United States

A brutal drama of violent men who had outlived their times. The year is 1913, just one year short of World War I. Disguised as U.S. soldiers, a gang rides into a Texas border town. Silently they enter and rob the railroad office. Along rooftops, a railroad company ambush waits. When the gang emerges, the company's hired gunmen open fire. Men, women, and children are caught in the crossfire. The slaughter that follows, gut-wrenching and eerily beautiful, might have been the climax of an earlier Western. But director Sam Peckinpah uses it to begin his exciting, provocative, and artistically influential 1969 film, The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah's aim was to break the western film out of its tired TV image. "We are telling a tale of hardened veterans of western outlawry," he explained. "This is a story of violent men who lived during the Mexican Revolution. The brutal story must be told honestly." Peckinpah couldn't have done it alone. To play his band of magnificent losers in a dying lawless West, he brought together a combination of fine actors at the peak of their talents. William Holden portrays Pike Bishop, leader of the Wild Bunch, Robert Ryan is Deke Thornton, who once rode with Pike and now faces return to prison unless he leads a team of bounty-hunters after his ex-partner. Ernest Borgnine is Pike's sidekick Dutch; Warren Oates, Jaime Sanchez, Ben Johnson, Strother Martin, and L.Q. Jones create their character roles to perfection. Particularly strong is Edmond O'Brien as Sykes, the old desert-rat who plays both ends against the middle. The Wild Bunch is one of a handful of films, like Bonnie and Clyde, that broke new ground in the realistic depiction of violence on the screen. Yet Peckinpah's violence has a calm, almost childlike serenity of spirit, as if to remind us that modern horrors to come would make even the wildest bunch of the West seem innocent.