Director Sam Peckinpah redefines the western genre by moving it away from the old tropes of cattle rustlers, showdowns at high noon, land grabbing barons with hired guns, and Indians shooting arrows at circled wagons, with an unrelenting look into the future of violence on the cinematic horizon with The Wild Bunch. A ridden-hard-and-put-away-wet looking crew of grizzled character acting legends (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates), in all their hung over looking, guts teaming over belt buckles, tequila swilling, Mexican prostitute loving glory – who live by a code of loyalty to each other that they’ll defend in blood, are tracked by a greedy posse (Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones) led by a former member of their crew, the begrudged Robert Ryan. Ultimately, The Wild Bunch are “Nine Men Who Came Too Late and Stayed Too Long.”
“It’s a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya’s.” – Pauline Kael
“At once strongly metaphoric and shamelessly visceral, Peckinpah’s saga of outlaws on the lam is arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s—a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice
