The Wild Bunch: An unapologetically polarizing masterpiece

As “The Wild Bunch” opens, Pike Bishop and his gang ride past a group of children and look down from their horses with a scowl. The children are watching as a swarm of fire-red ants overwhelm two struggling scorpions. They giggle and laugh before piling brush on top and engulfing both ants and scorpions in flames.

It’s the wicked consuming the wicked as the next generation wipes the slate clean with an even more casual act of desensitized violence.

Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” is a Western with no redemption or morality. It ravishes the romantic vision of the Wild West and the sanitized Old Hollywood template through a gratuitously violent, emotionally drained portrait of real outlaws.

Peckinpah is going for something in which the uncomfortable act of violence in the West is not a cathartic, exciting spectator sport but a brutal look at where the world is moving. In the film’s infamous final showdown, Pike and company are the scorpions, the ants are the army of Mexican soldiers under a corrupt general, and those kids looking and laughing are the ones who have no trouble dealing Pike the killing blow.

“The Wild Bunch” was premiered to uproarious controversy and rapturous acclaim at Cannes in 1969. It was arguably the most violent film ever made and a definitive pillar in the New Hollywood movement slowly rising in Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino and Peckinpah himself.

If nothing else, “The Wild Bunch” is a polarizing masterpiece. Some will see it as an exercise in style over substance, trading in excessive bloodshed and elaborate set pieces rather than flesh out its characters, and others will find it slow and empty as a result of its existential execution. Its plot of old souls and wounded warriors just looking for a way out is forlorn, but not nostalgic and sentimental in the ambiguously elegant ways of something like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.”

There’s little ambiguous about “The Wild Bunch,” although much of it feels symbolic and suggestive. What we see of Pike’s (William Holden) past is minimal. After a particularly loose night in a brothel, his partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) is arrested while Pike escapes. Now Thornton is hunting Pike down in an effort to stay out of jail. The rest about what they’ve done together isn’t clear.

There is however an understanding between Pike and his right hand man Dutch (Ernest Borgnine). After a failed robbery in which Thornton has ambushed the bunch, one of their men is wounded and is unable to ride. He begs Pike to put him out of his misery and go on ahead, and Pike unapologetically shoots him without hesitation. He exchanges a firm, yet knowing look at Dutch when the other posse members start to complain. “Either you can learn to live with it or we leave you here,” he says later, and we believe him.

Peckinpah’s style here is one that would come to define action movies of the ‘70s. He incorporates a twitchy and vitally realistic camera that zooms and whips around the frame, but one would never call it handheld in the modern sense. The action feels symbolic and experimental as horses collapse in slow motion and as children’s faces flash amid the bloodshed.

It again works to deteriorate that which we’ve come to know of the Westerns. It’s clear, colorful and exciting as Westerns are, but the action seems drained of meaning or of excitement. Later there’s a wide tracking shot over the gorgeous West vista that captures much of the beauty of the moment, but Peckinpah fades into a woman breast feeding a baby, and the awkward nuance of the image lingers.

The ending is reminiscent of the famous still frame at the end of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Peckinpah carries that moment out to its grim conclusion, and it seems much less heroic by the end of it. And yet guns blazing seems to be the only way out at this point.

“The Wild Bunch” doesn’t justify violence but views it as an unholy necessity. This is the end we’ve come to, and it ain’t pretty.