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The Wild Bunch film image; four cowboys walking down a dusty street

The Wild Bunch

Director’s Cut

Pantheon

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The Mexico/Texas borderlands, 1913: Pike (William Holden) leads his gang of aging outlaws on a foray south for one last hurrah, but the jig is nearly up and in their hearts they all know it.

In the early 1960s, Hollywood was still squeamish about showing blood: cowboys clutched the stomachs and fell to the ground. By the end of the decade, Vietnam brought carnage to the television evening news. Peckinpah put it on the big screen, in multiple angles, agonizing slow motion, and stinging vehemence. He wanted it to hurt. In the process, he revolutionized movie violence. The Wild Bunch is a landmark, but it is also Peckinpah’s masterpiece, one of the great movies of the last 60 years. Before the bullets fly the film exerts a rueful, tender melancholy as the frontier passes into history, and in their death-throes, desperadoes and renegades like Holden, Ryan and Oates accept that they are yesterday’s men.

Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 20-minute introduction and talkback.

Arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s — a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.

J Hoberman, Village Voice

The Wild Bunch is an American masterpiece, one of the greatest films ever produced in the Hollywood system.

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

It’s a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya’s. By a supreme burst of filmmaking energy, Sam Peckinpah is able to convert chaotic romanticism into exaltation; the film is perched right on the edge of incoherence, yet it’s comparable in scale and sheer poetic force to Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.

Pauline Kael, New Yorker

Director

Sam Peckinpah

Cast

William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, Jaime Sánchez, Ben Johnson

Credits
Country of Origin

USA

Year

1969

Language

English

19+
145 min

Book Tickets

Sunday March 16

11:00 am
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
Book Now

Tuesday March 18

7:30 pm
Hearing Assistance
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
Book Now

Credits

Screenwriter

Walon Green, Sam Peckinpah

Cinematography

Lucien Ballard

Editor

Lou Lombardo

Original Music

Jerry Fielding

Art Director

Edward Carrere

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