So when I went a little crazy a few weeks ago and actually purchased the 30th Anniversary Edition of Sam Peckinpah`s The Wild Bunch, I guess you could say that I committed a very unorthodox act. But I believed my reasoning to be very practical. Sure, the film is noted for setting the standard for graphic and repetitive bloodshed, but the film was made in 1969. How violent could it really be????
Apparently, some people still thought that it was still too much for the 21st century, as the MPAA almost gave the uncut version the NC-17 because of its violence. This seems rather baffling, considering that the same uncut version was given the R in ‘69, and equally controversial films of the time, like the X-rated Midnight Cowboy, are tame enough to only barely get the R rating today. (With a few cuts, Cowboy could probably even squeak by with a PG-13.) And so I watched the film, wondering if indeed this film could really be all that bad that it could still freak people out thirty years later. I watched the first battle scene; yes, many people died, and, as promised, blood was spilled more than in films from before, but there was nothing that I hadn`t seen before. And there were a lot of other people shot after the first sequence (this is a western, after all; not exactly atypical.), but this scenes seemed only relatively more graphic than pre-1967 films; some spilt blood, nothing much more. But something happened which changed all that...... it happened at the very end of the film, and it justified all the hype that surrounded this picture from day one, as we are awash in an incessant and incredible massacre, in which people just die and die and die, from all sorts of weaponry, as the blood splashes and seeps into everything and everyone, and only after about, say, five or six minutes, does the violence actually end. It was, quite simply, absolutely insane!
This is not really NC-17 material, but at the same time, the violence in this scene, and in all the rest of the film, is particularly disturbing for many reasons, because Peckinpah does not glamourize it, or spare anyone from its wrath. In the final scene alone, by-standers, including prostitutes and children, are involved, and are as heartlessly and coldly knocked off without so much as a piece of sappy score music to pull at the heartstrings. We realize that a lot of innocent people are being killed because a bunch of outlaws want to get their way. We are used to this kind of violence now, but back in 1969, this really would have been horrifying (numerous accounts exist of people becoming physically sick after viewing the film at that time), and viewers would probably find it hard to cheer for the ‘heroes' when they see their victims die, often in slow motion. This would have been the second time (after Bonnie and Clyde) that viewers would have seen how gruesome violence really is, and in this case, that truth is hammered home time and again.
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