Friday, July 10, 2009
Film If They Move...Kill 'Em: 'The Wild Bunch' at The Belcourt
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 10:30 AM
Is it immortal, or just undead? The difference is clear on the big screen. Of all the classic films to visit The Belcourt, here's one that's worth catching no matter how many times you've seen it: Sam Peckinpah's 1969 Western about a crew of aging bad-ass bandits who flee to Mexico after their career-ender bank heist goes awry. As the world-weary outlaws pursued by a former crony (Robert Ryan) and a cutthroat posse, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine operate almost entirely in a moral gray zone unthinkable to the traditional Western hero--symbolized by Holden brusquely ridding his spurs of an innocent victim's torn garment. But their wild bunch (including character-actor gods Warren Oates and Ben Johnson) still clings to a code of honor among thieves, prizing earned camaraderie above all else. As Borgnine growls, delivering the movie's creed, it's not giving your word to someone that counts, "it's who you give it to!" The result is war poetry in the guise of a horse opera. The object of furious controversy 40 years ago for its ultraviolence and slow-motion splatter, The Wild Bunch now looks like an elegy for a weathered brand of craggy cinematic masculinity--or a bloody hand clawing open the grave of the Western. D. PATRICK RODGERS & JIM RIDLEY
Comments (7)
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"But 40 years ago, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch triggered a debate about the extremes of movie violence that spilled over onto magazine covers, newspaper op-ed pages and public-affairs shows."
I don't see why that one should have been particularly singled out for violence at that time.
All those Spaghetti westerns that were coming out around that same time (or earlier) had copious amounts of shooting in them.
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It's not the shooting that made it shocking, it was the fact that you saw bullets enter and exit the body. It's the detail in the violence that was shocking and ahead of it's time.
Also, the Wild Bunch was a major film from a major director and a major studio, where as the spaghetti's were imports generally distributed by smaller outfits. Ultraviolence at the drive-in isn't going to have the same impact as Ultraviolence on Main Street.
I love Sergio Corbucci as much as the next guy (probably a little more based on my collection of Django posters) but him, and others like him, just weren't mainstream enough to earn the ire of granstanding moralists. If those films had been more mainstream folks wouldn't think my wife was crazy when she told them Franco Nero was her favorite actor...
Gilbert: The national debate really started in 1967, with Point Blank, The Dirty Dozen (which was a huge hit initially) and especially Bonnie and Clyde (which wasn't, although controversy and critical turnaround eventually fanned it into a blockbuster). And The Wild Bunch would be superseded in 1971 by the double whammy of A Clockwork Orange and Peckinpah's brilliant, hateful Straw Dogs.
But in 1969, The Wild Bunch seemed to take cinematic bloodshed to a level previously unseen in the mainstream. Not even the spaghetti Westerns had anything as realistically gory and brutal on such a large scale as the opening massacre (or the closing massacre). Heightening that brutality is the movie's refusal to tut-tut over the butchering of innocents, especially in a genre as beholden to moral codes as the Western. I can't remember a previous scene comparable to Holden trampling the old woman, then ripping her dress out of his spurs like someone wiping bird crap off his boots.
Put another way: The main reason The Wild Bunch became the flashpoint for the violence debate is that for once the violence actually bothered people.
I loved this film, and showed it, along with Dogma, to my European students in a Media Studies curriculum to demonstrate what kinds of decisions the editor makes. It's brilliant editing, just brilliant.
Great points all, Bawston Sean, especially this: "Ultraviolence at the drive-in isn't going to have the same impact as Ultraviolence on Main Street." The Wild Bunch looks like Teletubbies compared to something like the Herschell Gordon Lewis tongue-rippers that played rural drive-ins throughout the mid-1960s. The difference is that none of the parties who'd take offense went to anything as low-class as a drive-in. (What's the Nicki Wood line about only the middle-class being interested in legislating morality?)
Sergio Corbucci? SERGIO CORBUCCI?!? You're the freakin' man, Bawston Sean. My quest is to see The Great Silence on the big screen.
