![]() ![]() ![]() The graphic violence in much of today’s cinema feels glib and titillating, an over-caffeinated stimulant designed to jack up the teenage boys who account for a massive portion of box-office revenue. ![]() Stratton knows all about the blood - and the exploding squibs that provide it. That film, too, packed its visceral punch with buckets of blood. Released the same year as a number of other Revisionist Westerns, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, and the ultimate urban Western, Midnight Cowboy, it feels more akin to the 1970 acid Western El Topo. From the opening sequence, which shows us a gang of smiling, giggling urchins unleashing a swarm of red ants on a writhing scorpion, to the climactic bloodbath, an orgiastic explosion of bloodshed, The Wild Bunch enters the bloodstream like a drug. EVERWILD REVIEW MOVIEOne of the less outraged among those early comment cards reads: “This picture is burnt into my brain.” The movie has a tactile pungency that borders on the hallucinatory. That passion is ultimately what counts in evaluating The Wild Bunch. EVERWILD REVIEW HOW TOHe’s not a film critic, but a passionate and knowledgeable generalist who knows how to drill deep. There’s a certain guilelessness to Stratton’s approach. He works in a list of what he considers the best films ever made, including The Rules of the Game, The 400 Blows, and, yes, The Wild Bunch. He details the contributions of everyone from Jerry Fielding, a victim of the Hollywood Blacklist who composed The Wild Bunch’s sparse, haunting score, to Chalo González, a Mexican local who saved Peckinpah from a bar fight and became a sort of do-everything fixer on the film. Stratton’s book is part making-of chronicle, part appreciation, part personal reminiscence. “I still feel that way every time I watch The Wild Bunch.” “I stepped out of the theater into the night, my heart beating as if I’d just been running hundred-yard sprints,” he writes. Stratton, whose previous subjects run the gamut from the rodeo circuit to heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson, vividly remembers the day he first saw The Wild Bunch as an adolescent in Guthrie, Oklahoma. “When Sam got all those actors down to Mexico, he really did transform them into the characters they became in the movie. “Strother Martin once called Peckinpah a ‘dirty psychologist,’” Stratton tells me on the phone from his Austin home, referring to the character actor who plays the most gruesome of the film’s bounty hunters. That’s largely because the movie isn’t just blood and guts. Like most films born ahead of their time, The Wild Bunch has only grown in stature over the decades. Fifty years later, it still rattles the nerves and floods the senses. Its frontier is a place of fatalistic tragedy, not whooping triumph. There’s little heroic about Peckinpah’s film. Stratton’s definitive new book The Wild Bunch : Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film, this portrait of aging gunfighters fleeing Texas across the Mexican border for one last score was and remains a grimy, fatalistic rebuttal to the Duke’s days of glory. And this one, reinforcing the fact that not everyone was onboard with the burgeoning New Hollywood: “Whatever happened to the old John Wayne movies?” “No story, just gore, filthy, repulsive = blood, blood, blood!” read another. “This movie was TOO DAMNED BLOODY,” read one, proving that all-caps was a thing well before email and Twitter arrived. Audience comments cards from 1969 test screenings of The Wild Bunch didn’t merely express displeasure they conveyed apoplectic shock. ![]()
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