The Wild Bunch [HD DVD]

The Wild Bunch [HD DVD]
by Sam Peckinpah

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Actor: Edmond O'Brien, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, William Holden
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Cinematographer: Lucien Ballard
Writer: Sam Peckinpah
Editor: Lou Lombardo
Producer: Phil Feldman
Producer: Roy N. Sickner
Writer: Roy N. Sickner
Writer: Walon Green
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language); German (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 134 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-09-25
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video

DVD Reviews of The Wild Bunch [HD DVD]

DVD Review: The Wild Bunch is Still Wild
Summary: 5 Stars

I saw The Wild Bunch when it was first in the theaters. The scale of the large screen almost made the scale of violence of the movie to hard to take. But there are so many underlying themes and images that I find myself drawn back to it over and over again. This DVD version, with all the special features and using the director's original cut, brings those underlying ideas out into the open.
The first couple of times watching the film I focused on the physical violence -- the number of bodies and blood. Even though there are gallons of blood, it is still understated from reality. Bullets go through bodies and blood follows, but we do not have to sit through the additional tearing of flesh that a 45 would do. After seeing the physical, I began to see the psychological. There definitely are some sick and perverted characters, but it is the seemingly sane ones that bother me. William Holden is so calm (and his hero image from other films carries over to this one) that it is hard to believe that he is the mastermind behind the crime. Robert Ryan is trapped into leading the posse, but he also seems entirely out of place. At least Ryan finds an appropriate place in life at the end.
The end itself, with the peasants collecting things left from the massacre contrasts with the perverse body robbing of Ryan's posse.
Perhaps one of the most telling scenes in the movie is the kids putting a scorpion on an ant hill and enjoying the torment the scorpion goes through. They take even greater delight by setting all the insects on fire. That scene is really a summation of the whole film.
The Wild Bunch takes a strong stomach to watch, but it says so much about human nature that it forces us all to think about who and what we are. A simple comment on it: one of the most compelling films ever made.

DVD Review: 3.5 stars out of 4
Summary: 5 Stars

The Bottom Line:

Marred only (and slightly at that) by its unwillingness to develop most of its supporting characters (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson, in particular, come across as empty shirts), The Wild Bunch is a pulsating, red-blooded revisionist Western with exquisite direction by Peckinpah and some of the best-choreographed violence ever seen on screen: if you haven't yet seen it, make time for The Wild Bunch.

DVD Review: One of the "Top 10" Westerns of all-time!
Summary: 5 Stars

"The Wild Bunch" deserves to be considered one of the "Top 10 GREATEST" western films ever made. It's a CLASSIC of the western genre. The four leading actors are four of the GREATS. William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates. Robert Ryan and Strother Martin are excellent as well.

Sam Peckinpah's direction is MASTERFUL. The one thing everybody seems to think of when they think of this film is the very violent gun battle at the end. But this is just a small part of the movie. The entire movie is GREAT.

I recommend this movie highly and like I said, it's one of the CLASSICS of the western genre.

"If any of them move, KILL 'EM!"

DVD Review: BLOODIEST WESTERN! PEKINPAH'S MILESTONE
Summary: 5 Stars

The Wild Bunch (1969), directed by Sam Peckinpah, is a Western film about an aging outlaw gang at the Texas-Mexico border trying to exist in the modern world of 1913. The film was controversial because of its violence and the portrayal of the crude men trying to survive the era.

The Wild Bunch is noted for intricate, multi-angle editing, using normal and slow motion images, a revolutionary cinema technique in 1969. The writing of Walon Green, Roy N. Sickner, and Sam Peckinpah was nominated for a best-screenplay Academy Award; Jerry Fielding's music was nominated for Best Original Score; director Peckinpah was nominated for an Outstanding Directorial Achievement award by the Directors Guild of America; and cinematographer Lucien Ballard won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cinematography.[1]

In 1999, the U.S. National Film Registry selected it for preservation in the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. The Wild Bunch was ranked 80th in the American Film Institute's best hundred American films, and the 69th most thrilling movie.[2] In 2008, the AFI revealed its "10 Top 10" of the best ten films in ten genres, The Wild Bunch is the sixth-best western.

