Word: peckinpah
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...WILD BUNCH. The script is only another chapter in the legend of the West. But Sam Peckinpah's direction places him with the best of the newer generation of American film makers and makes the film a raucous and extremely violent classic of its genre...
...WILD BUNCH. The script is only another chapter in the legend of the West. But Sam Peckinpah's triumphant direction places him with the best of the newer generation of American film makers and makes the film a raucous, extremely violent classic of its genre...
...main irony of the film that the men who so desperately try to establish an identity through their collective action become overwhelmed by it. Peckinpah's vision of battle is total chaos. Uncompleted zooms are followed by cuts to entirely unrelated images. Pursurers are confused with pursued. At the end we are left with nothing but a sense of the beauty...
These scenes of death are the only things of real beauty in Peckinpah's world. Men are incredibly ugly and women valueless except for a night's sex. The railroad controls the law and does not mind massacring an entire town. IN contrast, the battles are composed of magnificent single images, images which upset us because killing is not supposed to look that good...
...Wild Bunch is at its worst when it is either moralizing (dialogue which nearly screams "Vietnam, Vietnam" at the audience) or when it is tentative (nostalgic close shots superimposed over the final track). But for the most part Peckinpah is honest both to his audience and himself. Rather than attempting to establish a mythical west, Sam Peckinpah has given us a segment of his own world, and it is a far more vital one indeed...