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Mel Gibson to Direct "Wild Bunch" Remake (OT)

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
16 replies | jump to latest

Well, Mel Gibson has been announced to direct -- and co-write -- a remake of Peckinpah's 1969 "The Wild Bunch." No word on if he will be in it.

(Insert generic comments about the outrage of remaking classics, here -- versus the positive of re-staging classics for new generations.)

I was young and around and aware of The Wild Bunch when it came out in the summer of 1969. What had sounded, in the newspaper reports when it was being made, like a standard Western with over-the-hill stars in it(William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan) hit hard when it was released and the critics let the world know: this was the bloodiest Western ever made, with equal parts horror and war movie mixed amidst the Western action. The word got out fast that this was the most bloody major Hollywood release since Bonnie and Clyde and -- like Psycho before them both -- was a major "shock event" BECAUSE of the blood...even while all three films were masterly works with serious performances within.

Folks like Jay Cocks in Time declared The Wild Bunch a masterpiece; Judith Crist went on Johnny Carson and said "bring your barf bag." (I personally read that Time review in 1969 and I was a bit stunned and excited; I personally saw Crist offer that quote on Carson.) Analogies were made to Vietnam(the film opens with battling outlaws and posse members killing off innocent villagers in a crossfire).

But along with and alongside the blood bags exploding all over The Wild Bunch was its frenzied New Wave cinematic style: in the bloodbath gunbattles which open and close The Wild Bunch, director Sam Peckinpah intercut slow motion with regular motion with in-between motion, creating what one critic called "a ballet of blood" while also being action at the highest level of excitement(the sound effects of guns going off were exciting, and the mix of visual action and sound action created, wrote one critic "gun music.")

Director Sam Peckinpah got lucky: the Warner studio chief at the time LOVED the first rushes of The Wild Bunch and so gave Bloody Sam all the money he wanted and all the time he wanted to stage his final gunbattle(4 men versus 200) -- and it stands as the greatest gun battle ever put on film, as exciting and moving as it is bloody. Peckinpah was never again given the time or budget again to stage something so massively; all his later shoot em ups (The Getaway; Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) seemed lacking when the gunbattles came.

Aside from the bloody gunbattles, The Wild Bunch plays as a very personal film, sort of like an art film -- this isn't your standard John Wayne/Robert Mitchum type Western with a plot. Rather the film flows along in an almost abstract manner, following four very bad men(led by William Holden, a great star in his twilight) as they become the best men on the screen, and hence heroes in spite of themselves. The film is also deeply in touch with Mexican culture in the country in which it was filmed.

The Wild Bunch was a controversial event on release, and stands as a classic today -- and one of the great "auteur" classics of all time. Sam Peckinpah's blood flows through it as Bill Holden's blood flows out of it. Its my favorite film of 1969 and my third favorite film of all time(behind Psycho and North by Northwest.)

So you can imagine I'm a bit irked by a remake of THIS one.

As with Psycho, what was shocking then is rather accepted now. And rather like The Birds with its special effects, the then-spectacular gunbattle that ends The Wild Bunch can be done rather easily today.

And what of Mel Gibson as the director? Well, unlike Peckinpah, Gibson has a Best Director Oscar. (But what, really does that matter? Hitchcock and Peckinpah don't have Oscars.) And he has his own personal reputation for screen violence - sadistic torture division(see: The Passion of the Christ.) But he's a bit past it -- a Hollywood pariah of sorts, brought back but on reduced terms(no longer a superstar.) And is he good enough to write a good movie?

We shall see. The idea of remaking The Wild Bunch as been around for decades. There was word it would be done modern day , with drug cartels and submachine guns. There was word that Will Smith would star(lucky for us, Mr. Smith's star has faded severely.) At this time, I don't know if the Gibson version is period or modern day, and who is going to be in it(Gibson COULD play the Holden role now, he's older than Holden was when he played it, but equal in wrinkles.)

The best thing about any remake announcement of a personal favorite film, I have found: it gets me thinking about the original. In a good way.

I'll likely be watching the 1969 original real soon.

[–] MizhuB (165) 6 years ago

Although I've heard about it for years, I've never seen the movie. Now I'm curious. But it's the plot and characters I'm interested in the most. The gore I've heard about...well, I suspect that, as gory as I've heard it is, it might be very 1969.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Although I've heard about it for years, I've never seen the movie. Now I'm curious.

