The essays I write for the Turner Classic Movies website all come to me as assignments. I don’t get to the pick the films, which means I get a variety of titles coming my way, some of which I’ve seen and a few that I haven’t. But there is a real pleasure in revisiting classics that you think you know but haven’t seen in years, perhaps decades. Such is the case with The Wild Bunch (1969), which I last saw on the theatrical re-release of the restored cut. I hadn’t forgotten much in the way of story, but the rhythms and the characters seem fresh, or at least refreshed, seeing it again for this piece. This time through it became clear just how Pike Bishop’s pronouncements of a code were simply empty words that had lost all meaning to him. “This time we do it right” means something after he’s been getting it all wrong all along and trying to fool himself into thinking it wasn’t so. It’s not revenge, it’s atonement, and it feels right for this bunch.

This time they do it right

The film that branded Sam Peckinpah with the nickname “Bloody Sam,” The Wild Bunch (1969) exploded in the era when Bonnie and Clyde (1967) redefined the portrayal of screen violence in a major studio production with glamorous movie stars and brought a more cynical attitude and bloodthirsty spectacle to the landscape of American westerns. In fact the original screenplay by Roy N. Sickner (a stuntman in the westerns) and Walon Green was influenced by the violent Italian genre known as “the spaghetti Western.” In their story, a brutal gang is ambushed during a heist and chased to Mexico by a posse led by a former member of the gang. They agree to steal American rifles from a military transport for a Mexican General but end up facing the General and his entire regiment, fighting to the death in a hopeless attempt to rescue one of their own. The title was borrowed from the name of the gang led by real-life outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but they had nothing on this bunch. The script was short on character and narrative development and big on violent set pieces. Lee Marvin was interested in playing Wild Bunch leader Pike Bishop — he had attached himself to the project even before it was sent to Peckinpah—and the studio saw the film as another macho action picture along the lines of previous Marvin pictures The Professionals (1966) or The Dirty Dozen (1967). Peckinpah saw something more and began rewriting the script, fleshing out the characters, enriching their stories with defining flashbacks and giving a dramatic foundation to the action and the spectacle of violence.

It’s not exactly a romantic portrait of the outlaws of the west — these men are killers and thieves who think nothing of using civilians for hostage or cover – yet Peckinpah favors these men over the ruthless, hypocritical forces of law and order such as the “gutter trash” bounty hunters who see dollar signs rather than people and fire on anyone who wanders into their gun sights: civilians, railroad employees and even American soldiers. His vision never denies the brutal reality of their lives or their actions, but it does recognize their humanity under the gristle, as well their faults. Pike is a man who professes a code — “When you side with a man, you stay with him,” he lectures his gang, “and if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal!”; it’s a code he has failed to live up to with his own actions and by the end of the film, he faces his own hypocrisy and sets out to “get it right,” in his own words.

Read the complete feature on TCM here. It plays on Friday, August 13, as part of a Robert Ryan tribute, and is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.

My feature on Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner in running on Turner Classic Movies Online.

Junior Bonner, Italian style

At first glance, the elegiac rodeo drama Junior Bonner (1972) might seem to be an anomaly in the career of Sam Peckinpah, famed as the director of controversial studies in violence such as The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971). That was surely one of the factors that attracted Peckinpah to this gentle tale of aging rodeo champion Junior Bonner (Steve McQueen), who returns to his hometown of Prescott, Arizona, for his first rodeo in a year – and a return match with an unbeaten bull named Sunshine. Yet the themes couldn’t be more suited to the director. Bonner is the last of the cowboy loners in the modern world where housing developments and high finance tear down the past. Peckinpah’s first contemporary western is another tale of an outmoded hero in a changing landscape, the (symbolic) descendant of the heroes of Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch and (later) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

Steve McQueen, who was looking for a change of pace role, signed on to play Junior and the film was rushed into production to shoot during the real-life Frontier Days Rodeo in Prescott. Peckinpah hurried back to the states from England, where he had been editing Straw Dogs, and quickly cast the supporting roles. Robert Preston plays Junior’s father Ace, a former rodeo champion now coasting on his glory and fantasizing about prospecting for gold in Australia. Ida Lupino is Junior’s mother, tired of Ace’s irresponsibility but still fond of the old charmer. And Joe Don Baker plays Junior’s wheeler-dealer of a brother, who buys out the family homestead and builds a housing development on it.

The film plays on Turner Classic Movies on August 27. Read the complete feature on TCM here.

“If they move … kill ‘em.”

This line of dialogue, delivered by veteran outlaw Pike Bishop (William Holden) to his gang just before they rob a bank in a dusty frontier town, comes in the midst of the opening scene as preamble to the credit that reads, “Directed by Sam Peckinpah.” That’s not just a screen credit, that’s a director making an entrance onto the cultural landscape. It’s a threat, a dare, a provocation and an outlaw oath: These desperadoes are taking no prisoners, and neither is Peckinpah.

Holden’s aging Pike, abetted by his loyal lieutenant, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), leads a ruthless gang of gunmen and killers made up of familiar veteran character actors (Warren Oates, Ben Johnson and Edmond O’Brien as the obligatory philosophical old coot) and new blood (courtesy of Jaime Sanchez and, briefly, Bo Hopkins as a decidedly psychotic young gun). Lying in wait for them is Pike’s former partner and one-time best friend, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), sprung from prison by corporate bankers to put a stop to Pike and his gang.

The Wild Bunch blazed onto theater screens in the era of Bonnie and Clyde, when genre conventions were being blasted away and directors pushed the boundaries of what was once considered “acceptable.” Peckinpah, ever the irascible maverick, rode roughshod over every unspoken rule of on-screen violence in his portrait of mortality in the savage life of an outlaw.

The film’s opening robbery-turned-ambush is a bloodbath the likes of which had not been seen before on American screens, a spurting blast of pulp and poetry choreographed into a ballet of violence. Thornton doesn’t bother hiding his disgust with his scurvy, squabbling mercenaries (among them Peckinpah favorites Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones), who don’t care who gets hit in the crossfire as they compete for bounty. A lot of critics didn’t bother hiding their disgust, either, and the film was met with a storm of controversy.

But the film is also an elegiac epic set on the twilight of the frontier, a romantic spin on the myth of “honor among thieves” played as an apocalyptic saga of friendship and loyalty in a world where such notions have lost their currency. “When you side with a man,” says Pike, “you stick with him,” for better and for worse. In The Wild Bunch, both outcomes take place in a blaze of righteous, bloody glory.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.