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Rating:  -
This was the first movie to show graphic violence. Aside from that it was a pretty good action film of some cold blooded killers and their adventures with a ruthless Mexican War Lord.
Rating:  -
There are a plethora of reviews of the movie, but my review is a comparison of the BD vs DVD version. The BD version is by far, the best version released but it shows the limitations of the older material that was less obvious in DVD. The audio and video is the clearest and sharpest ever but there is a lack of dynamic range in both; color gamuts are narrower, color are sometimes muted, and sound shortcomings are more obvious in BD -- lacking bass and treble so the midrange tends to be loudest. In a few frame colors are off, for example in the scene were Bo Hopkins is shot, the 'blood' the results is brown, versus red. The final gun battle scene is also different from the first 90% of the movie, its less sharp. The final frames with Ryan and O'Brien is even less sharp. I'm not sure if all these issues are due to problems with available film masters, details I couldn't notice on DVD that are Peckinpah's doing, or the lack of care from the digital process, as by comparison, the 1969 2001: Space Odyssey is near perfect audio and visually, lacking only enhanced sound imaging typically of modern movies.
Rating: -
An American original. In my opinion, the finest of any genre.
Acting (actors, all at the pinnacle of their craft), editing, scripting, scoring, cinematography, directing are all combined in the rarest of amalgams. None, standing alone, merit such praise...it is the alloying of all of these elements, fused in a Sonoran blast furnace, forged on an unsentimental western anvil, and tempered on one screen, which made this lustrous substance.
The skill displayed in the opening credits says it all.
Rating: -
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.
Rating: -
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.
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