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Well, its kind of my same old warning: you had to be there, I think, IN 1969, to get the initial shocking impact -- and then perhaps for much of the 70s as its legend grew.

The key years for The Wild Bunch for me were...the 80's. When VHS tapes came in. Just getting to watch that spectacular gunbattle whenever I wanted to was a reassertion that it was the GREATEST(and most moving) gunbattle ever put on film.

I would leave the tape "pre-wound" to the very dramatic moments when the anti-heroes decide to have the gunbattle, and occasionally just watch that.

Funny: for a year or so, I had a male roommate whose favorite movie was The Wild Bunch. I'd hear him come in some nights, plug in the VHS of The Wild Bunch, watch the gunbattle(there are certain famous lines that get it rolling -- I'll put them in SPOILER post below.) From my distance in another room, I would chuckle a bit. I'd HEAR those lines, hear the music, hear the opening line of the gunbattle("We want Angel.") And then -- for my ears only -- I'd listen and hear that gun music soar and understand that my friend was just enjoying life watching that gunbattle for a few powerful minutes...and the wonderfully warm coda that surprisingly followed it.

And then he'd rewind the tape to the gunbattle start and put it away.

Thus..and in other ways too...The Wild Bunch just kept living on in my life. A favorite of mine, THE favorite of a quite a few friends. It lived within them. And me.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But it's the plot and characters I'm interested in the most.

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Both are interesting. There IS a plot -- about a train robbery and the Bunch crossing paths with the good Mexicans and bad Mexicans engaged in civil war --- but it always seems to get lost in side tracks and wordless passages of "mood." There ARE characters -- this is arguably the greatest performance of William Holden's career -- but we have to get used to these men as vicious, merciless, and in the case of two of them (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson as brothers Lyle and Tector Gorch -- great names!) pretty dumb. These outlaws are OUTLAWS...but they do have a code of honor, Holden is a haunted man with a lot of guilt...and these elements feed the march towards that final gunbattle. By the way, this might not be Ernest Borgnine's greatest performance(that would be his Best Actor win for Marty), but it is close...and Borgnine solidified his career as a character star in this -- not five years after starring in that Navy sitcom, "McHale's Navy." I've always felt that Borgnine in The Wild Bunch mixed the humanity of his Marty character with the viciousness of his villains -- l ike Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity.

Robert Ryan was ill (pre-cancer) when he made The Wild Bunch, but I thought he looked great in it -- cool in longish hair and moustache, tall and lean and much less hard- looking than he had been as a younger actor. If I could look one way in this life, Ryan in The Wild Bunch is kind of it, middle-aged man division. But damn, I don't. Also: Ryan looks incredibly handsome in The Wild Bunch, but he also looks tired and worn out, it is a terribly moving look. And I love his line when he explodes at the mangy posse(led by Strother Martin and LQ Jones) that he must command to hunt down Holden: "We're riding after MEN, and I wish to God I was riding WITH them!"

Holden looks good too. Alcoholism had cracked his once perfect, boyish face, but he still was handsome, and he had roots in the urban cynics of Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17 which carried over well to this surprisingly courtly outlaw(who at one point, wears a suit and business tie with his Stetson, looking for all the world like a 1958 businessman transported to the Old West.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS

William Holden , in the story, ends up having one "current" best pal on his jobs with him(Borgnine), and one "past pal" chasing him(forced to, under threat of returning to prison) -- Ryan. Its an interesting triangle, almost as if Holden has two "male lovers" competing for his greater loyalty. The Wild Bunch is a tale about men, that's for sure, the women are window dressing and pretty much...hookers. And in the film's great final scene, male camaraderie pulls a happy ending out of a sad one.

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The gore I've heard about...well, I suspect that, as gory as I've heard it is, it might be very 1969.

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That's true. Its like 1960 Psycho. Shocking then, rather passe now.

The key thing was simple: when bullets hit men in The Wild Bunch, blood spurts out. Heretofore in Westerns, victims pretty much just fell down or flew backwards, blood was sort of painted onto the actors as an afterthought.

