Eye Candy #351 - "The Wild Bunch"

The Wild Bunch:  "It's his word." "That ain't what counts! It's who you give it to!" In my opinion, the best Western committed to film, a bloody, violent tale about the realities of the changing West (particularly the romanticized myth of it, with its gunslingers, whiskey-soaked towns, jezebels, and money) and how it jarred violently with a rapidly changing world, and the people caught in between because the world didn't wait for them to catch up. The Wild Bunch, with the first line, "If they move, kill 'em", is a gang or murderers and thieves that starts shooting two minutes into the credits and don't stop until their final bloody end. They're on the run from the railroad-hired gunmen, from the Mexican army, and from Time itself. This is Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece, and it echoes all his recurring themes of honor, friendship, brotherhood, and the relativity of right and wrong, good and evil, more effectively than any other film he directed before or after. The special edition lengthens the cut of the film by about ten minutes, and none of it's wasted. John Wayne complained that "The Wild Bunch" destroyed the myth of the Old West. That's damn right. Woodchuck sez, "Me lovey".