Real Men Love The Wild Bunch

“If they move, kill ‘em”

The opening of The Wild Bunch consists of one badass piece of misdirection. We see a bunch of Army guys riding into town, looking at children and helping old ladies with their bags -- all American heroes, these guys. Then, of course, they walk into a bank, pull out their guns, and the leader utters one of the film's most memorable lines: "If they move, kill 'em." 

Just like that, we find out that we aren't hanging out with particularly good men. They're liars, bank robbers, and probably murderers -- and they're the guys we're going to have to spend the next two and a half hours with.

The opening shootout

The opening shootout is not pretty. It's not pleasing to the eye, it's not well-constructed -- hell, it isn't even easy to follow. But then again, that's sort of the point. When the Bunch gets ambushed by the railroad men on their way out of the bank, it becomes nearly impossible to tell the bad guys from the regular townsfolk. Tuba players get shot, men in suits get their faces blown off, and the entire scene generally feels like one big, scary, meaningless orgy of violence (in stark contrast to the practiced, controlled, operatic feeling of the final, meaningful shootout). It's especially fun to watch the reaction of the children: first they run screaming from the bandits, then they hold onto each other for solace from the bandits, and, after the bandits have departed, they pretend to be the bandits. They shoot imaginary guns, shouting "BANG." Watching them go from fear to outright admiration is more than a little disturbing, but it's pretty much the way we all feel about violence.

Angel breaks up with his girlfriend

Once the Bunch get to Mexico to meet General Mapache, Angel's long-lost girlfriend shows up. After an extremely Mexican conversation where she evidently tells Angel to fuck off because she's found a new man, she cruelly jumps into Mapache's lap and begins licking his ear. She laughs and laughs, staring straight at Angel as if teasing him for leaving in the first place. She is, to put it bluntly, acting like a total bitch.

In this sense, it's somewhat understandable (but no less shocking or brutal) when Angel stands up, yells "PUTAAAAAAA" at the top of his lungs, and mercilessly shoots his ex right in the chest. Even today, the scene's timing and level of violence are pretty shocking, even if it is kind of easy to sympathize with Angel (although, that could just be the angry misogynism talking).

The subtly gay manhunters

The two pieces of gutter-trash who accompany Deke Thornton on his quest of betrayal initially seem to be your average, run-of-the-mill, borderline retarded hill folk -- until they start arguing over which of the two shot one of the gangsters. They argue back and forth, their claims of marksmanship getting progressively preposterous, until the one on the right yells at the one on the left, "LIAR! BLACK LIAR!" Suddenly, their shouting stops -- the leftmost hick looks genuinely hurt. "You shouldn't ought to talk to me like that," he says in an even, wounded tone. After a second, the other hick acquiesces: "I'm sorry. Come on, TC -- help me get his boots!" As they rip the dead bandit's zapatos off, they exchange what can only be described as quasi-loving glances with one another. I'm not entirely sure why the actors chose to play those characters as latently homosexual, but it sure as hell makes their scenes a lot funnier (and weirder).

Warren Oates and Ben Johnson vs a Wine Barrel

No single scene has best exemplified cowboy decadence -- if there even is such a thing -- than the one where the Gorch brothers take two of Mapache's whores and have a party in the wine cellar. Laughing, horny, and drunk, the Gorches pull off their dates' shirts ("Come on, show me your chi-chi's!"), and proceed to blow holes in the nearby wine barrels with their pistols. Literally showering in aged wine, Lyle and Tector dance around like the most rip-roaringly audacious cowboys who ever lived. This is about as close as they get to happiness, and the fact that this one scene includes booze, naked women, and guns probably makes it one of the manliest scenes in the flick (and by extension, in all of cinema).

Mapache goes apeshit

"IT MUST BE MOUNTED ON A TRIPOD," the German officer screams over and over again. Mapache, having just received a machine gun from the Bunch, isn't hearing any of it -- he wants to try this sucker out, tripod or not.

And boy, does he. Three of Mapache's men hold the machine gun while Mapache proceeds to damn near destroy his entire villa, blowing up flower pots and wooden structures and almost killing roughly half of his army. After destroying two thirds of his compound, Mapache falls on his ass from the recoil. Everybody sighs, happy that the shitstorm is finally ov--OH FUCK HE'S AT IT AGAIN as Mapache jumps right back up to the gun and begins firing like a twelve-year-old boy who's just discovered masturbation.

“Let’s go.”

Fuck monologues. That seems to be Sam Peckinpah's attitude, and it's hard to disagree with him.

When Angel gets captured and the Bunch lounge around in a Mexican whorehouse, we can see the irritation getting to them: while they might not have liked Angel, they don't agree with the way he's being treated, or the sonofabitch who's doing it to him. After having offscreen sex with a rather innocent-looking prostitute, Pike straps on his guns, opens the door to the Gorch Brothers' room, and tells them all they need to hear:

"Let's go."

With those two words, the audience now knows that -- as the kids say -- shit be on. No dramatic monologue, no rousing St. Crispin's Day speech: just the strapping on of guns, and "Let's go."

Well, that and

The lead-up

Evidently, this entire scene was improvised by Sam Peckinpah on the day of shooting. Not content to just end the film with the greatest shootout ever, Peckinpah said "Wait...let's do a walking thing." The crew got some extras together, got some of the musicians to start playing, and filmed the last four members of the Bunch walking, shotguns and rifles in hand, to their deaths. They're essentially marching to their own funeral music, but they know it and they do it anyway simply because they're tired of not fighting for something. One would be tempted to say the individual members of the Bunch have undergone complete character transformations, were it not for the fact that:

They’re still assholes

In the final gunfight (don't worry, the full thing is posted down below), literally every member of the Bunch save for Tector Gorch kills at least one woman. Pike gets shot in the back by a whore and then blows her away with a shotgun ("BITCH!"), Lyle Gorch accidentally shoots an unarmed woman as she runs through a doorway, and Dutch -- quite viciously -- grabs a stray whore and uses her as a fucking human shield. It's nearly impossible not to feel sorry for the chick as Dutch clutches her to his chest as bullets pound into her body, a victim of a fight she had no part in.

Yeah, the guys have kinda redeemed themselves -- they've decided to avenge their friend and take down a bunch of truly evil people for a higher moral purpose -- but that doesn't make them good guys. They'll still kill innocents, and they'll still do whatever it takes to prolong their lives, if only for a few more minutes.

The full gunfight

I wouldn't dream of writing an article on The Wild Bunch without including this video -- it's the greatest cinematic gunfight of all time. Other gunfights may be flashier (The Matrix) or prettier (Hard Boiled), but no shootout has combined brutality, character, and spectacle in the way the finale to The Wild Bunch does. From Warren Oates' orgasm on the machine gun to the aforementioned viciousness with which the Bunch execute innocent people, the gunfight is damned perfect. Unfortunately, it doesn't really have the exact same effect now as it did at release. It was supposed to be horrifying and unpleasant back then as a means of mirroring Vietnam, but the gunfight was so damned good that every action film to follow had to "up the ante," so to speak, by taking The Wild Bunch's level of violence and adding to it.

So, may not be terrifying today, but it's still brutal and intense and entertaining in a way no other gunfight has been, or probably ever will be.