The Cabinet Explores the Old West: The Wild Bunch

Dozens of Westerns feature wandering gunslingers struggling to adjust to the fact that as the American West becomes more settled and less lawless it no longer has a place for them. Some of the best known examples are Shane, The Searchers, and The Magnificent Seven, all of which are great Westerns, but none of them deal with this theme as effectively as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. What sets it apart is Peckinpah's willingness to depict the bloodshed that accompanies this struggle and follow it to its logical conlusion.

The Wild Bunch is probably the bloodiest Western ever made, and one of the bloodiest movies ever made. Its first line, spoken by William Holden's character Pike, sets the tone: "If they move, kill 'em." He's referring to the customers and employees of a bank that the Bunch are in the process of robbing. As Pike and his men begin filling their bags of loot, they realize that the building is surrounded by the hired guns of a railroad baron who is tired of having his money stolen. A parade of temperance activists also happens to be marching past the bank, and the Bunch escape by using them as human shields and leaving piles of bullet-ridden bodies in their wake. The result is an opening scene that graphically illustrates why the gunslingers can't live in a west that's no longer wild.

It also prefigures the even greater violence of the film's final scene. Having just been paid for stealing sixteen crates of weapons and delivering them to a rogue Mexican general, the Bunch are enjoying themselves with booze and whores and trying to forget about the fact that the general has taken one member of the gang prisoner and is torturing him. Knowing that the four of them are no match for the general and his dozens of men, Pike and his gang, nevertheless, march through the village and demand their friend's release. The general agrees, but then slits the prisoner's throat as he releases him. Pike responds by filling the general full of lead and thus initiates the final shoot out that ends  with the deaths of the Bunch, the general and all of his men.

A YouTube video entitled "The Wild Bunch Kill Count" indicates that at least 142 people are killed in the movie, and a fair response to the film is revulsion at its senseless violence. However, the violence isn't simply exploitative. It's a way of illustrating the gunslingers' resistance to the fact that their time is passing and of bringing their lives to a logical conclusion. In the Magnificent Seven, Steven McQueen's character states, "We deal in lead," and while this statement is true of the film's gunslingers, it's even truer of those in The Wild Bunch. They deal in lead, and Peckinpah shows us that this means shedding a lot of blood. While it's understood that the characters in The Magnificent Seven live by their guns, we only see them using these guns  to defend a village from a gang of bandits. They are portrayed as heroes rather than outlaws. It's only through dialogue that we are encouraged also to view them as hired guns whose time is passing. Moreover, by violently killing all of his characters, Peckinpah states that they must die in order for the wild west to be tamed. They deal in lead, and they die in lead. In contrast, John Sturges, director of the The Magnificent Seven, fails to bring his film's premise to its logical conclusion. It ends with the main characters, played by McQueen and Yul Brenner, riding away from the village as if, after pronouncing themselves as having no home, no prospects, and no other way of making a living, they can simply be absorbed into the new west that is emerging around them. 

Shane and The Searchers suffer from similar flaws.  The dark past of Shane's title character is revealed through dialogue but only hinted at through his behavior.  Like the Magnificent Seven, his onscreen violence is heroic:  he uses his shooting skills to defend farmers from greedy landowners, and then rides off into the sunset, alone, but still alive.  In The Searchers, John Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, spends years trying to find his niece who has been kidnapped by Apaches, not to rescue her, but to kill her.  Taken from her family as a young girl, she is now, in Ethan's words, more Apache than white.  However, when he finally tracks down Cicatriz, the chief who has made the kidnapped niece his wife, Ethan instead acts heroically and returns his niece to her family.  John Ford, the film's director, thus adds a level of nuance to Wayne's character that's often missing from Westerns.  However, like the gunslingers in Shane and The Magnificent Seven, Ethan never sheds blood on screen in a way that would cause viewers to see him as a hardened killer. No temperance marchers die by his gun.

One could, of course, argue that the endings of The Magnificent Seven, Shane, and The Searchers are actually more powerful because their gunslingers do survive and must continue wandering the West alone after having made friends, acted heroically to save them and been reminded of the kind of lives they will never have because they deal in lead.  There is something to this argument. In death The Wild Bunch are freed from their curse of wandering as outcasts in a world that has no place for them while the other gunslingers must continue living in outcasts.  However, this argument would be more compelling if they had been portrayed on film as hardened killers.  These are movies, not plays or novels, and if their directors want us to believe their characters have condemned themselves to lives of violence, they must show us.  The fact that they don't suggests that only Peckinpah had the balls to follow his film's theme where it led him.