#69: THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

THRILL SCALE 1-10

6

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

No

BEST SEQUENCE

The train hijacking sequence, or the final shootout

BEST LINE

"Well, how'd you like to kiss my sister's black cat's ass?"

- This movie is full of hardboiled cowboy talk like this, and this line is one of my favourites

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

91%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"The Wild Bunch is Sam Peckinpah's shocking, violent ballad to an old world and a dying genre."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"An aging group of outlaws look for one last big score as the "traditional" American West is disappearing around them."

DIRECTOR

Sam Peckinpah

MAIN CAST

William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan

THOUGHTS

• Maybe I just don't find Westerns all that thrilling, and that's totally fine. This is about as Western as they get, a story of rough and tough men fighting it out in the wide expanses of the Mexico-US border in 1913, and I just didn't find it very engaging
• I also wasn't blown away by the previous Western movie, The Magnificent Seven; it was fun enough, but it wasn't amazing. And that sense of fun and lightness isn't really found in The Wild Bunch, a much more serious movie. Now, for some (including the AFI) this may be what makes them consider The Wild Bunch the superior movie, but for me the dourness made it harder to get into. Although it is worth acknowledging that the violence is more sudden and shocking when it happens due to the longer stretches in between action scenes. And when the violent scenes happen, they happen big, especially in the climactic gunfight. There's a fair chance that The Wild Bunch has the highest body count of any movie I've reviewed so far, possibly even higher than something like Terminator 2
• As per usual for Western movies, the scenery is pretty amazing
• A while ago I said that I didn't expect to see so much Angela Lansbury in these movies, and I also didn't expect to see so much Ernest Borgnine! I didn't like his performance very much in The Poseidon Adventure, but he was way better here, and his character, Dutch Engstrom, may have been my favourite. Borgnine will be showing up again shortly in The Dirty Dozen
• So, while I wasn't entirely engrossed by The Wild Bunch as a movie, I did find it interesting as a very obvious inspiration for two very good video games, Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. And, I didn't find any information explicitly confirming my suspicion, but I'd bet money that the Red Dead character Dutch van der Linde was at least partly (if not entirely) named after Ernest Borgnine's character here
• I'll be watching at least two more Westerns eventually, but not for a while. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is #54, and then it's High Noon at #20. I might also try to find an opportunity to shoehorn in one more Western that I have seen before, and that I remember liking, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Maybe I'll even include the rest of the Clint Eastwood Dollars Trilogy, which I haven't seen. Could be a good follow-up to Dirty Harry, #41

Up next: But hey, if Westerns maybe aren't my preferred flavour of thrills, it's hard to argue against the classic slasher movie, and this is a big one. 1978's Halloween