"The Wild Bunch": Last of the Great Westerns [by David Lehman]

My latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar (February 23, 2023) is titled "Brilliant Carnage: Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion bullet ballet"

I have seen The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, many times. The film marks the definitive end of the truly Western Western, a farewell to the time when desperadoes played poker in frontier saloons, gunfighters fought legendary battles, and the cavalry saved the day or died with their boots on. A righteous man could be John Wayne romancing Claire Trevor in Stagecoach or Gary Cooper taking on three killers in High Noon, and a little boy could end the movie by begging “Shane! Shane! Come back!” Once, when my son Joe, then twelve, and I watched The Wild Bunch together, he came up with the perfect two-word description of the movie: “brilliant carnage.”

Myths die not all at once but in stages, and the Western always owed something of its appeal to the knowledge that the era it depicted—and, to some extent, invented—was long since gone by the time talking pictures filled movie screens. With each year, the cowboy-as-hero, whether lawman or bandit, grew more distant. Of the horsemen making up The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen are the only two who ride off into the sunset. Though they have defeated the bad guys who terrorized Mexican farmers, they know their days are numbered. “Only the farmers won,” Brynner says. “We lost. We always lose.”

In The Wild Bunch, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads the eponymous outlaws with Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) as his right-hand man. Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates) are brothers with bad tempers and a healthy lust for liquor and ladies. Angel (Jaime Sanchez) is the one Mexican among them, passionate and brave, while Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), a good-natured elder statesman, remains behind the scenes, because he can no longer meet the physical demands of a hold-up job. The bunch would have had one extra fellow, but Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s closest friend, was arrested, flogged mercilessly, and blackmailed by a vicious railway baron (Albert Dekker) into leading a team of “peckerwood” trash to hunt down the gang. The actors up and down the line give sterling performances.

The movie begins on the outskirts of San Rafael, a small Texas town, with children gleefully burning straw atop a battle of ants and scorpions. It is a powerful image, conveying the idea that cruelty and an impulse to destroy may be innate in even the youngest and most innocent human beings. In sharp contrast, a salvation salesman leads an open-air temperance meeting in the center of town, where a pathetic crowd swears off alcohol and sings “Shall We Gather at the River?”

It is then that Pike and his men, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, ride in to rob the railway’s offices. Their plans have been anticipated, however, and an ambush organized against them. In the ensuing crossfire, only Pike and five others ride their horses to safety. One of them will die of his wounds minutes later. And their bags of stolen treasure turn out to contain no treasure—just dime-store metal washers.

from The American Scholar https://theamericanscholar.org/brilliant-carnage/
for more click here

Comments

[Jen Knox]

Fantastic article, David! In 1969 cowboys were very good and very bad at the same time.

[Leo Kailas]

David: Another wonderful review--you capture my thoughts in such an eloquent fashion. The Wild Bunch has been among my top ten movies ever since I saw it the first time. A requiem to the Old Wild West with Bill Holden giving one of his finest screen performances. I love the movie--the old values of loyalty and friendship. I always quote the line towards the end when I think Bill Holden says, "let's go" and Ernest Borgnine says, "why not". Robert Ryan gives a great performance--his internal struggle is so evident. I love this movie!

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Jen, and thank you, Leo, for these much appreciated comments. Leo, the exchange you quote is one that has also meant a lot to me (and it appears toward the end of my article). It's Bill Holden who says "Let's go," and it's Warren Oates who replies "Why not?"

[Joanne Dominique Dwyer]