Pike Bishop (William Holden), the leader of a gang of aging outlaws, is seeking an elusive retirement with one final score, beginning with the robbery of a bank containing a payload of silver. The group is then ambushed by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) -- Pike's former partner -- and a posse of deputized bounty hunters hired out by a railroad company, resulting in a bloody shootout that kills off most of the gang; Pike, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson), and Angel (Jaime S?nchez) emerge as the only survivors. With the loot turning out to be fake, they reunite with another remaining gang member, Freddie Sykes (Edmond O'Brien), and head for Mexico. Deke, who was freed from prison to track down Pike, pursues them for the promise of his freedom.

The gang takes refuge in Angel's old village, where the Mexican Revolution has evidently taken its toll on the people; a corrupt warlord named Mapache (Emilio Fern?ndez), a General serving under the Mexican Federal Army, had been stealing food from numerous villages to feed his troops. They eventually head to Mapache's base town -- a den of senseless debauchery -- to trade horses, but once Angel spots his former girlfriend in the arms of Mapache, he shoots and kills her in the Generalissimo's lap out of jealousy. To defuse the situation, Pike then decides to work for Mapache, who hires him and his men for $10,000 in gold to steal an arms shipment from a U.S. Army train running near the border; he seeks to resupply his army and appease his German military advisers, who wish to attain some examples of American weaponry to bring home. Angel is eager to send some of the guns to his village, and convinces Pike to let him smuggle some for his share of the gold. The heist goes as planned, but Deke and his posse are waiting for them in the train and give chase, only to be foiled again after falling into an explosives trap that sends the posse down a river. Deke, nonetheless, continues the pursuit.

The gang then devise a careful way to send the guns back to Mapache without risk of betrayal, but during one of their transactions Angel is captured, having been found out for his theft of some of the guns. Later, with Sykes wounded and forced into hiding by another encounter with Deke's posse, the rest of the gang decide to head back to Mapache for shelter, where they find Angel being badly tortured. Out of a rare moment of conscience, they decide to rescue him. They confront Mapache, who is promptly shot after he slits Angel's throat. The violent gun battle that follows has Pike and his men killed, but not without a massacre of nearly the entire Mexican garrison.

Deke finally catches up to Pike, only to find his bullet-riddled corpse; he thus allows the remaining posse to take the bodies back and collect the reward, while electing to stay behind and watch Mapache's base town being abandoned. Sykes later arrives with several rebel partisans from Angel's village (who had apparently killed off the posse along the way), and asks Deke to fight in the revolution. Laughing, Deke and Sykes ride off together.
Director Sam Peckinpah considered many actors for the Pike Bishop role; originally, the part was written for Lee Marvin, who declined, thinking it too like his role in The Professionals (1966), and he was offered more money to make Paint Your Wagon (1969). James Stewart, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston were considered before William Holden.[5][6]

The part of Deke Thornton originally was offered to Brian Keith (who had worked with Peckinpah on The Westerner [1960] and The Deadly Companions [1961]). Keith, working in Family Affair, declined; also considered were Richard Harris, Arthur Kennedy, Henry Fonda, Ben Johnson (later cast as Tector Gorch) and Van Heflin. Robert Ryan was cast per his performance in The Dirty Dozen.[7]

Mario Adorf was considered for the part of Mapache; the role went to Emilio Fernandez, the Mexican film director and actor and friend of Peckinpah.[8] Among those considered to play Dutch Engstrom were Steve McQueen, George Peppard, Jim Brown, Alex Cord, Robert Culp, Sammy Davis, Jr., Charles Bronson and Richard Jaeckel. Ernest Borgnine was cast per his performance in The Dirty Dozen.[9]

Robert Blake was the original choice to play Angel, but he asked too much money, per his success with In Cold Blood (1967). Peckinpah had seen Jaime S?nchez in the Broadway production of Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker, was impressed and demanded he be cast as Angel.[10] Albert Dekker, a stage actor, was cast as Harrigan, the railroad detective. He died months after filming, The Wild Bunch was his final film.

