THE WILD BUNCH

Director Sam Peckinpah’s most celebrated masterpiece blasts its way across the screen and  demands a truer understanding of what it means to be a genuinely TOUGH guy.

William Holden leads a band of aging robbers through the hard world of the Old West as they try to outrun the bounty hunter (the legendary Robert Ryan) who is hot on their trail.

The balletic violence and weary fatalism that Peckinpah brings to his vision of the American West is underscored by some of sweatiest, dirtiest, bloodiest performances from some of the the toughest, ugliest actors of all time. Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates shoot, screw, drink, and ride horses all while imbuing the film’s harsh, empty world with a sense of real poetry.

This is a film about the mantle of violence passing from old professionals, who live by a code, to even more chaotic and deadly future generations. And what is the code these old men live by? Stand by your friends and against the world, take what you can get, and don’t kill civilians...unless they get in the way. (Tommy Swenson)