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Remake of The Wild Bunch Becomes Real?(Casting Begins) (Not OT)

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

I don't consider this post OT because I've always put three movies over the rest in my life for impact on my life:

Psycho
North by Northwest
The Wild Bunch

...this is all pretty "instinctive" on my part. In my ponderings, I'll sometimes wonder something like "The Wild Bunch OVER The Godfather?" (which I love as much as the next fan.)

Psycho and North by Northwest are pretty seminal to me. When they invaded my life, I simply thought they were the best of their type that any movie could be...any movie WOULD be. In terms of what I responded to.

Take North by Northwest. My main regard for that movie is that: Hitchcock gave us everything he could here. Its probably a work of commerce before its a work of art. A top star for a hero(Cary Grant, not Bob Cummings.) A top star for a villain(James Mason, not Otto Kruger.) An Oscar winning serious actress surprisingly turned hottie for a heroine . Top notch support. A cast of hundreds, familiar faces all. Real locations across the US. Three big action set-pieces, one of which is literally unstoppable(Rushmore at the end.) OTHER types of set-pieces(A UN murder, a madcap auction). A love story that moves from flirtatious sex to committed marriage. All launched by a massively exciting Saul Bass/Bernard Herrmann credit sequence(even Leo the Lion gets into the act.)

Armed with a budget from MGM that allowed him to do it all, Hitchcock gave his all. And we got North by Northwest. After that one, Torn Curtain, Topaz and Family Plot(scripted by Ernest Lehman) didn't have a chance.

And that vision of NXNW "locked in" even as a decades of action movies bettered it with machine guns, explosions and action: On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Star Wars(lasers in for machine guns), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, The Matrix. Beside them, NXNW looks "old and slow." But it started everything. And nobody else got to us Rushmore like that.

Psycho followed NXNW by less than a year(amazing!) and though it was made cheap, it never FEELS cheap. Movies like "Oh God" and "Mr. Mom" LOOK cheap, by comparison just off the top of my head -- Psycho has TEXTURE. The house from the outside at all times, but never better than when Arbogast walks up to it. Mother moving across the window. Norman's eye at the peephole, Marion's dead eye on the bathroom floor. The brilliance of the morph on Norman's final leer. And again, as with NXNW, the feeling that Hitchcock had given us his all, pulled out all the stops, followed one great shot with another. With a Bass-Herrmann credit sequence to start us off with a jolt.

As it turns out, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Wild Bunch all hit my life within two years of each other, even if the first two were made almost a decade before the third one.

NXNW debuted on the CBS Friday Night Movie in September of 1967; Psycho got its LA debut in November of 1967(I couldn't see it , but I "saw it" in my mind as told to me by friends); and The Wild Bunch came out in July of 1969, less than two years later.

In between came the violent Bonnie and Clyde(released the first time in September of 1967 , then re-released through early '68.) Technically Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch should have been a natural "trilogy of landmark violence" for me, but with the passing years, Bonnie and Clyde fell out as being on the level of the other two films (too fake-arty, too much Method acting, the climactic killings "not really enough.")

Psycho and The Wild Bunch make sense together -- I was drawn in by the taboo of ultra-violence in accepted genres. But how does the comparatively non-violent NXNW fit in with the other two?

Simple: North by Northwest doesn't fit with Psycho and The Wild Bunch by meaning of its violence, but gave its all, too. All three of them did. I felt-- with NXNW, with Psycho, and with The Wild Bunch -- that the filmmaker felt some sort of obligation to take his audience places they had never really been, "give 'em all you got," go for broke. I never watch NXNW, Psycho, or The Wild Bunch feeling that I'm "just watching a job, a director's desultory turning in of a couple of hours entertainment to make a few bucks." I'm watching a testament.