But from The Wild Bunch on, it was practically required that bullet hits would bleed. I recall seeing a comedy Western called "Skin Game" in 1971, where it was shocking -- when villain Ed Asner got shot -- that he DIDN'T bleed, he just fell down. Then I got it : well, this was a comedy in some ways, a family show.

But The Wild Bunch went a few extra miles beyond just having bullet hits spurt blood. For one thing, often the spurts were front AND back in the same shot -- you would see a bullet travel through a man's body.

And I recall something in the opening sequence that was meant to test my pre-teen mettle: one of Holden's gang gets shot in the face and rides along in misery until we get a close-up of the man's face entirely caked in red blood. He begs Holden to kill him - and Holden obliges, shooting the man point blank in the face. This was the kind of casual cruelty(yet compassionate) that The Wild Bunch traded in.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS

The film also famously begins with a symbolic real "insect atrocity." We watch giggling, innocent children enjoy watching a swarm of ants overrun and torment a scorpion in a small pit created by the kids. The symbolism is direct: The Wild Bunch will be that scorpion; the army that overruns THEM will be those ants.

And near the end, a man gets his throat slashed open on camera.

Add to this that many of the blood bag bullet hits explode in slow motion and...well, you had a cause celebre in 1969 that still packs a punch today. Bullet bags may still explode with blood today, but The Wild Bunch has a raw thematic savagery, start to finish, that feels very real and dramatic and harrowing...like "Psycho"(to me) this was NOT "only a movie." It was an experience that chills one to the core, you never forget it.

But I am resolute about one thing: that gunbattle at the end may be filled with spurting blood, but that blood is entirely secondary to the sheer visceral power of the sequence - the kinetics, the excitement. I akin The Wild Bunch to the Best of Hitchocck in the montage department: that gunbattle(which begins with Hitchockian suspense build-up) is right up there with the shower scene, the attack on Tippi Hedren in The Birds, the attack on Bodega Bay in The Birds, the berserk carousel sequence in Strangers on a Train, the crop duster and Rushmore scenes in NXNW, and the attack on Stewart by Burr at the climax of Rear Window...for sheer MOVEMENT and editing prowess. I can only figure that Hitchcock watched The Wild Bunch in his private screening room and was entirely impressed.

Indeed, if The Wild Bunch is my Number Three favorite after two Hitchcocks, it is largely because -- in 1969 when I first saw it, and for years later -- I felt it was a Western that looked and felt and played LIKE a Hitchcock -- cinematic with precision suspense sequences, bigger than life, the most exciting movie possible, with the director giving you much more than "the usual."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Moreover, I've always felt that, in The Wild Bunch, director Peckinpah showed far more "simpatico" with how Hitchcock filmed his suspense sequences than Brian DePalma ever did. Peckinpah "got it." I felt that in 1969 about The Wild Bunch, and I feel that today. You don't watch The Wild Bunch; you experience it.

(In addition to the mixed film speeds, the action sequences have more "cuts per minute" than most movies, Peckinpah keeps cutting this way and that way with energetic inserts that are very reminiscent of Hitchcock.)

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As with Psycho, The Wild Bunch has some "cultural externals" to consider, to wit:

George "Star Wars" Lucas was a film school student at the University of Southern California when The Wild Bunch came out, and he went nuts for it, dragging fellow film students out to see the movie over and over again. It was his favorite, and I expect that Lucas felt a real "youthful experimental excitement" in The Wild Bunch which, when you think about it, DID carry over to the accelerated pace of Star Wars 8 years later. (And some of those film students who saw The Wild Bunch with Lucas, ended up famous in their own right -- like John Milius -- for awhile.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS

A lesser known writer-director named Ron Shelton(Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump) played minor league baseball in 1969, and said that he often caught matinee movies in towns he was visiting because he played ball at night. He caught The Wild Bunch at a matinee in Texas and, thinking it was just going to be a "routine oater," was blown away by the whole thing to such an extent that it helped steer him towards becoming a film director himself.

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Personal story with SPOILERS:

I'd forgetten this . I've written of big audience "scream nights" at Psycho, Jaws, Wait Until Dark, and a "cheer night" at The Longest Yard.

But I got one like that with The Wild Bunch. Packed revival house in Hollywood. The 70's. In the audience : those guys who played Lenny and Squggy on Laverne and Shirley.

