Part of Milestones of the Last Quarter Century and Weekend Classics
Sometimes we’ll go deep into the classic genres. Contemporary too of course, but over the years three Film Noir fests, two Samurai and two Western series come to mind, among others. And yet especially with the recent passing of our dear H.G. Webb — a man who’s been with us from the very beginning in so many ways, and for whom no assemblage of a dozen or so words could possibly surmise — we cut a circle back to Westerns. An initial Westerns 101 series from 2009 included a solid 14 films that were mostly informed by our limitations at the time — we’d yet to install proper archival 35mm changeover projectors, and only had access to “platterable prints.” Westerns returned in a big way with 2018’s Essential Westerns series, a sauntering 26-film behemoth with the underwriting and participation of our beloved H.G., with whom a few of us introduced the opening film. We wore boots.
A master work of the Revisionist Western subgenre and a personal fave of H.G.’s, Sam Peckinpah’s classic THE WILD BUNCH tells the tale of a band of aging outlaws forced to contend with the inevitable death of their chosen lifestyle and the Old West as they once knew it. On the run from bounty hunters after a botched robbery, they escape across the Texas border, stepping into the heart of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. With competing interests encroaching from every direction, they fight to survive the only way they know how.
Inducted into the National Film Registry and selected by the American Film Institute (AFI) as one of the “100 Greatest American Films of All Time,” THE WILD BUNCH garnered two Academy Award nominations and features William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan and Warren Oates.
“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 SEVEN SAMURAI.” —Pauline Kael, New Yorker “Peckinpah, who wrote the script with Walon Green, will be hammered again for brutality that revels in excess, for misogyny that equates women with betrayal, for myth-making that finds a code of honor among murderers…. He simply lets beauty and terror pour out of him in powerful, poetic bursts that mark him still as a film master and THE WILD BUNCH as a bruising and brilliant work of art.” —Peter Travers, Rolling Stone “Few films can claim to do something that is truly original. But in the summer of 1969, while NASA was making the final preparations to put a man on the moon, Sam Peckinpah took his own small step for cinematic innovation. Exit wounds.” —John Naughton, Empire