And there's this: the sheer cinematics of all three films. The Wild Bunch climaxes with that exciting, gorgeous, gory and moving ultra-violent gunbattle and the cinematic fireworks of that scene(in image AND in sound) ultimately exist at a level of commitment that The Godfather(with its more quick and perfunctory bloodletting) never really does. The Godfather is a movie of great talking scenes as much as violent ones. The Wild Bunch goes way higher into the stratosphere to deliver its movie experience.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Sam Peckinpah was a "genius on the downswing." Drink and drugs would take him pretty quickly. William Holden was a "once handsome Golden Boy" in visible decline. Drinks would take him down, too. Those two men are the linchpins of what's unique about The Wild Bunch -- it is the work of men who put it all on the line this one time. And won. (That Ernest Borgnine and Edmond O'Brien were great two was a surprise -- and something about how Robert Ryan LOOKS in this movie is compelling to me -- he's quite handsome for a dissipated man, tall and thin, with longish hair and a great moustache.)

The casting announced for the new Wild Bunch so far is: Michael Fassbender, Jamie Foxx, and Peter Dinklage. Hey, now. I don't sense any of the "aging outlaw at the end of his rope" feeling to that casting. The racial change is de rigueur for this day and age, I expect we will never see an "all White" Western again (as Django Unchained and the new Magnificent Seven proved. Heck, as Silverado proved over 30 years ago.) Dinklage is perhaps the most interesting casting -- his capacity for violence is unknown to me(is he a violent guy on GOT? Must be.)

Mel Gibson is directing. His climb back has worked, he's very respected now (and looks prematurely aged -- HE would have been a fine Pike Bishop but I don't think he's quite box office anymore.) Mel Gibson is co-writing. Eh...maybe. Peckinpah's script was somewhat well written by himself and some other hands, but certainly it was pretty basic in its lines ("You stick together, otherwise you're just animals.")

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But my feellng about a new Wild Bunch is like my feeling about a new Psycho. You can't better the original for execution, for passion of the artist to tell THAT tale, and for shock value. I'm not screaming "don't do it!" here -- that's a futile gesture these days and I did like the "True Grit" and "Mag 7" remakes.

But "True Grit" and "Mag 7" weren't the "off the rails" achievement of The Wild Bunch circa 1969 was. "Psycho" and "The Wild Bunch" share that. They didn't feel like "usual" American studio movies. They went off the rails, took audiences to dangerous places.

The Wild Bunch in addition to being very violent, was very MEAN. The opening scene of children torturing real scorpion with real ants. Innocent bystanders getting shot, trampled , and used as human shields in the opening gunfight. Pike shooting one of his men in the face because the man was in agony from a wound to his face. Young Angel shooting his ex-girlfriend in public. The torture of the young Mexican Angel by the corrupt Mexican army. Borgnine using an innocent woman as a human shield in the final gunbattle; Pike shotgunning the woman who shoots him i the back.

If I weirdly "liked" all that when I first saw The Wild Bunch in '69, its because I felt I was being shown some unvarnished truths about outlaws and posses and war itself: the innocent die too. And if I weirdly "liked" all that more, it was because, at the very end, Mean Bill Holden and his three Mean Wild Bunchers proved humane enough to die trying as they took down 200 . It was the most moving slaughter (and self-slaughter) in movies.

And because Psycho, NXNW and The Wild Bunch all hit me at an impressionable age, its been difficult for later movies I saw when I was older(and more blasé) to top them.

Well, that's that.

So we had a Psycho remake and we'll have a Wild Bunch remake.

I'm pretty confident nobody wants to remake NXNW. Its just too tame.

[–] ADBruno1985 (3484) 6 years ago

Dang dude, nearly all your posts begin with clarifying that they're off-topic. The heads up is nice, but wouldn't it be just as easy to post them where they would be on-topic?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Well, I'll move this one over to The Wild Bunch but as I've noted elsewhere:

Its like nobody goes to boards on "old movies" other than Psycho. This is sort of a "top secret" "classic movies" board.

Also, this post may well be confusing at The Wild Bunch board given all the references to Psycho and NXNW.

Still: I am hereby beginning a policy moving some of this stuff to the "right" boards.

One more thing: at the other boards, more risk of being attacked. Younger audiences.

OK, here goes.

PS. I think my count should be pretty 50/50: Psycho posts and OT posts.

This is actually a Psycho post. I marked it "Not OT."