After reading David Lehman’s sagacious and applauding article on The Wild Bunch, I watched the film for the first time. Being a child in 1969, I loved the television shows Gunsmoke and Bonanza. I like so many others at that time, watched John Wayne movies and through those Westerns was exposed to the ideology of good men versus evil men, rescuers versus doers of harm. Now, as an adult with a different eye and brain, I’m still a sucker for heroes, heroines, anti-heroes and anti-heroines. But it was difficult for me to locate a hero archetype in any character in The Wild Bunch.
I agree with Lehman, that the violent gun battle scenes, in terms of cinematic choreography, are masterful. The majority of my praise goes to the accomplished cinematography – the coordination of multitudes of men and horses in motion along with blood and gruesome death is operatic and realistic at the same time. No hiding from the effects of war and wounding. No rose-colored glasses here.
In an era of the Vietnam War and continued racial injustices, along with protests against both, and the end of WWII and the Holocaust only 24 years prior, I wonder if Peckinpah was employing his film-making skills as protest: conveying the point that human beings have a disturbing propensity for violence. In my view, there isn’t a single main or secondary character in the entire cast who I’d call a good human being. Of course, it's realistic to be a mixture, we are all examples of that, The two that come closest to good humans are Angel and Deke. Angel because he cared for his village more than for gold or personal gain. But he shoots his former fiancé! He is a victim of his own and cultural macho jealous possessive rage. And we can all understand Deke not wanted to go back to jail, but...
I could not help but notice from my 2023 lens, just how much misogyny runs rampant through the narrative of this film. Perhaps that is true to life in 1913? And 1969? Was Peckinpah aware and purposeful in creating a male-dominant film? I noticed Mexican women’s breasts are bared on camera, but not American women's. And the Mexican women both in the (literal) hands of Mapache, the idiotic barbaric despot, and his soldiers - and in the hands of three of the four Wild Bunch are treated as property, as sexual gratification objects, not as human beings.
I appreciate Lehman’s adjective “compliant” when describing the ladies in his last paragraph. Lehman is not blind to the fact that the Mexican women had little if any choice in their lives but to accommodate the stingy drunk gringos who depersonalized them without conscience. Is this why Peckinpah has the woman shoot Pike near the end of the film?
I agree with the commenter that said so many men portrayed in the film remind her of criminals today. I could not help but equate the violence and behavior of all of the disparate groups in The Wild Bunch with Russia invading Ukraine and Cartel war lords in Mexico, to name just a few current bullies who value gold (and bitcoin) over human kindness, equality and camaraderie.
My humble thoughts....

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Joanne, for taking the time and trouble to post this lengthy comment. Your point about the movie's context (Vietnam) rings true and may apply as well to the striking success of the murderous if undeniably gorgeous couple in "Bonnie and Clyde." It was an era of anti-heroes and the celebration of outlaws. I don't see how either Angel or Deke qualifies as a "good human." Though soome in the cast are more sympathetic than others, none is exemplary.

While the reason for seeing and admiring "The Wild Bunch" has as little to do with heroes and heroics as with attitudes toward women in 1910 and 1969, one might make a valuable study of the subordinate role of women in Westerns. Leaving aside victims and sluts, they seem to fall into three categories: damsels-in-distress, tough gals in the manner of Marlene Dietrich in "Destry Rides Again," and moralists in the manner of Grace Kelly in "High Noon." Am I leaving something out? No doubt.
I do, of course, understand why someone would recoil from a picture that is so soaked in bloodshed, violence, nastiness, and brutish behavior. Did you sit through "Pulp Fiction"?

[Mindy Aloff]

"The unspoken question is: What else do they have to live for? They know their time is up." Stanley Kauffman's joke about the ballet and the bullet reminds me, for one, that the choreographer George Balanchine used to watch Westerns on t.v. and made a tribute to the genre's codes, styles, and Romantic melancholy in his '54 ballet suite Western SymphonyHow remote his light touch now seems. In 2023, the Existentialist question Peckinpah's film proposes evokes not a man's-world answer but a woman's: the soaring last vault of the Myth of the American West, forever inscribed in mid-air, by those two trousered ballerine, Thelma and Louise. All that said, back in 1969, when "The Wild Bunch" was brand-new, its brilliant carnage (as your son put it with precision) just seemed an inevitable capper to a decade of assassinations and a year that had brought us both Altamont and the Manson Family murders, as well as more of the slo-mo apocalypse in Vietnam. That was the world my generation--yours, too--coming of age, thought of as the real world, the tough truth for children whom childhood bypassed, and still does. Thank you for this terrific appreciation of a work that, lamentably, remains as relevant as today's headlines.

[Joanne Dominique Dwyer]

David -

You guessed correctly, I had trouble sitting in the movie theater years ago watching Pulp Fiction. My main discomfort, if I recall correctly, came from the laughter in the audience during the bloodiest scenes. I could not make sense of that.

I agree, a study of the "subordinate" roles of women in Westerns would be an interesting undertaking.