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The Wild Bunch

#522. The Wild Bunch

  • Year: 1969
  • Country: USA
  • Language: English/Spanish
  • Production: Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 145m
  • Director: Sam Peckinpah
  • Producer: Phil Feldman
  • Screenplay: Sam Peckinpah, Walon Green
  • Photography: Lucien Ballard
  • Music: Jerry Fielding
  • Cast: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmund O'Brien, Warren Oates
  • Oscar Noms: Best Screenplay, Best Original Score

Abridged Book Description[]

A Hemingwayesque answer to the Erich Segal-ish Western revisionism of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Wild Bunch is at once disgusting and romantic, investigating the thesis that "even the worst of us" want to be children again - "perhaps the worst of us most of all"... The Wild Bunch drags the cowboy movie myth into an age of mass-produced murder symbolized aptly by the Gatling gun and the Model-T Ford. Shot through with whiskery Western eccentricity, including a hilarious double act from L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin as human vultures, and a great deal of picturesque dialogue, this was the film that reclaimed the American tradition of the Western back from the Italians and proved that Peckinpah could pop more blood capsules than Sergio Leone.

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