The Wild Bunch (1969)

Ahh youth is wasted on the young. Any real western fan, sadly most are getting up in years, loves "The Wild Bunch" including myself. Sadly, the younger generation is caught up in all of those Marvel super hero movies and have no time for classics like "The Wild Bunch".

It was a shocker at the time of release and it certainly shocked me back then. I never get tired of watching it.

I think the opening scene is incredible. I think Peckinpah was very good at adrenaline fueled, gratuitously violent set pieces, however I think he rarely directed an overall brilliant film, with a complete narrative. He did it with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and The Getaway.

In the case of The Wild Bunch though, for me, it lacks character development. I don't find the characters that interesting, find them one dimensional, and these are great character actors Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson. Even the leads.. hell the leads do most of the talking (feels like the three above mentioned barely actually do anything in the film, like they're just there for effect and most of the film revolves around William Holden and Robert Ryan), and they are fundamentally less interesting than the supports who I just want to see better utilised!

Overall it feels too focused on action, violence, with very little in the way of narrative or character development. It really bugs me because I'm a huge Warren Oates fan and a huge western fan however I have been unable to find a Warren Oates western which I think is very good or in which I think Warren Oates is displaying one of his greatest performances.

Bo Hopkins was a great character.. and he was only there for the opening scene.

Good observations on the film, I still think the strengths of the film outweigh it's weaknesses. Did you ever see Peckinpah's RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)? Deals with many of the themes in "Wild Bunch", aging of the old west, violence, good vs evil, etc. Warren Oats has a small but brilliant part in this. My favorite film of his was "Two Lane Blacktop". One of the greatest charactor actors of all time had quite a meaty part in that one.

I saw Ride the High Country, overall I found it quite slow, boring, the characters not very dimensional or interesting. I do however remember enjoying the Hammond brothers, particularly Warren Oates and LQ Jones. I also remember thoroughly enjoying the wedding scene.

Sorry to disappoint, I do like westerns, just some I don't hit it off with and unfortunately I have this with all the Peckinpah westerns.

Two-Lane Blacktop is one of my all time favourite films. It's in my top 50. Warren Oates is amazing in it, wonderfully ambiguous, difficult to work out. I felt quite sure he was a creep when I first watched it, that he was gonna' be a right nasty piece of work. That would be quite typical and expected in that sorta' film, you've got your free spirited road trippin' hippies and then the older dude roars up in his motor and talks to 'em all cocky like you think you can foresee the general direction it will go in. I was very pleasantly surprised that it is just a film about four people road trippin' and gettin' on well, albeit with some friendly competition, sharing experiences and stories.

GTO was a tall story teller. The reason his sweater kept changing colour was in my opinion not an unintentional continuity error (this is not Troll 2!), but it was a subtle reflection on his character, continuously changing story, telling a new story that is difficult to tell how much of it is actually true. That's what I think. I know people like GTO.. he means no harm, he just feels inferior, unsuccessful, unfulfilled, he feels he needs to exaggerate his life stories or maybe just straight up make up things that he's done.. does it so much that to him it becomes the truth. He knows this or that didn't really happen, but it has come to feel like the truth because he outwardly expresses it to others as the truth. He probably gets his stories confused because there are so many of them, he probably contradicts himself, and people can tell he's bull$hitting but they just smile and humour him because at least he doesn't mean harm. Yeah I know people like that. I did feel though like GTO had had a mid-life crisis, and particularly like he was running from something. Maybe he ran out on his family, maybe he lost his job, maybe he ran out on his family because he lost his job, maybe he just spent loads of money on the car, then lost his job, and ran out on his family. Maybe there was no family and it was just the job.. maybe he lived with his mum his whole life and she died. Seemed like he was trying to escape from his reality anyway. Leaves me wanting more GTO.

So yeah, GTO, for me, is one of the best characters in movie history.

Another nice, albeit "low key" western I admired Warren Oates in was The Hired Hand (1971). He and Peter Fonda must have been close having worked in at least two other films together-Race With The Devil & 92 In The Shade (Both excellent "B" movies in my opinion). Oates really shined in these blowing Fonda's performances away. How sad he passed away so young. Having seen him in so many tv shows as a kid and all his film work, I felt like I lost a brother.

It is definitely one of the best. It changed the way audiences saw violence and it flipped the western genre on its head. The nihilistic aspects of the film really draw me in, and the depictions of violence were revolutionary at the time.

This is what you would imagine bank robbers in the old west would be like. It's a timeless classic that future generations will enjoy just as much as us. It shows a way of life that's not very pretty, but it was what it was, it had its time and faded into history. When I was a kid, I was thrilled by the action sequences. As I grow older, I still love the action scenes, but the quieter, low key scenes become more poignant as the years pass.



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Great Western, how bout when they opened the bags o money and it was washers!