A Special Case: The Studio Willingly Paid for the Greatest Gunbattle on Film

When it came out in the summer of 1969(and I was there for that)...The Wild Bunch was a sensation. People were expecting the usual kind of Western you get, with some fading 50's stars(William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgine)...a "routine oater" as they used to be called. LOTS of fading 50's male stars -- usually in pairs -- were in Westerns in the 60's.

You got this famous "roundelay" in 1967:

John Wayne and Robert Mitchum in El Dorado
John Wayne and Kirk Douglas in The War Wagon.
Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum in The Way West.

Frankly, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine seemed "light one star."

But the movie came out and soon the word was out: this was the bloodiest, goriest Western ever made. It joined Psycho(the thriller) and Bonnie and Clyde(the gangster movie) in using a familiar form in a shocking new way.

Many critics hailed the film for its cinematic wizardry(the gunbattles, with slow motion and varying speeds of film edited together for maximum excitement) and the profound narrative themes(aging American outlaws overrun by modern times and chased into a Mexican revolution.)

The film also offered a powerful view, forged with the new R rating and in the times of Vietnam and assasinations: savage, merciless American outlaws(who shot innocent bystanders in front of children, and grabbed women as human shields) ended up the HEROES of this film...they turned honorable at the bloody end.

A few critics saw only the blood, and were revulsed. "Bring your barf bag to The Wild Bunch," said critic Judith Crist on the Johnny Carson show.

It was a helluva movie and a helluva movie experience. And it launched its ornery genius of a writer-director, Sam Peckinpah as an "auteur" -- a specialist in violence and blood and action and "slo mo."

Peckinpah went on to make a lot of movies in a comparatively short time. And some of them were very good. But all of them started to reflect a man who had demons -- a drinking problem, a drug problem - the movies seemed often to reflect the incoherency of their maker.

And none of them EVER had something on the spectacular scale of the final , endless gunbattle in The Wild Bunch -- four men against 200, all dying but taking a lot down with them via a machine gun and dynamite to "even the odds."

What the record has revealed in the decades since The Wild Bunch shocked the world and excited a young generation in 1969 is that, for once "the suits at the studio" didn't flinch on letting their director spend all the money he wanted, and all the time he wanted, to make the best movie he could -- and with the biggest gunbattle.

Peckinpah had an ally in studio executive Kenneth Hyman, who saw early rushes on The Wild Bunch and KNEW he was looking at a classic. He congratulated Peckinpah by telegram(paraphrased): "You can be proud to be making a movie that will be remembered decades from now." Good call, Kenneth.

But Hyman did more. When Peckinpah set out to stage that final gunbattle(called "The Battle of Bloody Porch" for short by the makers)...Hyman kept sending him money -- money to hire more extras to get shot, money to buy more fake ammo(the first shipment was used very quickly), money to coat the costumes in fake blood and then to make clean costumes for further shooting.

And money to take the TIME to keep getting all this fantastic footage of The Wild Bunch taking on a corrupt Mexican army (in defense of their martyred Mexican revolutionary.)

Once one knows that Kenneth Hyman bankrolled this classic to BE a classic(and you can count the opening bloody gunbattle and the mid-firm train robbery and bridge explosion), one realizes that Hyman was "the co auteur" of The Wild Bunch.

And sadly, one realizes that in all the movies Peckinpah made AFTER The Wild Bunch, there was a reason that his later gunbattles never really hit the heights of The Wild Bunch. Simply put: Peckinpah wasn't getting the money, or the time, or the studio support that he had gotten so miraculously on The Wild Bunch. He only got to go "all the way" that one time.

We can all be glad that he did.