Word: bunch
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scenes involving the amusing low-life cronies Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym go well. Best of the bunch is Michael McGuire, who is (totes, and fires) Pistol. He has a fine comic sense, and spits out his consonants with relish. In his ludicrous run-in with the French soldier, though, the use of the French "moi" destroys Shakespeare's punning with "moy." Still, this performance compares favorably with the splendid Pistol of the late Ian Keith for the Cambridge Drama Festival here...
...WILD BUNCH is Director Sam Peckinpah's way of telling the truth while preserving the legend of the West. His bandits, led by William Holden, are drawn by their own peculiar code of honor into a bloody finish that surpasses Bonnie and Clyde for violence...
...with surprising clumsiness. These, happily, are not typical moments. More characteristic are the sweeping visual panorama of the whole film (stunningly photographed by Lucien Ballard) and the extraordinarily forceful acting from a troupe of Hollywood professionals. Holden hasn't done such good work since Stalag 17, and the bunch -Ernest Borgnine, Warren Gates, Ben Johnson, Edmond O'Brien, Jaime Sanchez-all look and sound as if they had stepped out of a discarded daguerreotype. As the reluctant head of the band of bounty hunters, Robert Ryan gives the screen performance of his career...
Final Tenacity. For all this, The Wild Bunch is Sam Peckinpah's triumph. His hard-edged elegies for the West come from a life spent absorbing its folkways. Born into a California pioneer family, Peckinpah is a hard liver who has found some of his script ideas by doing research in barrooms and bordellos. Because he is scrappy and unwilling to compromise, he has spent a good deal of his professional time warring with the money men in the front office, who truncated Major Dundee and fired him from The Cincinnati Kid after three days of shooting. "You have...
...Wild Bunch contains faults and mistakes, but its accomplishments are more than sufficient to confirm that Peckinpah, along with Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn, belongs with the best of the newer generation of American film makers...