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The Wild Bunch (1969)

Watching and, even more so reading, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood got me watching some old Western tv shows. One I stumbled into was The Westerner with a young Brian Keith. It's a black and white half hour show from 1960, so I was totally unprepared for how brutal it is. In the first episode, Dave Blassingame (Keith) rides into town with his dog co-star, Brown, and goes to the local saloon where the barmaid, Jeff, is woman he knew when she was young and innocent. Now she's essentially a prostitute, under the thumb of the domineering and abusive ex-boxer who owns the establishment. It's already pretty shocking for the day--this was a show that was up against The Flintstones mind you--but it really takes a turn when Jeff tells him she doesn't want to be rescued; she wants to stay where she is. In the next episode, a young woman is teaching Dave to read, but after a lesson a man she has spurned murders her and Dave is suspected. Not exactly Leave it to Beaver, eh? Well, it turns out that the show was created, written and directed by Sam Peckinpah. That explains the themes, if not how the heck it ever made it to network television.

At any rate, it seemed like a good time to revisit a Tarantino favorite, Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. The film is notorious for its violence and bleak view of humanity--it famously opens with a scene of children torturing ants. But I was struck by an unremembered/unexpected aspect of the story.

In its own way, it's one of the last films about the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee and American Communism. (Serpico is perhaps the last?) The Bunch, like all communist regimes of the time were, are mass-murderous nihilists. Pike's admonition about comradeship mattering more than anything-- "When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can't do that, you're like some animal, you're finished! We're finished! All of us!"--is an echo of Lillian Hellman, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions," and E.M. Forster, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." These are all nothing more than emotional excuses for doing evil when you know that's what you're doing. As Communism killed a hundred million people, many American Communists chose the comfort of their comrades over the lives of all those victims. Similarly, the Bunch disregard even the innocent lives they take themselves in pursuance of their perverse code. As Roger Ebert described it:

And what is that code? It's not very pleasant. It says that you stand by your friends and against the world, that you wrest a criminal living from the banks, the railroads and the other places where the money is, and that while you don't shoot at civilians unnecessarily, it is best if they don't get in the way.

Meanwhile, Robert Ryan's Deke is the tortured former comrade who has sided with the idealists, a la Elia Kazan or Whittaker Chambers. If, once upon a time, he was one of them, he now hunts them to their bitter end no matter the cost to himself.

It makes a surprisingly perfect companion piece with On the Waterfront.

(Reviewed:05-Mar-23)

Grade: (B-)

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The Wild Bunch (1969)

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