinue to do so ten years after hi
s death, at the age of fifty-nine.
A year and a half ago, when news leaked
out that Warner Bros.planned torelease the director's cut of The Wild Bunch in
70mm stereo prints,theexcitement that swept through the Peckinpah grapevine wasn
't merelycommemorative or nostalgic. The version of The Wild Bunch thatPeckinpah
prepared for release received commercial theatrical distribution inEuropebut not
the United States. One eighty-six-second scene was trimmedbefore themovie's U.S
. premiere. After the film made its debut here to pans(WilliamWolf: "Disgustingl
y bloody"), raves (Stanley Kauffmann: "Beautiful"),anddisappointing box-office r
eturns, the studio (without Peckinpah'sknowledge,let alone approval) deleted eig
ht additional minutes from everyAmerican-release print. Paul Seydor, now a gifte
d film editor (WhiteMenCan't Jump), is the author of the magisterial, sadly out-
of-printPeckinpah:The Western Films (1980). When Seydor was an assistant profess
orof Englishat the University of Southern California, he discovered that one oft
hemovie's nontheatrical distributors, Twyman Films, was releasing16mmCinemaScope
copies of what Twyman didn't realize (until Seydor toldthem) wasthe complete ve
rsion of The Wild Bunch. That's how I saw thedirector's cut,in a classroom in 19
80.
In 1985 everyone got the opportunity to appreciate Peckinpah'sintentio
nswhen Warner Home Video reinstated all the cut footage on tapes anddiscs. Butth
e videos came out only in pan-and-scan, monophonic editions thatbluntedthe force
of Peckinpah's wide-screen images and intricately wroughtsoundtrack. My first c
hance to see the film in near-optimum conditioncame in1988, when Peckinpah's arc
hivist, Don Hyde, got permission to runhisduplicate of the director's own copy a
t the opening of Hyde's theater,theRaven, in the town of Healdsburg, California.
The movie was fresherthanever, and the sound was phenomenal, but the sharpness
and colorhad dulled.
Early last year, when word spread from Warner's offic
es that thenegative wasin fine shape and that portions tested for a new 70mm blo
wup lookedthrilling, hopes of seeing Peckinpah's masterpiece in its preferredsta
teballooned--only to be deflated weeks later. On March 14 JaneGalbraith, ofthe L
os Angeles Times, broke the story that Warner Bros. hadscreened thefilm for the
MPAA rating board, which slapped it with arecommendation ofNC-17: "No Children U
nder 17 Admitted." In three and a half years ofexistence the NC-17 classificatio
n, designed to provide films of adultcontent with a rating that doesn't carry th
e stigma of an X, hasinsteadinherited the X's pariah status. TV and newspaper ad
departmentsand majortheater chains shun NC-17 movies; so do the big studios, wh
ichdepend onbroad-based publicity and exhibition. The world's largest video-rent
alchain,Blockbuster Video, won't stock NC-17 (though you can find soft-coreporn-
-unrated or R-rated--in some Blockbuster outlets). Warner Bros.hasnever distribu
ted an NC-17 movie; indeed, the only big-studio releaseto havecarried an NC-17 r
ating is Philip Kaufman's independently producedHenry &June, which in 1990 broug
ht about the creation of the category inthe firstplace. Predictably, Warner canc
eled its plan to showcase The WildBunch inLos Angeles and San Francisco last spr
ing; in November thecompany's domesticdistribution chief, Barry Reardon, said th
at he hoped to get it outthisyear.
The unreported aspect of this snafu is
that Warner Bros. didn't havetoresubmit the movie to the rating board. The MPAA
had already givenPeckinpah's version an R rating back in 1969. To get a morecomm
ercialrunning time after it had been rated, Warner Bros. sheared severalflashbac
ks, actors' bits, scraps of dialogue, and a huge action setpiecethat in no way e
xtended the boundaries of the film's sex and violence.(InEurope the director's c
ut ran as a prestige release in the besttheaters ofthe biggest cities, with rese
rved seats and an intermission.) AlthoughReardon told me in a phone conversation
that roughly eight minutesin therefitted version had never been seen before, th
at can be true only ifWarnerintends to include footage that Peckinpah himself ed
ited out, beforethepremiere--which would invalidate the "director's cut" label.
