In 1969, the film’s violent cynicism came as a shock to the system and now, it seems to have aged disturbingly well
Present day audiences remember Sam Peckinpah’s off-the-wall western The Wild Bunch for its blood, but no less shocking is the film’s moral carnage. Two orgies of bullets bookend the adventure of an outlaw gang on the Mexican border, setting a new standard for the depiction of violence in its day that persists as dizzyingly intense now, 50 years out from the initial release in 1969. Rapid-fire cutting, whiplash zooms and tricks with repetition could combine to dilate a single moment in time and make gunfire into a symphony of wanton destruction. All the glorious slow-motion shots of smoking barrels and spurting entry wounds had been mounted for a loftier purpose than base titillation, however. As stated in David Weddle’s Peckinpah biography If They Move … Kill ’Em!, the film-maker himself found it disturbing, the tooth-gnashing glee with which audiences received what he had intended as a cathartic purging of violent impulses. He thought he was making something closer to a morality play; he didn’t count on the public’s thirst for arterial spray.
Related: True Grit at 50: the throwback western that gave John Wayne his only Oscar
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