Stars: William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Strother Martin, Emilio Fernandez, Edmund O'Brien, Albert Dekker

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Summary: Sam Peckinpah's controversial portrayal of a battle between a ruthless Mexican revolutionary and Texan bandits.

As a counterpoint to the heroic horde of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, the ageing gunmen of Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece break the very laws of honour which bind them in this bloody and meditative tale of the American West--widely considered to be the self-conscious nail in the coffin of the genre. William Holden, Robert Ryan, and Ernest Borgnine star as the leaders of a grizzled crew of Texan bandits who ride to Mexico, where, one by one, they are unceremoniously slaughtered by a Mexican revolutionary. The western, a genre steeped in legend and the concept of loyalty, was a dying breed when Sam Peckinpah unleashed this amoral and violent opus. Along with BONNIE AND CLYDE, it ushered in a new breed of Hollywood film, depicting a harsh reality where lines between right and wrong became blurred. Peckinpah brilliantly used ageing Western stars such as Ryan and Holden to convey this passing of the cinematic torch. The film brought issues of violence and morality in movies to the forefront of American film criticism. Instead of appreciating the film as a critique of brutal violence, many critics responded by rejecting what they saw as a superfluous spectacle of dead bodies.

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Here's how director Sam Peckinpah described his motivation behind The Wild Bunchat the time of the film's 1969 release: "I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. The Wild Bunchis simply what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." All of these statements are true, but they don't begin to cover the impact that Peckinpah's film had on the evolution of American movies. Now the film is most widely recognized as a milestone event in the escalation of screen violence, but that's a label of limited perspective. Of course, Peckinpah's bloody climactic gunfight became a masterfully directed, photographed, and edited ballet of graphic violence that transcended the conventional Western and moved into a slow-motion realm of pure cinematic intensity. But the film--surely one of the greatest Westerns ever made--is also a richly thematic tale of, as Peckinpah said, "bad men in changing times." The year is 1913 and the fading band of thieves known as the Wild Bunch (led by William Holden as Pike) decide to pull one last job before retirement. But an ambush foils their plans, and Peckinpah's film becomes an epic yet intimate tale of betrayed loyalties, tenacious rivalry, and the bunch's dogged determination to maintain their fading code of honor among thieves. The 144-minute director's cut enhances the theme of male bonding that recurs in many of Peckinpah's films, restoring deleted scenes to deepen the viewer's understanding of the friendship turned rivalry between Pike and his former friend Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who now leads a posse in pursuit of the bunch, a dimension that adds resonance to an already classic American film. The Wild Bunchis a masterpiece that should not be defined strictly in terms of its violence, but as a story of mythic proportion, brimming with rich characters and dialogue and the bittersweet irony of outlaw traditions on the wane. --Jeff Shannon

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Interactive Menus, Production Notes, Scene Access, Documentary
Subtitles:	Arabic, English
Year:	1969
Release Date:	June 1, 2005
Runtime:	138 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 014034
Keywords:	Wild, Cut, Bunch, Director's, Westerns
Genre:	Westerns