As The Wild Bunch reached its climactic passage , the audience would dutifully "stay silent" and then start cheering to wit:

Crowd silence.

Holden: Let's go.

AUDIENCE CHEERS, APPLAUDS, WHOOPS. Then goes silent.

Warren Oates: Why not?

AUDIENCE CHEERS, APPLAUDS, WHOOPS.

And they kept on cheering, applauding and whooping as Holden and his bunch grabbed, loaded, cocked and mounted their guns on their bodies, and marched towards their certain honorable doom.

The cheering didn't end until the movie was over.

And as we piled out into the lobby, Lenny and Squiggy came out, faced each other and played the scene:

Lenny: Let's go.

Squiggy: Why not?

To MORE CHEERS as they walked out of the lobby.

The Wild Bunch, gory as it was, became something of nostalgia and group participation.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Interesting... does seem like a thankless task to remake a stone-cold classic and landmark like The Wild Bunch or Psycho. At best you'll make a profitable footnote to film history, and there are indefinitely many ways to do much, much worse.

That said, I could go for Gibson in Holden's role and Costner in Ryan's, and Mel could definitely bring the ultra-violence. And, hell, this NY Times story a few weeks ago reminded me of Vietnam:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/world/asia/afghanistan-security-casualties-taliban.html
Maybe between this and unease about mass shootings at home and hyper-partisan hatred in general there's something in the air right now to be expressed by an epic apocalyptic western. There certainly have been rumblings towards such a thing in Hell or High Water, Bone Tomahawk, Sicario, Logan, even, I suppose, There Will Be Blood and No Country a while back.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Interesting... does seem like a thankless task to remake a stone-cold classic and landmark like The Wild Bunch or Psycho.

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Yes, I think the higher up the list of classics the movie, the more thankless trying to remake it , is.

Wait until somebody tries to do The Godfather. Then many will feel the pain.

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At best you'll make a profitable footnote to film history, and there are indefinitely many ways to do much, much worse.

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As Gus Van Sant found out. (But hey, I personally liked the experiment, liked that he restaged the original.)

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That said, I could go for Gibson in Holden's role and Costner in Ryan's, and Mel could definitely bring the ultra-violence.

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I could go for Gibson in Holden's role, too. The issue, I guess, is whether he is too much still "damaged goods" as a star. Still, in real life, Gibson is/was a drinker, as Holden was, and both men were boyishly handsome then, craggy now.

I feel that Kevin Costner looks more like a handsome and manly movie star now(in his 60s) than he did in his heyday(in his 30s.) And he always had an ornery streak that helped feed his stardom.

I would imagine, however, that this new Bunch may get some diverse casting.

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The issue with Mel's penchant for "ultra-violence" is that it tends to linger sadistically on beatings and the like. How much worse can he make these gunbattles(likely a LOT worse, come to think of it.)

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--- And, hell, this NY Times story a few weeks ago reminded me of Vietnam:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/world/asia/afghanistan-security-casualties-taliban.html

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Oy. We are reminded that certain "hells on earth" never end. Out of sight, out of mind, though.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Maybe between this and unease about mass shootings at home and hyper-partisan hatred in general there's something in the air right now to be expressed by an epic apocalyptic western.

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With the final gunbattle especially, The Wild Bunch always WAS an epic. And an epic of cinematic dazzle, too. One reason that The Wild Bunch rises above my favorite films of the year in the years following it(MASH, Dirty Harry, The Godfather) is that at its core, it has more incredible cinematic ACTION than any of those films. The killings in Dirty Harry and The Godfather are, by comparison, perfunctory.

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There certainly have been rumblings towards such a thing in Hell or High Water, Bone Tomahawk, Sicario, Logan, even, I suppose, There Will Be Blood and No Country a while back.

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Yes. We can say that The Wild Bunch influenced everything from Star Wars to Scarface to Die Hard on the action side, but it has a certain bleak "End of the West, end of Civilization" profundity that has influenced the dramatic side of films, too.

Your mention of today's mass domestic shootings reminds us that -- as with Psycho - what was once harrowing violent "fantasy entertainment" has now been well matched by the world at large. The Wild Bunch was controversial in 1969 for infesting the Western with blood; it may be controversial today for "using our modern gun horrors for entertainment." Well, that's not a movie's fault. The world changed. It went mad. Or maybe it always was.

