The Wild Bunch And The Rebirth Of The Western
Forget BC and AD - where you're talking about westerns, the periods are pre- and post-Sam Peckinpah.
It’s not unusual for film certificates to be changed with the passing of time. Midnight Cowboy, awarded a porn-worthy X on its original release in the the US, now plays on the festival circuit as an R, while The Rocky Horror Picture Show, once deemed scandalous and perverting, now plays on TV like a mildly saucy pantomime.
All of which makes it that much more telling that, when the Director’s Cut of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was re-released 25 years on from its first outing, the American censor removed its prohibitive R rating - only to add an even more prohibitive NC17 instead!
While some upgrading might not be justified, the decision’s understandable when you consider that people don’t often die on-screen the way they die in The Wild Bunch. In the film’s much-vaunted finale within a claustrophobic, adobe walled fortress, around 10,000 explosive squibs were used over 12 days of filming to simulate bullet hits on everything and everyone. Legend has it that the production used more ammunition than was expended during the Mexican Revolution, the event that provides The Wild Bunch with its backdrop.
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