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Rating: "The Wild Bunch" (1969) is one of those films that can be enjoyed by both those who seek escapism in cinema and those who seek meaning. As a boy, I was in the former group and the two bloody massacres, one at the beginning and one at the end of the film, satisfied my thirst for adventure, heightened by the shootouts of a gang of outlaws attempting to rob the railroad company, which rightly sends bounty killers after them into Mexico. As I grew up, I realized that it wasn't so simple, and I enjoyed it twice as much.
The story of this handful of desperadoes already had something epic in the making in my adolescent mind. But I still couldn't grasp the greatness of Sam Peckinpah, whose previous film "Major Dundee" had been heavily re-edited by producers. I had seen other westerns, such as "The Magnificent Seven", where professional gunslingers strive to defend the poor farmers' village for free, but here, for ten thousand dollars, the gang of Pike Bishop serves the regular Mexican army against Pancho Villa’s peasants... something didn't add up: the film's protagonists allied with the bad guys! And the initial carnage didn't make sense either, when the mercenaries hired by the railroad company and led by Deke Thornton, an old comrade now Pike's adversary, fire indiscriminately into the street crowd to prevent the robbery. Essentially, criminals being countered by lawmen even more murderous than they are.
Misled by the splendid action of the failed heist, with a triumph of slow-motion bullets tearing through bodies and horses shattering windows (this extraordinary scene would be paid homage to ten years later in the magnificent "The Long Riders" by Walter Hill), I hadn't reflected on this aspect. Pike is now an outdated outlaw struggling to keep the gang together, he doesn't accept his decline, which is somewhat that of the entire Western epic. The steam's masters are now the capitalists, whose business-minded logic is even more ruthless than the bandits'. When they are forced to work for General Mapache (and his rapacious German advisors) against the revolting Mexican people, Pike and his men will do it not out of greed but to survive. But as in all Sam Peckinpah films, the awareness of the cynic, the outcast, the zero double, the one who means nothing, comes out, whether it's the failed pianist searching for a severed head ("Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia") or the old and obsolete Cable Hogue, crushed by the first automobile to cross the country ("The Ballad of Cable Hogue").
When Mapache executes their comrade Angel, guilty of giving a crate of rifles to the rebels, Pike leaves a generous tip to the very young Mexican prostitute with whom he had spent the night, passes by the Gorch brothers who are arguing about paying a pittance to a whore in the next room, and that's all it takes for him to say: "Let's go!" with a new light in his eyes. Loyal Dutch, who had been waiting outside, needs no words to understand and join them. Four men against an entire garrison of the regular Mexican army.
How do you think it ended?
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