Focus Features

An iconic shot from Peckinpah's The
Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah died 25 years ago, on December 28th, 1984. He's best known for The Wild Bunch, which re-invented the Western, and influenced countless others, until Clint Eastwood re-invented the genre yet again with Unforgiven.

Peckinpah's biographer, David Weddle, describes the impact the first screening of The Wild Bunch had on its audience:

"On May 1, 1969, 1,000 people filed into the Royal Theater in Kansas City to see what the Warner Bros. publicity department had advertised as "The First in the World Public Showing of One of the Year's Biggest Movies!"  Few noticed the film's director standing with a phalanx of dark-suited executives in the outer lobby, looking uncomfortable and out of place in faded Levi's, worn  cowboy boots, and a tan leather jacket that matched the complexion of his deeply lined face. Even fewer would have recognized his name, or cared that he'd been hailed in Europe as one of the most talented of a new generation of American filmmakers.

It was a Midwestern crowd with little appetite for highbrow critical theories. They'd come to see a good old-fashioned shoot-'em-up western with plenty of action and thrills and predictable good guys and bad guys. With stars like William Holden and Ernest Borgnine and a title like The Wild Bunch, this looked like a picture that could deliver the goods. But when the lights lowered and the velvet curtains parted that night, the good citizens of Kansas City got more than they bargained for, much more. Uneasy shifting began with the very first scene.

While robbing a railroad office in a dust-choked town square, William Holden's gang is ambushed by a posse of bounty hunters. But who are the good guys and who are the bad?  The bounty hunters are every bit as sleazy and ruthless as the outlaws, neither group displaying a glimmer of guilt as they blow away innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. The 70mm picture seems to explode beyond the confines of the screen. The action is shot from a dizzying variety of angles, some filmed in slow motion, others at normal speed, cut together in an alternating rhythm so that time seems to compress and then expand. Bullets smash into chests, shoulders, limbs, and faces like incoming mortar shells, spraying fountains of blood and flesh; bodies jerk and twist; glass windows shatter lethargically, the sparkling shards raining down like ice crystals; horses and riders tumble to earth with balletic grace.

No, this was no ordinary western. This was like no western, no movie, anyone had ever seen before.

Thirty people bolted up the aisle and out of the theater, some to vomit in the ajoining alley. But most remained pinned to their seats, horrified yet transfixed. "I saw the picture with one eye at times, from behind arms and fingers spread in fright," a young woman in her early twenties recalled afterwards. "But I must admit, I was excited, repulsed, and at the same time drawn to what I saw on the screen."

But the opening shootout was only an appetizer, a spring picnic, compared to the battle some two hours later, when Holden and his bunch plunge into suicidal combat with an entire Mexican army.

In the audience, a woman found the Bunch's headlong rush into death "strangely exhilarating...I felt something of a mental orgasm."

"Only a madman could call this creation!" one livid patron scribbled furiously on the reaction card that the clammy-palmed publicity man from Warner Bros. had handed out. "It's not art! it's not cinema! It's pure wasted insanity!"

Up near the very top of the cavernous theater, next to the projection-booth door, the madman who'd made the movie, Sam Peckinpah, stood quietly observing the chaos. Beside him the film's editor, Lou Lombardo, paled at boos and hisses rising up from the ocean of people beneath them. He leaned close to Peckinpah's ear and whispered urgently: "Sam, we've got to get out of here! They're getting ready to kick the shit out of us!"

The director's brown-gray beard parted into an enigmatic half-grin, half-grimace. "Leave now?" Peckinpah said in a raspy whisper, his hazel eyes shining brightly. "Hell, partner, I think we've got 'em on the run!"

Peckinpah viewed the anger of those who had sat through the entire movie with irony. He suspected the real target of their rage was not him, but themselves. "They want to walk out, but they can't. They can't turn their faces away and that makes them mad," he would say later. "You see, people begin to see the violence within them, the violence just below the surface. It's in all of us, as the film shows, whether we be criminals, lawmen, children (who imitate their elders, although they are violent naturally), or old men...Violence usually begins with a reason, with some principle to be defended. The real motivation, however, is a primitive thirst for blood, and as the fighting continues reasons or principles are forgotten and men fight for the sake of fighting."

Extract taken from Sam Peckinpah: If They Move...Kill 'Em by David Weddle (Faber & Faber, 1996).