In a lettertoJack Valenti, the president of the MPAA, protesting the NC-17rating
, DavidWeddle, the author of the groundbreaking biography If They Move . .. Kill
'Em: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah, wrote that after goingthroughPeckinpah
's production files for The Wild Bunch, "including memos onallphases of negotiat
ions with the MPAA," he believed there was noquestion thatthe "uncut" version, w
hich Warner Bros. scheduled for release lastyear, "isthe exact same version" tha
t the MPAA originally rated R.
Why would a movie that was rated R in 1969
be considered NC-17 in1993? WhenI asked Richard Heffner, the chairman of the MPA
A /NationalAssociation ofTheater Owners Classification and Rating Administration
, he said,"The basicpoint is that we make every effort to reflect contemporary p
arentalattitudes, and those attitudes have changed in a number of areas. Itused
tobe that if you showed a single bare breast, you got an R; we wouldnotautomatic
ally give that film an R in 1993. So, too, correctly gaugingcontemporary parenta
l attitudes, the board is now tougher onviolence." Buthave anti-violence standar
ds toughened in the current frenzy toblame moviesand TV for the violence in the
streets? Or is The Wild Bunch beingpenalizedbecause its galvanizing violence is
emotionally and aestheticallycomplex,and thus challenging? When Vincent Canby, o
f The New York Times,presented a"mayhem report" in 1990, he found that Peckinpah
's approximateonscreen bodycount of eighty-nine, although high, paled before tha
t of the R-ratedDieHard 2, whose total was 264. Canby said, "There is not a mome
nt [inThe WildBunch] when the audience laughs at the spectacle of death as it do
esduringTotal Recall. The violence of The Wild Bunch is as sorrowful as it issho
cking. The film is a classic."
Actually, there is one moment when the audi
ence laughs at thespectacle ofdeath, after a manic Bunch member named Crazy Lee
drops threeassailants likea row of clay pigeons, along with many moments when th
e violence is"assorrowful as it is shocking." Peckinpah elicited all possible re
actionstoviolence and then turned them against one another--that's part ofwhat m
akesthe film so daring. There's nothing gloating about the carnage (asthere isin
so many of today's R-rated action hits), and because it's integral toPeckinpah'
s story about outlaws at trail's end, it leaves a ravaging,mournful residue. The
MPAA has recommended NC-17 forPeckinpah's masterworkwhen blood-feasts starring
Arnold Schwarzenegger or SylvesterStallone arenormally awarded Rs. That's simila
r to the organization's refusing topresentan R to Henry & June, a tender, ironic
al look at a woman's sexualawakening,and then willingly bestowing an R (after sl
ight re-editing) on thetitillating-or-nothing Basic Instinct. Movies that reduce
violence andsex togimmicks and squiggles are less threatening than those that v
iewthem withsardonicism, wisdom, and astonishment. At Basic Instinct or Die Hard
2 it'seasier to use the phrase "It's only a movie" to brush away anymomentaryups
et than it is at Henry & June or The Wild Bunch.
The Wild Bunch is ideal f
or intelligent adolescents, because Peckinpahforcesviewers to question their res
ponses to everything, including itsamazingsurges of sanguinary imagery. Grungy t
hough its characters may be,the moviedoes have inspirational qualities. Lacerati
ng and self-lacerating,Peckinpahmakes movie directing seem enticingly, foolhardi
ly heroic: he exploresextremes of thought, feeling, and behavior without hesitat
ion,apology, orafterthought, and offers as justification only the aesthetic pote
ncyandlived experience of the work itself.
