As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
I remember the first time as a kid I saw the Wild Bunch directed by Sam Peckinpah and I did not like the feel of it, as it was intimidating and not caring in any of the characters. It was not John Wayne, Roy Rogers or any of the Westerns I had been exposed to.
It was not until viewing the movie, in running out of other Westerns as I reached adulthood, that I was stunned to understand how much I liked this movie as an adult. Always wanting to make movies, I studied the Directors I thought were very good at what they did and sought to understand how they told the story the writers put into print, and the actors were moulded into. The first 20 minute scene of The Wild Bunch is a masterpiece in groundbreaking cinema in how Pekinpah tells the story through the eyes of everyone there from their vantage point.
The scene which is chilling to me is the opening where William Holden, playing an Army officer is bumped into on the street by a woman. If you watch that closely, you see Holden flare in murderous rage. He wants to by instinct, beat, rape and murder this dumb bitch who has violated his space, but he catches himself and politely escorts her as he has to cover up all he is to pull off this bank job.
He later leaves a retard to die who is part of the gang for their escape. When he voices the command as they rob the bank, "If anyone move, KILL EM". There is no doubt who Holden is as Pike.
I never liked William Holden as in life he was a manwhore who ruined women's lives and in cinema, no one ever got anything out of him, except the one time with Sam Peckinpah. Holden was playing the man he was, the man that all men are who are not pansy asses. You must understand in what Sam Peckinpah, drunk most of the time, shooting guns off far too often and bedding more whores than Charlie Sheen was, what he created in the Wild Bunch. You are watching men, being unaplogetic for being a man. There is no lying to the wife. There is no lying to the girls about morals while lusting to get them drunk or stoned and making them scream in bed. There is no having to behave because society will reward a man's slow death in paying for other people's bastards or dying in war for whoring wives and Darwin brats. This is what men are in The Wild Bunch in all their raw form.
When Harrigan who is the railroad stooge repeatedly shoots the retard kid left to die, who says, "You can kiss my sister's black cat's ass", you are seeing men on both sides, men who own the law and men who are outlaws, all one and the same. All of this is dressed up in suits and apologies in the world we are imprisoned in, but this is what the world is. It has been shackled by pansies and shemales wanting to have a penis, so they can bully with laws and shunning to get their dictatorial way. With Sam Peckinpah, you saw men as they are, both sides of outlaw in all their ugly form, but in their complete handsome reality of what all of us have been cornered into.
Two actors sums up the John Wayne character in the Wild Bunch. Robert Ryan and Edmund O'Brien. One is sent out to hunt track down the Wild Bunch after being brutalized in prison and the other is the uncle of the retard who William Holden used and got murdered. One would rather be with the Wild Bunch and the other is the sole survivor of the Wild Bunch, who join together as everyone is dead, and it is just something to do.
Men in all forms and men just the same. The women, all whores, selling it to whoever their looks can get the sum they are willing to settle for. All treacherous and devious, in town demanding that men do not drink and in Mexico enabling the criminal rape and murder as it benefits them.
No the Wild Bunch is not about women, but the snapshot is what the writers and Peckinpah summed up men and women at their complete visage without the glaze covering the sinful pretention of both.
There was not any "I have to be a good little boy in this movie" so I get money and sex . There was not any I have to be a good little girl in this movie, "so I control the money with my sex". This was the brutal reality of what lays beneath the actors and actresses using people in life and whoring when they think no one is recording it.
Sam Peckinpah made some bad movies in his experiments like Junior Bonner with Steve McQueen. He also proved in an odd move he cameod in named something like China 9, that he was a better actor than the best actors on the big screen.
I read once of a writer bringing Bob Dylan to meet Peckinpah for the first time. As they walked up, they heard a scream, the maid ran out, a gun shot, and as they walked in, the writer thought, "I'm going to lose Bob Dylan over this", and there stood Peckinpay, naked, a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a gun in the other and the shattered mirror he just shot. All that was said was, "Sam this is Bob Dylan".
That is naked and unafraid when the world we have been imprisoned in has us all clothed and terrified.
Nuff Said
agtG
