Wild Bunch, The (HD DVD)

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The first time Warner Bros. transferred "The Wild Bunch" to disc, it was in a non-anamorphic edition that included very few extras. The second time was on a two-disc special edition, offering an improved image and a stagecoach full of bonuses. Now, the studio has issued it in high-definition picture and sound with all the special-edition extras and more. An acknowledged Western classic deserves the best, and it gets it.

Some critics have said that director Sam Peckinpah glorified violence in his films and romanticized killing. There is no denying that fact, but in 1969's "The Wild Bunch" there is much more. It is a quintessential modern, even postmodern, Western, a story of over-the-hill outlaws living by a worn-out code, a notion of honor in a dishonest world, a world where the viewer can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. Peckinpah's movie is a turbulent yet poetic vision of the death of the Old West and the coming of a new, more sterile, less-caring age. And along with its vision, the film is important for its integration of slow-motion with regular-speed footage, helping to create a unique narrative style that influenced a generation of future filmmakers.

As before, WB give us the Director's Cut, which restores about ten minutes of deleted footage, mostly adding background material on the main characters' motivation, thus making the bloodletting seem less wanton. With its gutsy realism, believable personalities, and complex moral values, one has to consider the movie among cinema's all-time great Westerns.

The filmmakers set loosely knit plot in southern Texas and Mexico in 1913, during the Mexican Revolution. William Holden plays Pike Bishop, an aging outlaw based vaguely on Butch Cassidy, who is leading his Wild Bunch--Ernest Borgnine, Edmund O'Brien, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sanchez, and others--on one last desperate heist before they retire. They attempt to rob a U.S. arms shipment for a corrupt Mexican general in exchange for ten thousand dollars. Hot on Bishop's trail is his old pal Deke Thornton, played by Robert Ryan, who is now working for the railroad and heading up his own motley band of ruffians. Holden's Bishop and Ryan's Thornton are interchangeable. In the two characters we see good men gone bad, and in spite of their differences, we see their mutual respect for one another, each man evoking our sympathy. They even look alike, reinforcing the blur between good and evil. In the course of the story, Holden and his men encounter lawmen, pretty girls, bandits, Pancho Villa, revolutionaries, the U.S. Army, and the Mexican Federales.

The film is memorable for any number of things, not the least its colorful supporting cast, played by some of Hollywood's finest character actors. I've already mentioned Borgnine, Ryan, O'Brien, Oates, and Johnson, but there are also Dub Taylor, Albert Dekker, Bo Hopkins, and Strother Martin. Interestingly, since the Wild Bunch was obviously the real name of Butch Cassidy's gang, Fox released "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance" the same years as "The Wild Bunch." The two films are almost mirror images in terms of plot, yet the tone of one is humorous and the other dead earnest. And what brings this to mind most tellingly is that Strother Martin is in both of them!

But the film is as memorable for its symbolic imagery, its music, and its settings as it is for its characters and action: Things like the opening shot of two scorpions being overwhelmed and devoured by a legion of ants; the beauty of Nature set against the vulgarism of Man; the continual use of children as onlookers and emblems of innocence betrayed; Jerry Fielding's lyrical, passionate musical score; the authenticity of the location shooting, especially around Parras, Mexico, the actual scene of several important battles of the Mexican Revolution; and, of course, those wonderful, slow-motion gun fights.