Describing the opening sequence
alone should convey the packednature ofPeckinpah's movie to those who have view
ed it only on TV; watchingit canawaken and stretch slumbering portions of the ad
ult brain, andchange the wayteenagers see. From the very first shot Peckinpah pu
ts new mysteriesinto OldWest mythmaking. The director presents his initial image
--fivemounted men incirca 1913 U.S. Army uniforms, riding along railroad tracks-
-in thestarkestblack-and-white chiaroscuro, freezing the action as the kickoff c
reditflashes on the screen. The design resembles an inKblot rendition ofthe Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Then Peckinpah unfreezes the actionand brings itinto
full, vibrant color. Even those who don't recognize WilliamHolden andErnest Bor
gnine, the stars of the movie, react to the plethora ofominousovertones and unde
rtones emanating from Holden's gritty, wary mien,the odd,unsettling detail of a
man sweeping the railroad tracks, and theenigmatictingle of Jerry Fielding's mus
ic. Peckinpah shifts between color actionandblack-and-white stills throughout th
e opening-credit sequence--asuspensefuldelaying tactic that becomes a poetic dev
ice, foreshadowing thehorrors andbeauties of a story about men engraved in the p
ast. The riders pass agroupof children who giggle at the sight of scorpions bein
g devoured by acagefulof red ants. The Bunch are the scorpions; the bounty hunte
rs, therailroadmen, and the teetotaling citizenry awaiting them in the south Tex
astown ofSan Rafael are the red ants. The twentieth century is the cage; theyoun
gsters are capricious gods, toying with the fate of ants andscorpionsalike.
<
P>The whole movie is about dastardly and heroic acts performed on thebrink ofext
inction. Entering San Rafael, the Bunch amble past a belligerenttemperance meeti
ng as the mayor (Dub Taylor) decries the soul-depletingsinfulness of drink to an
audience filled with hatchet-faced women.Theiconoclastic treatment of children
and proper townsfolk adds to thegatheringtension. Peckinpah takes the traditiona
l suspense hook of strangerslopinginto a sleepy town and pushes it to the point
of volatility. Whilefurtivelychecking out the Bunch members already stationed ar
ound MainStreet, Holdenbumps into a genteel old woman who drops her string-tied
packages.Their mildcollision resonates like a kettledrum. With the utmost courtl
inessHoldenpicks up the parcels. Then Borgnine offers to carry them while Holden
lendsthe woman his arm. That's when anyone receptive to Peckinpah'sartistrybegin
s to feel high-voltage exhilaration.
Peckinpah and his co-writer, Walon Gr
een, working from a story byGreen andRoy N. Sickner, twist the normal rooting in
terests of Westerns andothermale-oriented action movies. It's elating to observe
a tight-knit groupexecute a plan and even improvise around it; by the time Peck
inpahprovidesglimpses of the bounty hunters waiting on the rooftops to ambushHol
den andhis men, the audience is inclined toward the Bunch's side. ButPeckinpahre
fuses to pay them knee-jerk melodramatic allegiance. These arehardguys--thieves
and murderers. Just before Holden and company entertherailroad's administrative
offices, the senior clerk spouts one of themovie'skey lines: "I don't care what
you meant to do, it's what you did I don'tlike." Seconds later Holden lifts the
man from his seat, throws himagainstthe wall, and pronounces, "If they move . .
. kill 'em." Against Holden'sstill portrait flash the words "Directed by Sam Pec
kinpah"--the boldestdirectorial signature in movie history.
With character
istic audacity Peckinpah takes half an hour to identifyall theantiheroes by name
. But through word, gesture, and action he cuestheaudience in to their character
s, and then thrusts them into acataclysmic gunbattle. The total conviction of th
e entire cast makes Peckinpah'sobliqueintroductions memorable. Holden is Pike Bi
shop, the charismatic, no-nonsenseleader of the Bunch; Borgnine is Dutch, his do
gged, faithfulsecond-in-command; Jaime Sanchez is the alert, graceful Angel, the
Bunch'sonly Mexican (and its one out-and-out idealist); Warren Oates andBen John
sonare the scurrilous Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector; Bo Hopkins isCrazy Lee,wh
o has unforgettable psychotic eyes. Pike's nemeses are his ex-partner, DekeThorn
ton (Robert Ryan), a haunted man who has been hired out ofYuma Prisonto hunt Pik
e down; the ruthless railroad security chief Harrigan(AlbertDekker); and a scurv
y band of "gutter trash" (including StrotherMartin andL. Q. Jones) out for bount
y.