Essential Viewing: Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Junior Bonner, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

An iconic shot from Peckinpah's The
Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah died 25 years ago, on December 28th, 1984. He's best known for The Wild Bunch, which re-invented the Western, and influenced countless others, until Clint Eastwood re-invented the genre yet again with Unforgiven.

Peckinpah's biographer, David Weddle, describes the impact the first screening of The Wild Bunch had on its audience:

"On May 1, 1969, 1,000 people filed into the Royal Theater in Kansas City to see what the Warner Bros. publicity department had advertised as "The First in the World Public Showing of One of the Year's Biggest Movies!"  Few noticed the film's director standing with a phalanx of dark-suited executives in the outer lobby, looking uncomfortable and out of place in faded Levi's, worn  cowboy boots, and a tan leather jacket that matched the complexion of his deeply lined face. Even fewer would have recognized his name, or cared that he'd been hailed in Europe as one of the most talented of a new generation of American filmmakers.

It was a Midwestern crowd with little appetite for highbrow critical theories. They'd come to see a good old-fashioned shoot-'em-up western with plenty of action and thrills and predictable good guys and bad guys. With stars like William Holden and Ernest Borgnine and a title like The Wild Bunch, this looked like a picture that could deliver the goods. But when the lights lowered and the velvet curtains parted that night, the good citizens of Kansas City got more than they bargained for, much more. Uneasy shifting began with the very first scene.

While robbing a railroad office in a dust-choked town square, William Holden's gang is ambushed by a posse of bounty hunters. But who are the good guys and who are the bad?  The bounty hunters are every bit as sleazy and ruthless as the outlaws, neither group displaying a glimmer of guilt as they blow away innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. The 70mm picture seems to explode beyond the confines of the screen. The action is shot from a dizzying variety of angles, some filmed in slow motion, others at normal speed, cut together in an alternating rhythm so that time seems to compress and then expand. Bullets smash into chests, shoulders, limbs, and faces like incoming mortar shells, spraying fountains of blood and flesh; bodies jerk and twist; glass windows shatter lethargically, the sparkling shards raining down like ice crystals; horses and riders tumble to earth with balletic grace.

No, this was no ordinary western. This was like no western, no movie, anyone had ever seen before.

Thirty people bolted up the aisle and out of the theater, some to vomit in the ajoining alley. But most remained pinned to their seats, horrified yet transfixed. "I saw the picture with one eye at times, from behind arms and fingers spread in fright," a young woman in her early twenties recalled afterwards. "But I must admit, I was excited, repulsed, and at the same time drawn to what I saw on the screen."

But the opening shootout was only an appetizer, a spring picnic, compared to the battle some two hours later, when Holden and his bunch plunge into suicidal combat with an entire Mexican army.

In the audience, a woman found the Bunch's headlong rush into death "strangely exhilarating...I felt something of a mental orgasm."

"Only a madman could call this creation!" one livid patron scribbled furiously on the reaction card that the clammy-palmed publicity man from Warner Bros. had handed out. "It's not art! it's not cinema! It's pure wasted insanity!"

Up near the very top of the cavernous theater, next to the projection-booth door, the madman who'd made the movie, Sam Peckinpah, stood quietly observing the chaos. Beside him the film's editor, Lou Lombardo, paled at boos and hisses rising up from the ocean of people beneath them. He leaned close to Peckinpah's ear and whispered urgently: "Sam, we've got to get out of here! They're getting ready to kick the shit out of us!"

The director's brown-gray beard parted into an enigmatic half-grin, half-grimace. "Leave now?" Peckinpah said in a raspy whisper, his hazel eyes shining brightly. "Hell, partner, I think we've got 'em on the run!"

Peckinpah viewed the anger of those who had sat through the entire movie with irony. He suspected the real target of their rage was not him, but themselves. "They want to walk out, but they can't. They can't turn their faces away and that makes them mad," he would say later. "You see, people begin to see the violence within them, the violence just below the surface. It's in all of us, as the film shows, whether we be criminals, lawmen, children (who imitate their elders, although they are violent naturally), or old men...Violence usually begins with a reason, with some principle to be defended. The real motivation, however, is a primitive thirst for blood, and as the fighting continues reasons or principles are forgotten and men fight for the sake of fighting."

Extract taken from Sam Peckinpah: If They Move...Kill 'Em by David Weddle (Faber & Faber, 1996).

Essential Viewing: Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Junior Bonner, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.