Ask anyone about Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, and if they remember anything about it at all, they’ll probably remember the violence. Even people who only know the film by reputation know it for the violence. When I covered this film the last time back in 2018 for the AFI Countdown, I made a perfunctory remark about the violence and then spoke more about how, like many Westerns, The Wild Bunch is more about the changing nature of the West, how the title gang is a group of mostly aging gunslingers and outlaws who are watching their way of life vanish before their eyes as they go off on one last job. The thing is, that vanishing way of life is a feature in a lot of Westerns. Settlers move out into “uncivilized” lands–you know, aside from whatever Native American cultures might be out there–and reshape the territory into what is today the United States. The Wild Bunch just tells that story in a more direct way.
But I always try to say something different when I write these up, so this time, I will be focusing on how The Wild Bunch uses violence.
Director Sam Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch the way he did, in part, because he didn’t like the way that Westerns handled reality. In a word, he thought they did so badly. Part of that can be chalked up to factors like the Hays Code and general censorship that would limit what a film could or could not do for many years, but by 1969, those standards were somewhat loosened up. However, Westerns were often very much a good guy/bad guy sort of situation where nuance was rarely the point. Take, for example, the previous entry to the countdown The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. That film doesn’t try to hide who the good guys and bad guys are. Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance is about as despicable a man as it is possible to be. Jimmy Stewart’s Rance Stoddard is benevolent to the point of naivety, and John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon is mostly good, but he is just enough of a throwback to a dying era in the West while also being squarely on Stoddard’s side that he’s a good guy, but one who recognizes the world doesn’t need his like anymore, and he will die unnoticed long after the events of the film’s extended flashback. When people are shot, it’s basically framed as a good thing if the right character does it, and it’s awful when someone else does. The violence is good or bad depending entirely on who performs the act and why, and ultimately, Stoddard’s hands are clean even if he’s one of a handful of people aware of that fact.
Now look at The Wild Bunch, where there aren’t really any benevolent characters. The best you can hope for there is either an idealist like Angel (Jaime Sánchez) or some sort of innocent bystander. This is a film that opens with a group of children happily watching ants attack a handful of scorpions, and while the scene is obviously symbolic for how the film ends with the Bunch fighting off seemingly endless hordes of armed Mexican soldiers, that misses another point: that fight ends with what appears to be a fire set by the children to burn away all the combatants, and the fact remains, these are children enjoying watching animals kill each other. The various members of the Wild Bunch are no saints. They’re just better men than most of the people arrayed against them.
That comes out most prominently in conversations between the old timers in the bunch. Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) is too old to go on missions, but he’s also not too upset to learn his dimwitted grandson was killed during a robbery. As for leader Pike (the great William Holden) and his righthand man Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), their morality is pretty simple: stand by the other men in your group and keep your word. That’s about it. If the Bunch kill less innocents, it’s more of an accident than anything else or they’re just better shots. And even then, they will open fire in a crowd, and one member of the gang during the climactic shoot-out with the Mexicans briefly uses a woman as a human shield. The two Gorch brothers alone (Warren Oates and Ben Jonson) are pretty damn brutal and stupid, but even they seem to be alright with Pike’s basic code. The only real objection any of them can raise is when Dutch objects to Pike’s excusing of traitorous former comrade Deke Thornton’s (Robert Ryan) siding with the railroad to bring Pike and the others in, and even then, it’s not about breaking a promise, but about whom you make a promise to.
Because that there is the key to the violence. Yes, Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers leave a trail of bodies in their wake, but they come across as much better people than anyone else because even if their honor code is rudimentary, at least they have one. Thornton hates himself for where he is, wishing aloud he was still riding with Pike, and he was tortured into helping. The men he rides with are even dumber and more inclined to violence than even the worst the two Gorch brothers display. As for Mexican General Mapache, he is a cruel man, hard on the locals, and doesn’t get too upset when an enraged Angel kills the woman in his lap because, it turns out, she was once his girlfriend. He just needs to be reassured Angel wasn’t aiming at him. Granted, he tortures Angel to death later, but torture is beyond the Wild Bunch. They may kill you, but they won’t drag it out too long. Factor in as well that Mapache’s job for the Bunch is to rob the U.S. Army of guns and ammunition, including a machine gun his people will not really know how to use, and he’s clearly a dangerous man.
Heck, this is a film where a woman, usually depicted as a damsel in distress type in these films, does shoot Pike in the back at one point only for him to growl, “Bitch!” and kill her in response. In the world of The Wild Bunch, you’re either dishing out the violence or it’s being used against you. And that was part of Peckinpah’s overall plan. He wanted the squibs to go off and the blood to be shown because getting shot should be messy. The older Western, again probably for understandable reasons, was often bloodless, or at least the blood was at best implied. In The Wild Bunch, the violence is on full display. The only thing that makes The Wild Bunch‘s outlaws and thugs the sort of characters you might want to spend time with is only because they’re the best of a lot of terrible options.
And, oddly enough, I sit here in 2023 and realize that the things Peckinpah was railing against, namely bloodless violence, is alive, well, and thriving. Studios know, or at least suspect, that the best way to make a lot of money at the box office is to get that PG-13 rating on as many films as possible. That means, among other things, allowing only one F-bomb per film and keeping blood to a minimum no matter what is done to a person. The belief is R-rated films keep out the teenagers and younger kids while PG-rated films are seen as kiddie fare and only attract children. Meanwhile, I can’t remember the last time I saw a film with a G-rating when even Disney animated features like Frozen come back with a PG. The occasional John Wick aside, there aren’t many R-rated action flicks, and only Quentin Tarantino or some other big name director seems capable of showing what violence actually does to a human body. If The Wild Bunch was trying to teach everyone a lesson about how brutal violence can be, that seems to be a lesson that Hollywood has either since forgotten or never really learned in the first place.
NEXT: Hey, how about a foreign language film that is both recent and something I have seen before? Be back soon for the 2019 historical French queer romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
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