I recall feeling a little guilty a few years ago when I read a Stephen King book called "Mr. Mercedes" in which the mass killer psychopath of the story kept gunbattle scenes from The Wild Bunch on his computer screensaver. I always saw those gunbattles as enthralling, unevenly matched gunfights between warriors. King seemed to be suggesting that if you love the bloody gunbattles in The Wild Bunch...you're sick.

Well...maybe. Just a little. But I still found them enthralling.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The Wild Bunch ...is my favorite film of 1969 and my third favorite film of all time(behind Psycho and North by Northwest.)

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Worth a little explaining...because I find my own personal system to be almost unexplainable. Yet not.

Psycho, North by Northwest, and The Wild Bunch all entered my consciousness within a couple of years of each other. Psycho got local 1967 LA TV showings that drove my obsession with a film I'd never seen, but heard all about. North by Northwest I saw on CBS in 1967 (around the time Psycho got its local release) and felt like the most exciting story I'd ever seen in my life.) The Wild Bunch I saw in 1969 -- after a great deal of "parent negotiation" and having read all these reviews about how bloody it was -- and I thought IT was the most exciting story I'd ever seen in my life.

As the 70s arrived, what I think happened is I got older and "lost" some of that youthful hormonal driven excitement about movies. No matter how good or great later films would be to me -- and surely The Godfather and Chinatown and Jaws would be right up there -- movies would stop affecting me as they did when I was younger.

Thus, Psycho and North by Northwest and The Wild Bunch have survived as a "seminal top three" above and beyond all the other favorite movies on my list. I don't HAVE a Number Four or Number Five. Just those three at the top and all the other great movies arrayed below them.

These rankings also survive my "Best of Decade" rankings:

Fifties: North by Northwest
Sixties: Psycho
Seventies: The Godfather

Because Psycho is Number One for the sixties, and can therefore best The Wild Bunch.

Ah, hell...its crazy.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

This I know: Like Psycho, like North by Northwest, The Wild Bunch is a movie event that has followed me through the decades. All three are "more than movies."

And what a tricky Top Three: two landmark "violent" movies...but the third is famously "fun and not bloody"(though five men die in it.) Well, its not about the violence. Its about each of the three feeling like the filmmaker is telling the greatest story of his life(which, yeah, Hitchocck did more than once), with the most generosity towards the audience, so that it will never be forgotten.

On the violence: I cannot doubt that the same forces compelled me to Psycho and The Wild Bunch: either the media or friends and family told me: "This is a bloody movie, you shouldn't see it, could you handle it if you did?" and thus seeing the movie became a rite of passage.

But this: Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch were the "big three in violence" in the sixties, but I never liked Bonnie and Clyde as much as the other two. Compared to the finale of The Wild Bunch, the final massacre of Bonnie and Clyde is pretty quick and minor(Peckinpah explicitly sought to outdistance Bonnie and Clyde WITH The Wild Bunch) and I found the Bonnie and Clyde characters to be too "New York method"(even if playing Southerners) -- with Estelle Parsons' screeching ninny hard to take, especially.

But also this: one key shot sequence in the Psycho shower scene -- Janet Leigh spinning around to face her attacker with one-two-three ever-closer close-ups on her screaming mouth -- inspired the similar "one-two-three" build-ups to Bonnie and Clyde realizing that they are about to die, and The Wild Bunch realizing they are about to kill AND die.

Thus, Psycho directly inspired the two films to follow it in landmark violence.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Oy. We are reminded that certain "hells on earth" never end. Out of sight, out of mind, though.

There are still 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan, losing, fast. Will that presence be ramped back up to say 200,000? - not so out of mind! - or will the US *finally*, after 17 years of the Forever War, cut bait in Afghanistan, i.e., let the Taliban take over again? The US is so politically dysfunctional right now, however, that this isn't *any* kind of issue in the up-coming mid-term elections.

[–] TiaTamaragohomee (91) 6 years ago

def off topic

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Well, given that I have tried to show the "straight line" from Psycho to The Wild Bunch(with Bonnie and Clyde in between), that's why I marked it "not OT."

But given how I think this board allows for some OT topics as well,and there are other things to say here...

I'm going up top and marking the OP "OT."

[–] TiaTamaragohomee (91) 6 years ago

was jokig