The Wild Bunch still retains its sorrowful, fatal power because of the complexity of Peckinpah's attitudes about violence. He forces us to confront our own voyeuristic ambivalence; we're alternately horrified by the butchery and exhilarated by the orgiastic energy his balletic spectacles stir up. ...
He coughs, and Nigel appears, holding the Statue of Liberty torch that he has carried throughout the film, and hits the wildebeest with it. He then apologizes to the audience, breaking the fourth wall and ending the film in the process. ...
Thornton’s decision to catch the Wild Bunch on the way out of the railroad office allows them to avoid capture, under cover of the Temperance march; Angel’s decision to shoot Teresa almost gets the Bunch killed and backfires when her mother informs on him about the rifles; Pike’s decisi...
PETER is passing pages around a bunch of actors. JOHN, JAMES, and NOL are looking through their pages. JOHN "Draw if you be men! (to JAMES) Gregory, remember thy washing blow." NOL "Part, fools, put up your swords." WILL is going around pumping hands and slapping shoulders, flushed...
Sticking to the final outcome of Cheung Tze-keung’s real life escapades makes it easy for Wild Wild Bunch to toe the one-party line when it wraps up, and after all the big budget bang for your buck along the way it’s an awkward landing. A chase leads to the Macao/China border an...
In "The Wild Bunch," violence becomes more than a vehicle through which morals are judged. Rather, it confuses the line between right and wrong, displaying conflict in a sense that is even appealing, or aesthetic. That attitude would have been unimaginable in its predecessors, where violence ...
But the film’s ambiguous ending points to a murkier truth. Many – including members of Cassidy’s family – believe that the real-life Butch Cassidy, the jovial, charismatic leader of the Wild Bunch, lived for decades after the legendary South American shoot-out. Butch Cassidy grew up in...
#60. ‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969) - Streaming: DIRECTV - Director: Sam Peckinpah - Stacker score: 90.6 - Metascore: 95 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Run time: 135 minutes Sam Peckinpah’s hyper-violent Western revises traditional notions of the American genre. The film follows a gang of out...
41 The Wild Bunch (1969) Photo : Courtesy Everett Collection For the first half-century of cinema’s existence, the Western was the medium’s defining genre, in America at least. But hundreds of movies — plus primetime television series like “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” — wore it out, ...
The Wild Bunch still retains its sorrowful, fatal power because of the complexity of Peckinpah's attitudes about violence. He forces us to confront our own voyeuristic ambivalence; we're alternately horrified by the butchery and exhilarated by the orgiastic energy his balletic spectacles stir up. ...