The Wild Bunch

I have seen Sam Peckinpah's classic violent western The Wild Bunch (1969) before and enjoyed it. I wanted to re-watch it because I have been reading a book about Peckinpah, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies by Stephen Prince. Prince has previously written a book on this film as well and it features prominently in the discussion of violent movies and I could not remember the plot details well and wanted to see the scenes that Prince described in the book again. Prince note that the slow motion action montages that he uses in the film were inspired by Akira Kurosawa. t was also suggested by Peckinpah that the western (not unlike Shakespeare plays) can comment on the present. And America in the late 60s was awash in violence as people witnessed dead bodies in Vietnam nightly on TV and many sensational murders such as those committed by the Manson family and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King among others rocked the the nation. Peckinpah may have been trying to denounce violence-he simultaneous was elevating it as an art form in his film. However, on another level, it was an entertainging heist film where a bunch of robbers are looking to make one last score as the American west as they knew it comes to a close.