Neither side has any compunction about endangering the people inthetemp
erance parade. When Angel spots opposing rifles on a rooftop,Pikemarshals his te
am, completes his mission--and kicks the senior clerkinto thepath of the oncomin
g marchers. In the prolonged explosion thatfollows, theBunch, desperate to get o
ut of town, treat the citizens as shields andimpediments, while the railroad men
and bounty hunters fire at willinto thecrowd. Still, Deke Thornton, who disdain
s the greedy lowlifes whosurroundhim and disparages Harrigan as a smug, mercenar
y manipulator, willsay of theBunch, "We're after men--and I wish to God I was wi
th them."
Peckinpah isn't so adoring. It's a Bunch member, Crazy Lee, whoe
xhibits themost terrifying and erratic (and darkly comic) behavior. On Pike'sord
ers heholds two clerks and a female customer hostage at the railroad officedurin
gthe shootout. He punishes the woman for calling him "trash" bysticking histongu
e in her ear, and then forces his prisoners to sing the marchers'hymn,"Shall We
Gather at the River?" Yet Peckinpah makes us feel a warpedaffection for Lee. He'
s a quick-draw artist, Pike's loyal soldier, and ahomicidal jester all at once.
As the surviving Bunch members maketheirescape to Mexico, Freddie Sykes (Edmond
O'Brien), the eldest ofPike's gangand, next to Dutch, Pike's closest friend, rev
eals that Crazy Lee washisgrandson. As Dutch later says of Angel, Sykes's grands
on "played hisstringright out to the end."
Peckinpah's treatment of indivi
dual acts of violence is electrifyinglyambiguous. He and his cinematographer, Lu
cien Ballard (with inputfrom theeditor, Lou Lombardo), shot the action scenes no
t in simple slowmotion butat varying rates of speed; Peckinpah cuts among speeds
--and betweenparalleldisplays of mayhem--as he shifts perspectives. The results
challenge aviewer's powers of perception and empathy. At one point a boy and agi
rlcling to each other as they witness death being choreographed bybullets.When a
n outlaw rides by at full gallop and grabs the saddlebags outof a deadman's hand
s, their expression mingles shock with awe and, possibly,delight.That one superc
harged instant exemplifies Peckinpah's achievementthroughoutthe film: he creates
indelible images of Western legendry in analternatelytragic and ironic modern c
ontext.
The most extraordinary aspect of The Wild Bunch is that the moviee
nds in abloodbath even wilder than the one in San Rafael, but for Pike's crew(an
dthe audience) it's an act of redemption. What happens in between,Peckinpahonce
remarked, is that the killers go to Mexico.Peckinpah can be as incisive as John
Huston in The Treasure of theSierraMadre when delineating the lure of gold: Pike
advises Angel, "Tenthousandcuts an awful lot of family ties." But somewhere alo
ng the line moneyceasesto be an issue: what's at stake is the death of honor. Th
etransformation ofthe Bunch begins when Pike and his men sojourn in Angel's vill
age.Even afterAngel nearly gets the whole Bunch killed (the warlord Mapache hass
tolen hisgirl, so he shoots her while she's sitting in Mapache's lap), the menre
mainloyal to him. When they make a deal to steal American rifles forMapache,they
agree to allow Angel to steal one case for his villagers. Thecaperworks like a
charm, with the unexpected plus of temporarilydebilitatingThornton's bounty hunt
ers. But the mother of Angel's beloved tellsMapacheabout the stolen guns, and th
e chieftain's thugs torture Angel. Thegun jobhas been crucial for Pike, not just
because of the money or someillusionthat it will give him a new start but becau
se, as the restoredflashbacksillustrate, he has consistently screwed up his life
and those of thepeopleclosest to him--the one woman he loved, and Deke Thornton
, andeven FreddieSykes. Pike promises, "This time we do it right." And for once
hedoes. Butthe persecution of Angel keeps him from savoring his victory--andlead
s theBunch to a glorious group sacrifice.