Bo Hopkins played the part of Clarence "Crazy" Lee.
In 1967, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts producers Kenneth Hyman and Phil Feldman were interested in having Sam Peckinpah rewrite and direct an adventure film called The Diamond Story. A professional outcast due to the production difficulties of his previous film Major Dundee (1965) and his firing from the set of The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Peckinpah's stock had improved following his critically acclaimed work on the television film Noon Wine (1966). An alternative screenplay available at the studio was The Wild Bunch, written by Roy Sickner and Walon Green. At the time, William Goldman's screenplay Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had recently been purchased by 20th Century Fox. It was quickly decided that The Wild Bunch, which had several similarities to Goldman's work, would be produced in order to beat Butch Cassidy to the theaters.[11][12][13][14]

By the fall of 1967, Peckinpah was rewriting the screenplay and preparing for production. Filmed on location in Mexico, Peckinpah's epic work was inspired by his hunger to return to films, the violence seen in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, America's growing frustration with the Vietnam War and what he perceived to be the utter lack of reality seen in Westerns up to that time. He set out to make a film which portrayed not only the vicious violence of the period, but the crude men attempting to survive the era. Multiple scenes attempted in Major Dundee, including slow motion action sequences (inspired by Akira Kurosawa's work in Seven Samurai), characters leaving a village as if in a funeral procession and the use of inexperienced locals as extras, would be perfected in The Wild Bunch.[15]

The film was shot with the anamorphic process. Peckinpah and his cinematographer, Lucien Ballard, also made use of a wide angle camera lens, one that allowed for objects and people in both the background and foreground to remain in sharp focus. The effect is best seen in the shots where the Bunch make their "long walk" to Mapache's headquarters to free Angel. As they walk forward, a constant flow of people pass between them and the camera, yet are as sharply focused as the Bunch. The editing of the film is notable in that shots from multiple angles would be spliced together in rapid succession, often at different speeds, placing greater emphasis on the chaotic nature of the action and the gunfights.

Lou Lombardo, having previously worked with Peckinpah on Noon Wine, was personally hired by the director to edit The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah had wanted an editor who would be loyal to him. Lombardo's youth was also a plus, as he wasn't bound by traditional conventions. One of Lombardo's first contributions was to show Peckinpah an episode of the TV series Felony Squad he edited in 1967. The episode, entitled "My Mommy Got Lost," included a slow motion sequence where Joe Don Baker is shot by the police. The scene mixed slow motion with normal speed. Peckinpah was reportedly thrilled and told Lombardo, "Let's try some of that when we get down to Mexico!" The director would film the major shootouts with six cameras, all operating a different film rates including 24 frames per second, 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second, 90 frames per second and 120 frames per second. When the scenes were eventually cut together, the action would shift from slow to fast to slower still, giving time an elastic quality never before seen in motion pictures up to that time.[16][17]

By the time filming wrapped, Peckinpah had shot 333,000 feet of film with 1,288 camera setups. Lombardo and Peckinpah remained in Mexico for six months editing the picture. After initial cuts, the opening gunfight sequence ran 21 minutes. Cutting frames from specific scenes and intercutting others, they were able to fine-cut the opening bank robbery down to five minutes. The creative montage became the model for the rest of the film and would forever change the way movies would be made.[18]

In 1993, Warner Brothers resubmitted the film to the MPAA ratings board prior to an expected rerelease. To the studio's surprise, the originally R-rated film was given an NC-17, delaying the release until the decision was appealed.[19] The controversy was linked to 10 extra minutes added to the film, although none of this footage contained strong violence. Warner Brothers trimmed some footage to decrease the running time to ensure additional daily screenings.[20] Today, almost all of the versions of The Wild Bunch include the missing scenes. Warner Brothers released a newly restored version of The Wild Bunch in a two-disc special edition on January 10, 2006. It includes an audio commentary by Peckinpah scholars, two documentaries concerning the making of the film and never-before-seen outtakes.

