The Wild Bunch (1969)

Set in 1913 Texas, an aging gang of outlaws lead by a man named Pike (William Holden) escape to Mexico after a disastrous bank robbery that turned into a massacre. Meanwhile, he's being pursued by an ex-member (Robert Ryan) of his gang now working for the law in an attempt to stave off a prison sentence. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, there's never any doubt that we're in the hands of a master director. Aided by Lucien Ballard's superb cinematography, Louis Lombardo's impeccable editing and an excellent score by Jerry Fielding, Peckinpah's revisionist western examines a group of men of another time that no longer fit in the changing West. But as brilliant as it is, it's also a film that I'm very ambivalent about. Peckinpah bestows an almost mythological heroic status on these outlaws that they don't deserve. They're killers, simple as that. There's talk of the poetry of violence in the film and while I'm as admiring of his orgy of bloodletting as the next film buff, it seems like Peckinpah abandons realism in the finale as four surviving outlaws massacre an entire garrison of Mexican soldiers all by themselves in a bloody shootout. Surely not all of the Mexican soldiers were such lousy shots! With Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien (channeling Walter Huston), Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sanchez and Emilio Fernandez.