In Weddle's book Peckinpah's lon
gtime collaborator, Jim Silke, says,"Thewhole idea was, who would really do that
--rob and kill, steal guns,and yetin the end give the guns away to the peasants
and go back for Angeland diefor him?"
Peckinpah set about answering that q
uestion partly by investingcharacterslike Deke and Pike with his own emotional t
opography. Even at whatnow lookslike the peak of his career, Peckinpah knew abou
t defeat and failure,betrayal and busted relationships: after the critical succe
ss of hissecondfeature, Ride the High Country (1962), he'd been shut out of thee
diting roomon Major Dundee (1965), fired after a few days on the set of TheCinci
nnatiKid (1965), and barred from features for most of the rest of thedecade. Inh
er brilliant review of The Killer Elite (1975) Pauline Kael analyzedPeckinpah's
"nihilist poetry" in terms of his hatred for the moderncorporateworld. It's ther
e in embryo in The Wild Bunch--in the paid-forbondage ofDeke Thornton to the rai
lroad, in the ominous connection betweenMapache andhis First World War-era Germa
n advisers, in the naivete and hypocrisyandmalice that permeate the representati
ves of the straight, moralisticworld.Pike may make his kamikaze move out of self
-disgust, but it's out ofdisgust,too. Pike's code--"When you side with a man, yo
u stay with him"--applies tohim and his men alone.
This anarchic integrity
--this urge to make the universe come to terms--getsat the core attraction of Pe
ckinpah's much-booted-about machismoand goesbeyond the whoring and the physical
bravado of each Bunch member.It alsogets at the centrality of Mexico to Peckinpa
h's vision. Peckinpah wasaWestern individualist (his family is rooted in frontie
r California), andPikeis his reflection. Both men were drawn to Mexico. Richard
Rodriguez,in Daysof Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, describesCa
lifornia as acomic culture, "constructed on a Protestant faith in individualism,
"where"youth is not a fruitless metaphor; where it is possible to start anew."Mexico, on the other hand, is a tragic culture: "My Mexican father, ashisfather before him, believed that old men know more than young men;that lifewill break your heart; that death finally is the vantage point fromwhich alife must be seen."
In The Movie Rating Game (1972) Stephen Farber, a Los Angeles-based critic,writes that when Pauline Kael spoke to the rating board, at Farber'sinvitation, in 1970, she asked a crucial question: in Farber'sparaphrase,"By excluding young people from some of the most provocative andinnovativecontemporary films, aren't we depriving them of a good deal of theintellectual and imaginative stimulation that movies at their best canprovide?"
In the current anxiety over movie violence we seem to be headingback to thedays when moviegoing for teenagers meant Teflon fun. The cruelestirony isthat many of the movies that could actually open kids' minds mayprovevulnerable to censorship, because they take violent, attention-gettingstories and fill them with character and feeling. I recently watchedHenri-Georges Clouzot's great The Wages of Fear--an ancestor ofPeckinpah'smovie, about four men hauling nitroglycerin over bad roads for a bigpayoff--with a semi-delinquent adolescent friend, who afterward toldme,solemnly, that the movie really taught him a lesson: "There are somethingsyou shouldn't do for money." That's more than kids get from mostmovies. Fortheir sake, The Wild Bunch should be freed.
--------------------
Michael Sragow writes reviews for The New Yorker's "Movies in Brief"section.He edited Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You've NeverSeen (1990).
Epilogue: In astatement issued October 14, the MPAA said that "after exhaustiveresearch,[Warner Brothers] was able to produce evidence that the director'scut itwill now release is the identical version of the film rated R by theratingsboard in 1969." The re-release is scheduled for springtime.