cinema history class: the wild bunch (1969)

The session: "And the Train Kept a Rollin'"
We look at Spaghetti Westerns with an eye toward trains and how they helped change the West

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: The Wild Bunch (1969)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew of this film and its reputation for being very violent and very good. But I knew nothing about the plot. I think I had imagined it to be something like The Magnificent Seven. I was wrong about that

Plot:
As the old West is making way for the new, an aging gang, used to the old ways, tries to pull off one last glorious robbery.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
The Wild Bunch is, in one important way, the odd man out in our annual month devoted to Spaghetti Westerns: It's an American film, and therefore not a Spaghetti Western. I actually asked Keith about his choice when he first told us what he would show. And his explanation was that this movie, despite being American, owes a lot to Spaghetti Westerns. In fact, he told me, Sam Peckinpah said he never would have made The Wild Bunch if not for Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Having gotten that explanation from Keith, I was expecting to see something that felt like a Spaghetti Western. But I didn't get that. The fact is that The Wild Bunch feels very much like an American Western. I never would have mistaken it for its Italian-made relatives. What it does owe to them, however, is the extreme violence. The violence isn't brutal the way it is in the Italians' films. The torture that we expect from Corbucci and Leone is absent -- or at least largely so. And yet the violence itself -- most of it through repeated gun battles -- seems to be unending. There's a lot more of it than the Italian films had.

There is definitely a theme to this film. We have a bunch of men coming to terms with their own obsolescence. There are frequent references to the fact that the world is changing. The heroes as such, are thieves and killers. But they stick to a code of honor and the story is told from their perspective. And the audience (or at least I) can't help but sympathize with them and hope that, if they can't stop the world, they can at least leave it on their own terms. And this movie, making its point about the changing world, is the perfect one to close the session on, because the civilizing of the west was a major theme in all the movies Keith showed this session.

A great cast makes this a really great movie.

Ratings
Me: 9
Bob-O: 9.8
Dave: 9.8
Ethan: 9.5