Plot
In 1913 Texas, Pike Bishop (William Holden), the leader of a gang of aging outlaws, is seeking retirement with one final score, namely the robbery of a railroad office containing a cache of silver. They are ambushed by Pike's former partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), and a posse of bounty hunters hired and deputized by the railroad. Thornton has been released from a Yuma prison to help track down his former comrades in return for a full pardon. A bloody shootout kills several of the gang. The town's citizens were not warned, so many are killed in the crossfire.
Pike rides off with Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson), and Angel (Jaime Sánchez), the only survivors. They are disappointed when the loot from the robbery turns out to be a decoy instead of silver. The men reunite with old-timer Freddie Sykes (Edmond O'Brien), and head for Mexico.
Pike's men cross the Rio Grande and take refuge that night in a village where Angel was born, and where the Mexican Revolution has taken its toll. The townsfolk are ruled by a self-styled bandito warlord named Mapache (Emilio Fernández), a general in the Mexican Federal Army, who has been stealing to feed his troops.
In the town of Agua Verde (Spanish for "green water"), a den of debauchery, Pike's gang makes contact with the general. A jealous Angel spots a former lover in Mapache's arms and shoots her dead, angering Mapache. Pike defuses the situation and offers to work for Mapache. Their task is to steal a weapons shipment from a U.S. Army train so that Mapache can resupply his troops – and appease Mohr (Fernando Wagner), his German military adviser, who wishes to obtain samples of America's armament. Their reward will be a cache of gold coins.
Angel gives up his share of the gold to Pike in return for sending one crate of the stolen rifles and ammunition to a band of rebels opposed to Mapache. Other than Dutch Engstrom having to be saved by Angel when he nearly fell under the train's wheels, the holdup goes as planned – until Deke's posse turns up on the very train the gang has robbed. The posse chases them to the Mexican border, only to be foiled again by an explosive booby trap which blows up a trestle and sends the entire posse into the Rio Grande.
Pike and his men, knowing they risk being double crossed by Mapache, devise a way of bringing him the stolen weapons – including a Browning M1917 machine gun – without him double-crossing them. However, Mapache learns from the mother of the former lover Angel killed that Angel embezzled a crate of guns and ammo, and reveals this as Angel and Engstrom deliver the last of the weapons. Surrounded by Mapache's army, Angel desperately tries to escape, only to be captured, betrayed by Engstrom (who ironically calls him a "thief"), and tortured after Engstrom rides back to rejoin Pike's gang.
Sykes, while securing the gang's spare horses, is wounded and forced into hiding after another encounter with Deke's posse. The rest of Pike's gang returns to Agua Verde for shelter, where a bacchanal celebrating the weapons purchase has commenced; to their disgust, they see Angel is being dragged on the ground by a rope tied behind the General's car. After a brief assignation and a period of reflection, Pike and the gang try to persuade Mapache to release Angel, barely alive after the torture. The general appears to comply; however, as they watch, the general cuts his throat instead. Pike and the gang angrily gun Mapache down in front of hundreds of his men. For a moment, the Federales are so shocked that they fail to return fire, causing Engstrom to laugh in surprise. Pike calmly takes aim at the German officer and kills him, too. This results in a violent, bloody showdown in which Pike and his men, along with the majority of the German and Mexican troops present, are killed.
Deke finally catches up. He allows the remaining members of the posse to take the bullet-riddled bodies of the gang members back and collect the reward, while electing to stay behind, knowing what awaits the posse. After a period, Sykes arrives with a band of the previously seen Mexican rebels, who have killed off what's left of the posse along the way. He asks Deke to come along and join the revolution. Deke smiles and rides off with them.
Read more about this topic: The Wild Bunch
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)