.jpg)
They don’t make Westerns like they used to. In classic Western films, the audience always rooted for the hero of the story. It was always the lonesome stranger riding into a town that was being run by the bad guys. The hero was then dragged in to save the day. There were always the classic shoot-outs in the end between the main villain and the hero, always with the tumbleweeds rolling by, and nobody could forget the classic stare down before the guns were drawn. In the end, it always concluded with the hero riding off into the sunset.
In Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western, The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah threw out the classic hero story and gave the audience an ultra violent, anti-hero story that puts all those hero stories to shame. This film changed the way audiences viewed western films by presenting them with a band of aging outlaws, going for one last ride. Gone were the classic heroes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Instead, the audience found themselves rooting for characters that would traditionally be the “bad” guys. Peckinpah presented the world with a new twist on Western films by portraying the idea that not all good stories are those of heroes facing bad guys but of criminals facing even worse men.
The Wild Bunch also provided a stark visual change from most Westerns of the time. It was a film with heightened violence for that time, laden with bloody scenes that included men and women getting murdered. This was one of the first films to show such a vast amount of violence and it changed the way Westerns were made in the future.
An all star cast, including William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, gave outstanding performances that audiences could never forget. They inflicted passion into their roles that was so raw that they transformed this film from a purely violent story into a well-rounded, instant classic. The great acting mingled with a solid plot and created a memorable film that is still celebrated to this day.
Great Westerns seem like a long-forgotten genre. Sam Peckinpah took the classic genre of Westerns and turned it on its head but it worked. It created an entirely new entity that matched the classics for greatness but added its own unforgettable spin. Other memorable Westerns were created after The Wild Bunch but this film introduced the idea that sometimes there doesn't need to be a clearly defined hero, just a gang of outlaws who were better than the worst men.
