The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch , recently re-released in a restored print, is perhaps the revisionist Western, a film that at once shatters the myths of the classical Western even as it invokes them. “Pouring new wine into an old bottle it explodes the bottle,” as Pauline Kael put it at the time. The classical Western, for example, Ford's My Darling Clementine , is founded on the discrimination between violence necessary for communal survival and destructive violence that is beyond the pale of humanity. The Western hero knows violence and harnesses this knowledge to serve the community when his sense of personal loyalty gets tangled up with community interests. By the 1910s the open spaces have gone, moneyed interests have taken over, the automobile has arrived. The Western hero has lost his function, he is literally dying off: Pike (William Holden) has a gammy leg that makes it painful just to ride a horse and Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) is impotent. Furthermore, the violence the hero has mastered can no longer be readily discriminated from the violence he once opposed: The heroes are a gang of outlaw bank robbers, two of whom, the Gorch brothers (Ben Johnson and Warren Oates), are wanted for rape and murder. But Mexico, in The Wild Bunch, is a further frontier that affords the Western formula one more self-consciously baroque rearticulation. Community is thoroughly idealized in the form of a rural utopia—the “real” Mexico as one of the characters put it, and the enemy is fantastically large—the entire Mexican