Monday 15 June 2015

The Wild Bunch: How The Western Ain't How It Used To Be

The Wild Bunch:
How The Western Ain't How It Used To Be

This doesn't often happen with a film but the first and last lines of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) sum up just about everything you need to know about the film. An absolutely key film for its time, Peckinpah's brutal revisionist western, along with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), signified a change in the representation of American values in cinema. Particularly relating to the mythic West. The Wild Bunch represented a seismic shift in how that most American of film genres worked. The opening line, “If they move, kill 'em!” is a threat of violence spoken by a gang leader to his followers during a daylight bank robbery. Its delivery jolts the film into life; a slap in the face after a slow, teasing, almost twee walk through a deliberately typical Western town during nostalgic freeze-frame credits. It's a great line, capturing the uncompromising nature of the speaker (William Holden's Pike) and his hard-boiled accomplices. The most interesting thing about it, though, is who says it: this line, this threat of violence, this amoral order to a group of criminals, is spoken by the good guy. John Wayne or James Stewart, this is not. The closing line, “It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do,” is a eulogy for a changed American genre; perhaps not edging further West and more, but still wild.

'Revisionist' is a term you might have read in articles about films of this time. It is often applied when a film breaks or challenges the conventions of a genre, daring to do something new and making the statement on what the genre is now. The Western, arguably the purest of genres, is also the most open for revisionism and the reason is because of that purity. In theory, one could watch a short snippet of a Western and immediately identify it as a Western. The same could probably not be said for a musical (if you watched a non-singing bit) or a horror (if you watched a non-frightening bit), but the iconography of the Western has largely remained intact from the 1920s to the relatively rare occasions when they're made today. You tend not to get 'revisionist' horror films; horror is a genre which, along with, say, sci-fi, moves with the times. Evolving and therefore immune to revision. The Western, to a point, remained fairly static in terms of what one could expect. The Western was a portrait of an innocent time, when America was still being built. And this article is about the point where it changed.

It's a cliché of the classic western that the Good Guys wear white hats. Typically, they defend the homestead, the town, the herd, the very essence of civilization in an America expanding Westwards. More so, they defend traditional values, morality and a man's place in the world as a strong individual. Against whom do they defend these things? Quite literally, the wild of the West (the name didn't happen by accident). Depending upon the era: Indians, convicts and their gangs, thieves, Mexicans; anyone who represents the perceived disruption of 'civilization'. It's a very traditional, Conservative viewpoint, and one which was blown open by, among other films of the late 60s, The Wild Bunch.

Director Sam Peckinpah, already something of a Western veteran, pioneered an editing style which is still powerful to watch today. The barrage of jump cuts which accompany shootouts in this film are an assault on the senses, heightening and accentuating the violence. Packinpah uses a simultaneous mixture of slow motion photography and rapid jump cuts to startle and upset the viewer's senses. This is a far cry from the classic western shootout where John Wayne shoots from the hip, his target clutches his stomach before spinning round and falling bloodlessly to the ground. This was both heightened and realistic at the same time and still has a visceral impart today.

So the film is visually brutal, but morally perhaps even more so. This is a film which has no good guys. The heroes are the thieves, and we as an audience are supposed to get behind them and hope for some form of victory. This is largely driven by the charisma and star status of leads William Holden and Ernest Borgnine (as Pike's brother-in-arms, Dutch) but also because we are given no other choice. Relentlessly pursued by Robert Ryan's Deke and his band of Hyena-like bounty hunters and in over their heads with a Mexican warlord they really shouldn't have done business with, the film deals with their way of life coming to an end and their inability to move on. As the audience (of the Western, rather the just the film), we sympathise with them, seeing our nice safe genre coming to an end, and ultimately come to respect their moral code to each other if not the law of the land. Of course, this wasn't the first time a Western protagonist had straddled the line between civilization and wilderness; John Wayne's famous role in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) touched on the theme but with less conviction and social relevance. There are no good guys, no white hats left in the West; only degrees of bad, lesser evils and shades of grey. And what is this if not relevant to the social climate in America at the time? Vietnam and Kennedy, embedded in the social consciousness, were evidence that America was corrupt and not the mythic utopia once represented in Westerns.
The Wild Bunch has an almost palpable air of finality and despair to it, punctuated only by moments of levity in the camaraderie of the titular group. We are reminded throughout that their ways as outlaws are at an end. As they approach the final confrontation, driven to it by loyalty to their captured friend, Angel (Jamie Sanchez), we know that they face insurmountable odds and that they are sure to perish. The group's decision to return to save an almost-dead Angel from their former employer Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) is one of their only moral decisions. Having provided this warlord with formidable stolen weapons, they return to face him, demanding their companion is returned to them. They are betrayed and one of cinema's greatest bloodbaths ensues. As they fall, the final man's hand still gripping the machine gun they stole for Mapache earlier in the film, we also witness the end of the old West. The Western goes on, but with Pike and Dutch, its moral core dies.


And then then comes the final line; the line to summarise the state of play of the mythic Wild West. Bounty hunter Deke, thwarted at every attempt to capture Pike & Co, arrives just after the battle, failing again to capture them one final time. It's a hollow victory for Pike's crew; they died as free men fighting for their friend, but they still died. Offered the choice between joining Mexican revolutionaries or trying to avoid jail on his own, Deke is offered the enticement “it ain't how it used to be, but it'll do,” and that is the state of the Western in 1969; brutal, morally blurry and with an air of decay and end. John Wayne apparently commented that he thought that the film was “destroying the myth of the old west.” At a time when people were thirsty for the truth and jaded by the myth, I can think of no higher praise. Well, if no higher praise can be found, it'll do.