The Wild Bunch is a 1969 American Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah about an aging outlaw gang on the Texas-Mexico border, trying to exist in the changing "modern" world of 1913. The film was controversial because of its graphic violence and its portrayal of crude men attempting to survive by any available means.
It stars William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates. The screenplay was by Peckinpah and Walon Green.
The Wild Bunch is noted for intricate, multi-angle editing, using normal and slow motion images, a revolutionary cinema technique in 1969. The writing of Green, Peckinpah, and Roy N. Sickner was nominated for a best-screenplay Academy Award; Jerry Fielding's music was nominated for Best Original Score; Peckinpah was nominated for an Outstanding Directorial Achievement award by the Directors Guild of America; and cinematographer Lucien Ballard won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cinematography.
In 1999, the U.S. National Film Registry selected it for preservation in the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. The film was ranked 80th in the American Film Institute's 100 best American films, and the 69th most thrilling film. In 2008, the AFI revealed its "10 Top 10" of the best ten films in ten genres: The Wild Bunch ranked as the sixth-best Western.
Read more about The Wild Bunch: Plot, Cast, Casting, Production, Themes, Reception, Documentary, Awards, Honors, and Nominations, Versions, Remake
Famous quotes containing the word wild:
““Because I am mad about women
I am mad about the hills,”
Said that wild old wicked man
Who travels where God wills....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)