Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane as an American landmark film—that

is, a film that describes "a critical, unsettled area of American life"—in
this case, the emptiness of technology in the form of a film that is itself a
technological wonderment. From any perspective, 2001 is that most rare
of cinematic achievements: a big-budget, nonnarrative spectacle of enormous
technical sophistication which nevertheless makes an original and
personal artistic statement about the human condition.*
The Wild Bunch: "Zapping the Cong"t
The years 1968 and 1969, perhaps the darkest in American history
since the Civil War, witnessed some of the most original American films
since the late forties. Like Bonnie and Clyde, many of them were aimed
at the new youthful audience and were either covertly or overtly concerned
with the political hysteria that had gripped the nation over the
war in Vietnam. If Bonnie and Clyde was about the type of romantic
rebel who would fight the military-industrial complex to end the war and
usher in the greening of America, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch
(1969) was about America's mercenary presence in Vietnam itself. In this
film, which opens with the bloody massacre of an entire Texas town in
the course of a payroll robbery, a gang of aging outlaws led by Pike
Bishop (William Holden) finds itself increasingly confined by the closing
of the American frontier and, pursued by bounty hunters, crosses the
border into Mexico in search of greener pastures. The year is 1914, and
the Mexican Civil War is in full swing, but the members of the Wild
Bunch aren't looking for a cause, only some action. (As one of them
comments after they have crossed the Rio Grande, "Just more of Texas,
as far as I'm concerned.") The group falls in with Mapache, a brutish
general who is leading federal troops in the fight against Pancho Villa
and the insurgents. Brilliantly played by the Mexican director Emilio Fernández,
Mapache is a sadistic thug who murders and tortures indiscriminately.
His military base in the village of Agua Verde is a corrupt, barely
competent dictatorship propped up by powerful foreign governments (in
this case Germany and her allies) and their sophisticated weapons technology.
The Bunch agrees to rob an American munitions train near the
border for Mapache, who then attempts to seize the arms without paying
for them. The gang outwits him, but Mapache captures one of their num-
* Kubrick's best films have always been both technically and intellectually a decade ahead
of their time. His classic antiwar statement Paths of Clory (1957), set in a French army unit
during World War I, relentlessly exposed the type of military stupidity and callousness that
would lead us into Vietnam. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb (1963) is an unsparing black comedy about the inevitablity of nuclear holocaust,
produced amid the optimism of the New Frontier. And A Clockwork Orange (1971), liberally
adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess, projected a vision of the alienated, drugridden,
ultraviolent future incarnated by "punk" culture in the late seventies and eighties.
The Shining (1980) is less the conventional horror film it was initially thought to be than an
account of America's long-concealed history of domestic violence and child abuse, while
Full Metal Jacket (1987) seems to suggest that the country itself is a sort of distopic Disneyland
in which the Vietnam War became one of the more elaborate rides.
t A common slang phrase from the period that referred to the indiscriminate killing of Vietnamese,
usually with automatic weapons fired at a distance.
The New American Cinema · 929
20.15 Mercenaries as mythic heroes: The Wild Bunch (Sam
Peckinpah, 1969). Ernest Borgnine, William Holden, Warren
Dates. (Note the expertly balanced composition.)
20.16 Radical destruction: a shot from the massacre which
concludes The Wild Bunch. Ernest Borgnine, William Holden.
her—a Mexican Indian who has collaborated with the rebels—and tortures
him to death before their eyes. In disgust, Pike and his men confront
Mapache and kill him. The film ends in a sustained bloodbath as the
outlaws seize the fédérales' machine gun and blast Agua Verde to pieces,
all of them dying in the process.
The spectacular massacres which open and close The Wild Bunch are
filmed in the style of the final ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, with a variety
of lenses and different cameras running at different speeds, usually decelerated
to depict the moment of death. With the death scene from Penn's
film, they are among the most complex, kinetic, and shocking montage
sequences in postwar American cinema, and they are balletically choreographed
in a manner reminiscent of the battle scenes from Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai. The film is also a stunning piece of widescreen composition
from beginning to end, skillfully photographed by Lucien Ballard
(1908—88) in Panavision. Nevertheless, critics of the period were outraged
at the extent and ferocity of the bloodshed. The final massacre has
about it a sort of mad, orgasmic ecstasy, as the slaughter grows more
and more intense until it reaches Eisensteinian (or Buñuelian) proportions:
we see more people die than could possibly fill the small village;
we see the same people die over and over again. Furthermore, the victims
of this "heroic" violence are principally civilians caught in the crossfire.
But a year before the revelation of the My Lai massacre, the outraged
critics could not know that they were watching a mythic allegory of
American intervention in Vietnam.* ,
* In 1969, the original release print of The Wild Bunch was said to have had more individual
shots than any color film ever made—a claim difficult to substantiate today since the film
was withdrawn by Warner Bros, after its debut and rereleased in several different versions,
none of them as long or elaborate as Peckinpah had intended. For example, Warners cut
an entire series of flashbacks establishing the prior relationship between Pike and his pursuer,
Deke Thornton, which is crucial to the film's themes of honor and betrayal. Also cut
was an elaborate sequence in which Mapache's troops are routed at a provincial railroad
station by Villa's, which adds depth to the general's characterization and opens up the plot.
During 1969, The Wild Bunch was shown in alternate versions of 190, 148, 145, 143, and
930 · Hollywood, 1965-Present
As with Bonnie and Clyde, the violence of The Wild Bunch was revolutionary,
was excessive for its time—a thing difficult to see today, when
slow-motion bloodletting has passed from innovation to convention to
cliche. Nevertheless, Penn and Peckinpah were committed filmmakers
during the time of the war. Like their counterparts in the film noir