The Wild Bunch:
How The Western Ain't How It Used To Be
This
doesn't often happen with a film but the first and last lines of Sam
Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch
(1969) sum up just about everything you need to know about the film.
An absolutely key film for its time, Peckinpah's brutal revisionist
western, along with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde
(Arthur Penn, 1967) and Easy Rider
(Dennis Hopper, 1969), signified a change in the representation of
American values in cinema. Particularly relating to the mythic West.
The Wild Bunch
represented a seismic shift in how that most American of film genres
worked. The opening line, “If they move, kill 'em!” is a threat
of violence spoken by a gang leader to his followers during a
daylight bank robbery. Its delivery jolts the film into life; a slap
in the face after a slow, teasing, almost twee walk through a
deliberately typical Western town during nostalgic freeze-frame
credits. It's a great line, capturing the uncompromising nature of
the speaker (William Holden's Pike) and his hard-boiled accomplices.
The most interesting thing about it, though, is who says it: this
line, this threat of violence, this amoral order to a group of
criminals, is spoken by the good guy. John Wayne or James Stewart,
this is not. The closing line, “It ain't like it used to be, but
it'll do,” is a eulogy for a changed American genre; perhaps not
edging further West and more, but still wild.
'Revisionist'
is a term you might have read in articles about films of this time.
It is often applied when a film breaks or challenges the conventions
of a genre, daring to do something new and making the statement on
what the genre is now.
The Western, arguably the purest of genres, is also the most open
for revisionism and the reason is because of that purity. In theory,
one could watch a short snippet of a Western and immediately identify
it as a Western. The same could probably not be said for a musical
(if you watched a non-singing bit) or a horror (if you watched a
non-frightening bit), but the iconography of the Western has largely
remained intact from the 1920s to the relatively rare occasions when
they're made today. You tend not to get 'revisionist' horror films;
horror is a genre which, along with, say, sci-fi, moves with the
times. Evolving and therefore immune to revision. The Western, to a
point, remained fairly static in terms of what one could expect. The
Western was a portrait of an innocent time, when America was still
being built. And this article is about the point where it changed.
It's
a cliché of the classic western that the Good Guys wear white hats.
Typically, they defend the homestead, the town, the herd, the very
essence of civilization in an America expanding Westwards. More so,
they defend traditional values, morality and a man's place in the
world as a strong individual. Against whom do they defend these
things? Quite literally, the wild of the West (the name didn't happen
by accident). Depending upon the era: Indians, convicts and their
gangs, thieves, Mexicans; anyone who represents the perceived
disruption of 'civilization'. It's a very traditional, Conservative
viewpoint, and one which was blown open by, among other films of the
late 60s, The Wild Bunch.
Director Sam Peckinpah, already something of a Western veteran,
pioneered an editing style which is still powerful to watch today.
The barrage of jump cuts which accompany shootouts in this film are
an assault on the senses, heightening and accentuating the violence.
Packinpah uses a simultaneous mixture of slow motion photography and
rapid jump cuts to startle and upset the viewer's senses. This is a
far cry from the classic western shootout where John Wayne shoots
from the hip, his target clutches his stomach before spinning round
and falling bloodlessly to the ground. This was both heightened and
realistic at the same time and still has a visceral impart today.
So the film is visually brutal, but morally perhaps even more so.
This is a film which has no good guys. The heroes are the
thieves, and we as an audience are supposed to get behind them and
hope for some form of victory. This is largely driven by the
charisma and star status of leads William Holden and Ernest Borgnine
(as Pike's brother-in-arms, Dutch) but also because we are given no
other choice. Relentlessly pursued by Robert Ryan's Deke and his
band of Hyena-like bounty hunters and in over their heads with a
Mexican warlord they really shouldn't have done business with, the
film deals with their way of life coming to an end and their
inability to move on. As the audience (of the Western, rather the
just the film), we sympathise with them, seeing our nice safe genre
coming to an end, and ultimately come to respect their moral code to
each other if not the law of the land. Of course, this wasn't the
first time a Western protagonist had straddled the line between
civilization and wilderness; John Wayne's famous role in The
Searchers (John Ford, 1956) touched on the theme but with less
conviction and social relevance. There are no good guys, no white
hats left in the West; only degrees of bad, lesser evils and shades
of grey. And what is this if not relevant to the social climate in
America at the time? Vietnam and Kennedy, embedded in the social
consciousness, were evidence that America was corrupt and not the
mythic utopia once represented in Westerns.
The Wild Bunch has an almost palpable air of finality and
despair to it, punctuated only by moments of levity in the
camaraderie of the titular group. We are reminded throughout that
their ways as outlaws are at an end. As they approach the final
confrontation, driven to it by loyalty to their captured friend,
Angel (Jamie Sanchez), we know that they face insurmountable odds and
that they are sure to perish. The group's decision to return to save
an almost-dead Angel from their former employer Mapache (Emilio
Fernandez) is one of their only moral decisions. Having provided
this warlord with formidable stolen weapons, they return to face him,
demanding their companion is returned to them. They are betrayed and
one of cinema's greatest bloodbaths ensues. As they fall, the final
man's hand still gripping the machine gun they stole for Mapache
earlier in the film, we also witness the end of the old West. The
Western goes on, but with Pike and Dutch, its moral core dies.
And then then comes the final line; the line to summarise the state
of play of the mythic Wild West. Bounty hunter Deke, thwarted at
every attempt to capture Pike & Co, arrives just after the
battle, failing again to capture them one final time. It's a hollow
victory for Pike's crew; they died as free men fighting for their
friend, but they still died. Offered the choice between joining
Mexican revolutionaries or trying to avoid jail on his own, Deke is
offered the enticement “it ain't how it used to be, but it'll do,”
and that is the state of the Western in 1969; brutal, morally blurry
and with an air of decay and end. John Wayne apparently commented
that he thought that the film was “destroying the myth of the old
west.” At a time when people were thirsty for the truth and jaded
by the myth, I can think of no higher praise. Well, if no higher
praise can be found, it'll do.
