Word: peckinpah
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...pretty patterns which Ballard was allowed to establish in True Grit are absent in The Wild Bunch since, unlike the Hathaway film, Sam Peckinpah has directed half to three-quarters of this epic in close-shot. The major exception to this rule of composition comes in the slow-motion orgies of violence which punctuate the film at various crucial points...
...style of The Wild Bunch is one which I have found myself opposed to almost as much as the set of values implied in True Grit, but here Peckinpah has forced a reevaluation. For once all those close-ups work...
...three principal characters (William Holden and Ernest Borgnine on one side, Robert Ryan heading the group out to stop them) are something of an exception to this. They seem to have more of ideal of what they are doing than the rest do, and Peckinpah shoots Holden and Borgnine in two-shot and has Ryan made up to look like Holden. They alone fight for dominance of the frame once the battle has begun, but they too are overcome once the battles get fully underway...
...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...
...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...