The Wild Bunch [Blu-ray] starring
William Holden, Ernest Borgnine,
Robert Ryan, Edmond OBrien,
Warren Oates
Steel In The Stone Age
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 Pikes 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. Its the deeper, dark flip side to 1969s 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
Personal Review: The Wild Bunch [Blu-ray] starring William
Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond OBrien, Warren
Oates
he 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 Sánchez) 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 Fernández), 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 Sánchez 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 fa
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