Tag: Ernest Borgnine

The Wild Bunch: An unapologetically polarizing masterpiece

Sam Peckinpah’s pivotal and controversial late ’60s film helped define New Hollywood with gratuitous violence.

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.” Continue reading “The Wild Bunch: An unapologetically polarizing masterpiece”

Rapid Response: The Dirty Dozen

Only in a movie with Lee Marvin (and maybe Henry Fonda) could Charles Bronson look like less of a bad ass.

That’s kind of the appeal of “The Dirty Dozen,” a movie with a ridiculously famous cast of already massive and would-be massive stars (Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, John Cassavetes) that was not only a shockingly violent war film but one that defined a generation of war films for years to come.

In many ways, “The Dirty Dozen’s” legacy is more interesting than the movie itself. Mark Harris’s book “Pictures at a Revolution” describes how Robert Aldrich’s film became the biggest box office hit of the year by celebrating a black man killing Germans, by appealing to a counter-culture, anti-establishment movement and by being the first war movie to outwardly call attention to the Vietnam War. Harris writes that the film reached an audience of war fans bored with the genre and craving to see some gritty, tough guy action and teens who disliked the war movies their parents did.

“It would have made a very good, very acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don’t think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture,” Aldrich was quoted in Harris’s book. And in that way, it was one of the many films that year that revolutionized filmmaking.

The problem is, the film remains a clumsy, long action movie that doesn’t really get interesting until the two big battles in the last hour. It spends a lot of time developing at least half of the dozen war criminals assigned to Major Reisman’s (Marvin) command, but the writing doesn’t have the sharp tenacity or wit to make it truly compelling.

Exploitation films and similar, even more polarizing fare like Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” merely two years later would surpass it in the violence department, and New Wave Hollywood directors were not far away from making less than oblique statements about the Vietnam War.

Still, it’s influence is obvious. Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” is intentionally lifted from this film’s concept, not to mention the copycat Enzo Castellari version only years after “Dirty Dozen.”

But what bugged me was how almost hokey the film felt. I think the whole construction montage for instance is time that could easily be trimmed from the film, and the score really Mickey Mouse’s it in these moments as well. More time should’ve been spent highlighting the film’s theme of authority and power dynamics to make this an outwardly counter cultural film. That would’ve made it more timeless as well.

“Dirty Dozen” does aim to have fun, plain and simple, and that’s its appeal. But there are better ways to spend your time.