Newspaper Page Text
July 11, 1990 « - Flagpole Magazine Page-13
gnine 'makes you think of McHale’s Navy,
then forget that nonsense. Borgnine started
his career as a heavy, and he gives more of
himself than most audiences are used to
seeing. Robert Ryan, a nr.ajor star since the
40s, plays the ex-partner who’s forced to
hunt his friends to avoid further torment in
prison. Edmond O'Brien (star of the 1949
drama DOA, among others) is unrecogniz
able and indescribable as Old Sykes,
Holden’s old outlaw pal. O’Brien visited
Athens, Ga., in the early 1970s shortly be
fore his death; a witness said he looked old
and tired, but that in The Wild Bunch he
gave the performance of' his career. The
irascible Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector,
are played by Warren Oates, who is always
good, and Ben Johnson, who has the most
“Western” voice of any man alive. (The
studios in an earlier decade tried to make a
star out of Ben Johnson, a la Rock Hudson,
but I believe it was his voice that got in the
way.
There is an ambiguity in the characters,
as in all of Peckinpah’s work. This uncer
tainty or mixture of values tends toward
These are the sort of things
that happened, this is
where they happened, and
these are the kind of people
who did them.
irony, especially in the contrasts of social
class. The general of the Mexican federales
is a glorified bandit; the German military
“advisors” are whoring opportunists; the
railroad officer a sadistic paymaster of
bounty killers. The “heroes" of the film are a
pack of armed robbers, dangerous killers,
but that doesn’t deny them their humanity,
or their loyalty to each other that is stronger
than their own lives. No one is all good or all
bad, which is something that ideologues of
every stripe tend to forget, from flag-burn
ers to advocates of universal drug testing.
Peckinpah’s skill in editing is most strik
ing in the action scenes, often the violent
ones, where brief sections of slow motion
are intercut with the real time action se
quences. As critics have remarked, this has
the effect of engaging the viewer in two
ways at once. The normal speed action has
i i usual involuntary impact on the viewer,
especially in scenes of violence. We flinch
as people on the screen are shot, trampled,
etc. But the slow motion inserts have the
effect of distancing the action from the
audience, making it seem remote and im
personal, something to be observed. The
abrupt cutting never gives the viewer a
chance to fully adjust to the slow motion
before it cuts back to normal speed. This
technique is remarkably effective in
Peckinpah’s hands. Others have imitated
the technique with less success, usually
holding the slow motion so long that all you
notice are trivial details, things floating in
space. The emotional power is lost without
the quick cuts.
When this film was released in July 1969,
public sentiment had begun to reinterpret
history along class and ethnic lines, favor
ing the downtrodden. Films were beginning
to attempt a realism in depiction that hadn’t
seemed so important before. But The Wild
Bunch doesn’t exploit or sentimentalize
these human differences, like Little Big
Man. Nor does it lean too heavily on being
a picture history of the end of the Old West,
like Monte Walsh or Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid. The setting, like the charac
ters, are only elements of a larger drama,
not the overplayed point of a single-thesis
social statement.
Cinematographer Lucien Ballard and
Peckinpah looked at as many old photo
graphs and newsreels of the Mexican revo
lution as they could find to recreate the “look
and feel” of the time without slipping into
cliche. The results rewarded the effort. The
costumes and props are meticulously accu
rate, contributing to the viewer’s immersion
in the story. The sound of the locomotive
and the gunfire was redubbed after the first
theatrical showing to make it more distinct.
Each kind of weapon has a characteristic
sound, faithfully reproduced on film.
It may be true that all drama is conflict.
But the conflict always involves people, if
not in the story then the ones in the audi
ence. The drama of the bunch’s struggle is
more than the mindless energy of a formu
laic shoot-’em-up. The human drama is as
real and personal as the death of a friend.
To those who object to films because
they are Westerns, or contain violence, or
have only male actors, I say this: These are
the sort of things that happened, this is
where they happened, and these are the
kind of people who did them. It’s narrow
minded to deny the value o. a setting or of a
character merely because it doesn’t fit your
ideal world-view. The Wild Bunch is about
human values tested in a citation that hu
mans somewhere face every day. If you
turn your back on everything that isn’t
peaches & cream, then all you can get is
.overweight with bad breath.
John Gaither
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