The ending is very similar to the climax of The Wind in the Willows.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame was a childhood favorite book of mine and The Wild Bunch is one of my favorite movies, but I never associated the two stories before.

Your first impulse might be to laugh at the suggestion that a gentle British children's story has anything in common with the most violent western movie ever made, but read on.

At the climax of TWITW, 4 friends, Rat, Mole, Toad and Badger arm themselves and go to confront an army of criminal weasels and stoats, who have taken over Mr. Toad's mansion and are using his banquet hall to host a nonstop raucous, drunken feast. The 4 heroes engage in a violent battle against the weasels and stoats in the banquet hall and kill or drive them all away.

At the climax of TWB, 4 members of an outlaw gang arm themselves and go to confront an army of renegade Mexican soldiers who have taken over an old hacienda and use it to host a nonstop raucous, drunken feast. (In TWB, they have the additional motivation of freeing their comrade, Angel, from the Mexican general.) The 4 anti-heroes engage in a violent battle against the Mexican soldiers in the hacienda and kill most of them and drive the rest away before they are killed themselves.

The climactic battles of both stories are set up in a very similar way with the battle in the "grand feasting hall" setting. The difference being that The Wild Bunch is FAR more explicitly violent and the 4 protagonists all die, while the battle in The Wind in the Willows is more violent than modern children's stories, but still aimed at a (pre-helicopter-parent) child audience and has a happy ending with all 4 friends alive and victorious. Also, there is no machine gun or grenades and no prostitutes in The Wind and the Willows.

I had sometimes wondered why the final battle of The Wild Bunch struck such a chord with me. It wasn't until recently when I watched a stop-motion version of The Wind in the Willows that I realized that The Wild Bunch's shootout was an amped-up, ultra-violent adult remake of the battle in my favorite childhood story.

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