Sam Peckinpah and the making of The Wild Bunch was the subject of the documentary The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage (1996) directed by Paul Seydor. It was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary Short Subject.[21]

Peckinpah stated that one of his goals for this movie was to give the audience "some idea of what it is to be gunned down." A memorable incident occurred, to that end, as Peckinpah's crew were consulting him on the "gunfire" effects to be used in the film. Not satisfied with the results from the squibs his crew had brought for him, Peckinpah became exasperated; he finally hollered, "That's not what I want! That's not what I want!" Then he grabbed a real revolver and fired it into a nearby wall. The gun empty, Peckinpah barked at his stunned crew: "THAT'S the effect I want!!" He also had the gunfire sound effects changed for the film. Before, all gunshots in Warner Brothers movies sounded identical, regardless of the type of weapon being fired. Peckinpah insisted on each different type of firearm having its own specific sound effect when fired.

Themes
Critics of The Wild Bunch noted the theme of the end of the outlaw gunfighter era. Pike Bishop says: We've got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast. The Bunch live by an anachronistic code of honour without a place in twentieth century modern society. When they inspect General Mapache's new automobile, they perceive it marks the end of horse travel, a symbol also in Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970).[22]

The violence that was much criticized by critics in 1968 remains controversial. Director Peckinpah noted it was allegoric of the American war against Vietnam, whose violence was nightly televised to American homes at supper time. He tried showing the gun violence commonplace to the historic western frontier period, rebelling against sanitised, bloodless television westerns and films glamourising gun fights and murder. The point of the film is to take this fa?ade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that 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 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. Peckinpah used violence as catharsis, believing his audience would be purged of violence, by witnessing it explicitly on screen. He later admitted to being mistaken, that the audience came to enjoy rather than be horrified by his films' violence, something that troubled him.[23]

Betrayal is the secondary theme of The Wild Bunch. Characters suffer their knowledge of having betrayed a friend and left him to his fate, thus violating their own honour code when it suits them. Such frustration leads to the film's violent conclusion, as the remaining men find intolerable the abandonment of Angel. Pike Bishop remembers his betrayals, most notably when he deserts Deke Thornton (in flashback) when the law catches up to them; and when he abandons Crazy Lee at the bank after the robbery (ostensibly to guard the hostages).

DVD Review: William Holden
Summary: 5 Stars

Hola Gente:

William Holden at hsi best!

Saludos, Allan.

Description of The Wild Bunch [HD DVD]

Director Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is a powerful tale of hang-dog desperados bound by a code of honor. It is said that The Wild Bunch rates as one of the all-time greatest Westerns, perhaps one of the greatest of all films

One of the best action movies ever made, in a cleaned-up print restoring crucial parts of the story. No cavalry ever rode in with more epochal impact than the Wild Bunch in the legendary opening scene. Their steel-eyed leader, Pike (William Holden), and his robbers in stolen army uniforms help an old lady across the street, and then spark a massacre led by Pike's old crony Thornton (Robert Ryan), sprung from jail to hunt down his old gang. In just a few minutes, Sam Peckinpah sets the scene--a dusty Texas town in 1913--sketches a dozen vividly individualized characters, and choreographs one of the most realistic, influential, brilliantly photographed shootouts under the pitiless sun. The cast is superb (even Ernest Borgnine!), the dialog crackling, the bitterly ambiguous moral of the story hard-earned. It's the deeper, dark flip side to 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Consider buying the letterbox Wild Bunch, the review collection Doing It Right, and the Peckinpah bio "If They Move... Kill 'Em!" --Tim Appelo

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