This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Sam Peckinpahs epic western ‘The Wild Bunch’.
More than half a century has done little to diminish the impact of a film that would be not only hugely influential on westerns in the years that followed but also signal a major turning point for American cinema. 

A group of aging outlaws led by Pike Bishop (William Holden), that includes his loyal right hand man Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), grizzled veteran Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), the notorious Gorch brothers, Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson) and their young Mexican ally Angel (Jaime Sanchez), operate on the U.S.-Mexico border in 1913.

On the brink of the Great War, the world is changing rapidly and Pike and his men have failed to keep pace. Horses are being replaced by motor cars and rifles by machine guns.

From the beginning it’s clear that this is a western like none seen before. The gang ride into a small Texas town, disguised as U.S. cavalry soldiers, with intent to rob the railroad office. They pass a group of laughing children who are torturing some scorpions by covering them with fire ants. As each opening credit appears, the screen freeze-frames momentarily turning live action into a sketch like image.

Once inside, hostages are taken and Pike gives the command “If they move, kill ‘em”. The final freeze-frame credit appears: ‘Directed by Sam Peckinpah’ before all hell breaks loose.

The robbers have walked into a trap set up by the railroad company and are ambushed by a group of bounty hunters led by Pikes ex-partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) who’s cut a deal to bring Pike to justice in 30 days or return to jail. As the gang flee town after the shootout, leaving the bodies of innocent bystanders cut down in the cross fire, they pass the children once more, who have now set fire to the scorpions and ants. The symbolism is striking. This is a cruel, unforgiving landscape. What was meant to be the last big score before retirement, leaves the outlaws with bags of steel washers instead of gold coins.

They head across the Rio Grande into Mexico where Pike tells his men “We’ve got to start thinking beyond our guns, those days are closing fast”. Old habits die hard though and they agree to rob a U.S. army train of its weapons for the corrupt Mexican General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) in exchange for gold. A couple of brilliantly executed set pieces follow: the tension-filled train hijack, with Thornton and his men onboard, and the blowing up of a bridge to halt the pursuing posse, sending men and horses tumbling into the river below.
Mapache pays the Bunch as agreed but upon learning that Angel has given a case of rifles to Mexican revolutionaries to use against his army, he takes sadistic retribution. No longer willing to stand by and watch the general and his men torture their young friend, Pike decides to take a stand. Cold blooded killers they might be but the gangs code of honour is already evident from an earlier scene when Pike tells Tector “When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal, you’re finished”. Pike, Dutch and the Gorch brothers take the walk through town that leads to the climactic bloody gun battle.

For the action scenes, Peckinpah used multiple cameras running at different speeds from different angles. The footage, once edited by Peckinpah and film editor Lou Lombardo, was an innovation in filmmaking. Using revolutionary fast cutting techniques, a total of 3643 shot to shot edits were created across the films 2 and a quarter hour duration. ‘The Wild Bunch’ has been acknowledged as an influence on their work by modern directors from Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright to Kathryn Bigelow.

With its stunningly beautiful cinematography by Lucien Ballard and Jerry Fielding’s excellent score, this is a western that is about much more than gunfights and chases on horseback. It’s about the passing of time and regret. About loyalty and betrayal. Pike lives with the guilt of abandoning his wounded friend Deke to capture and imprisonment. Deke Thornton, in turn, knows he should be riding with the Bunch, not hunting them down.

Two years earlier, thanks to a relaxation in censorship, Arthur Penn’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ had shocked cinema goers with its violent denouement. Peckinpah upped the ante in terms of how far you could go with violence on screen and responded to the inevitable criticism in his inimitable style by saying “The point of the film is to take this facade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so they are starting to go in the Hollywood, television, predictable reaction syndrome and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut ... It's ugly, brutalizing and bloody fucking awful. It's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement because we're all violent people”. 

‘The Wild Bunch’ is Peckinpahs masterpiece and one of the greatest westerns of all time.