The Wild Bunch in 35mm

The Wild Bunch in 35mm

An elegy to ideas of outlaw culture, Sam Peckinpah’s epic, which received Oscar nominations for Original Screenplay and Score, remains one of the genre’s most controversial and violent landmarks. Its blood-soaked journey tracks a gang of elderly, American gunfighters in 1913 on their way down past the border and into an explosive melee with the Mexican Federal Army. True to Peckinpah tradition, the film doubles down on expectations of the form it works within, notably the rugged individualism and violent scaffolding of traditional Westerns, and twists them into thorny critiques of the genre itself and the violence of a land without laws that it frequently celebrates.

DIRECTED BY: Sam Peckinpah. WRITTEN BY: Walon Green, Sam Peckinpah. STORY BY: Walon Green, Roy N. Sickner. WITH: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien. 1969. 135 min. USA. Technicolor. Scope. English. Rated R. 35mm. Print courtesy of the Constellation Center Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

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