Number One With A Bullet!

For your delectation and enjoyment, my first paid film review!

The year was 1995, the month December, and after months of scratching around, I was finally hired to write a film review for no less an organ than What’s On Birmingham. The fee? If memory serves, £30. And the subject? One of the greatest movies ever made.

The Wild Bunch: The Director’s Cut
First off, the bad news. Contrary to what you might have read elsewhere, this isn’t a new cut of Sam Peckinpah’s ace western. While this new print does contain footage unfamiliar to American audiences, this is, give or take a few frames, the self-same Wild Bunch that airs on British television. So not, then, an opportunity to view a new cut of an acclaimed classic, but rather a chance to reacquaint yourself with the familiar cut of an old favourite.

New footage or not, The Wild Bunch remains a film worth getting excited about. William Holden stars as Pike Bishop, leader of the meanest posse north of the Rio Grande; Robert Ryan Deke Thornton, the former Bunch affiliate hired to hunt down his former friends. Throw in a band of savage Mexican renegades and you have the perfect recipe for chaos.

The Wild Bunch’s brand of chaos is a cut above your average Hollywood mayhem. The violence still jars, even in these post-Tarantino times. That said, Peckinpah never uses sadism for shock value. Instead, the senseless slaughter helps draw attention to the film’s central themes of loyalty and honour. The director’s love of blood hits is certainly secondary to his concerns over friendship and the positive effects of male camaraderie.

Menace, tenderness, salvation and shrieking violence: The Wild Bunch has it all. If you haven’t seen the film before, make it the next movie you catch. And if you have, sod it and see it again. As they say in the film, “Let’s go.” “Why not?”