I was in 14-year-old Boy Heaven: a rousing adventure of aging Texas bank robbers who, with their free-range lifestyle drawing to an end, gallop off to Mexico and become embroiled in the 1913 revolution. I got two incredible explosive shoot-outs that open and close the film and a terrific train robbery, still about the best pure action sequence ever, as it weaved and spun together triumph and terror with frightening grace and thunderous energy.

I was only fourteen. I had no insight into how Peckinpah’s film—both beloved and rightly one of the most controversial ever—had punched into my young boy’s angry self and suffused the grim shadows that had already been cast there by the world outside the movie house.

In the late 1970s, the revival theater house period started. For years after, I made a yearly pilgrimage to see The Wild Bunch. Every time I saw it, I saw more into it, seeing both the fierce intelligence behind it while becoming increasingly disturbed by the power of its images. As time went by, I had the queasy sense of being pulled toward an abyss and forced to look down.

The Wild Bunch is much more than the greatest western action picture ever made (and the maybe the greatest Guy’s Movie ever). The Wild Bunch presented its violence with startling seriousness minus any glib hypocritical anti-violence cant. It poetically expressed disturbing—and profoundly illiberal—implications about human beings and the world we live in, implications that should still concern humanity.

The Wild Bunch may be the first film—certainly the first mainstream Hollywood film—to try to confront its audience with a hard, stone truth: That human beings—males most of all—have serious, often fatal, issues surrounding aggression and violence, issues that implicate those of us who watch from dark theaters or comfortable couches.

They not only do not make them like this anymore, they truly couldn’t, even if they wanted to. When the film was re-released in the late 1990s, controversy erupted again when the Hollywood ratings board wanted to give it an NC-17 rating. Many—among them Martin Scorsese—protested and won, but I could understand the board’s queasiness. So many other films are so much more bloody, but The Wild Bunch still provokes a special, visceral reaction none of them approach. It truly is an Adults-only picture.
 

Of that small population of true film auteurs, Sam Peckinpah, who was also the film’s co-writer, was the only one with the courage, passion, talent and skill to show us the heart of human violence; the social, technological and political landscapes where violence seems most likely to explode (even alcohol plays a vital role); the psyches and souls of those who, almost all male, live by it (and those who refuse to face its reality); and most of all its fatal, horrifying, but unmistakable glamor both to its participants and eager audiences.

A large number of human beings commit acts of violence. A disturbing portion of them enjoy themselves while committing these acts. An even larger number of people like to watch. (What kind of hit would Avatar be without the shoot-’em-up at the end?)

Sam Peckinpah tried to ask why human beings act violently while so many more will pay to sit and watch the morbid spectacle. In many of his films, he confronted and wrestled urgently, often emotionally, and sometimes with a bitter cold eye, with these questions.

I’ve probably seen The Wild Bunch close to thirty times. In the twenty-first century, it’s as easy to pop a film into a DVD player as bread into a toaster, so like all movies now, watching it is not the special event it used to be. There’s more to this than convenience, or even its recognizable flaws. Like Peckinpah’s gnarly doomed outlaws, I’ve gotten older all right; unlike those outlaws, I can’t see wanting my life to end in blood and fire.

Once in awhile, I get the itch to ride again with The Wild Bunch. Early this year, I decided to find out how my wife’s sister and her husband would react to it and presented it to them at their house in Pleasanton, CA. (It’s not a movie I show easy, like Citizen Kane.).

As I expected, they found it disturbing. Damn good thing, too. The Wild Bunch was never a fun thrill ride movie. It was meant to be confrontational and disturbing. Everyone ought to be at least a little shaken by the power of its orgiastic violence and worldview (and if you’re not, maybe you need to take a long look in the mirror.)

The source of this unease, I think, can be traced to at least two sources, one of them technical. Peckinpah had a brilliant collaborator in film editor Lou Lombardo. Lombardo had been a TV editor and created the technique of rapidly alternating fast motion film with slow motion, to create the strange, eye-popping, rubber band effect that makes The Wild Bunch’s action scenes both punchy and hypnotic. As Peckinpah said, “You want to look away, but you can’t.”

As a result, The Wild Bunch remains one of the best-edited movies, ever. The techniques introduced by Peckinpah and Lombardo were adopted by MTV and—I hate to say it—there’s no escaping them now. They’ve become debased clichés.

The other source for the disturbance—and the most profound one—are the metaphoric roles played by children. From the opening minutes, we know we’re on a ride into unshirted hell as the outlaws ride past a group of kids who laughingly watch a scorpion in doomed battle with a sand hill full of ants. This terrifying image echoes throughout the film and is the most powerful film metaphor I’ve ever seen; not even Ingmar Bergman conjured such an image with his magic lantern.
 

Children populate the edges of The Wild Bunch, initially as bystanders who watch in innocent curiosity as the supposedly more responsible grown-ups slaughter each other before they’re placed closer and closer to the action—as in the image of a nursing infant pawing at a bandolier slung around its mother’s shoulder—until, at the end, they too pick up the gun. Violent behavior gets passed insidiously from generation to generation, like a cultural meme or a sick gene. The worlds of children and that of adults seem not too far apart. As one character states, “We all dream of being a child again. Even the worst of us. . . perhaps the worst most of all.”

Most women—my wife among them—find Peckinpah’s sexism off-putting. They’re right: No matter how hard some Peckinpah admirers twist themselves in pretzels, there’s no getting around it: Sam held a special antipathy toward women that streaks like tar throughout his work with effects both moral and aesthetic. Even when they try, Peckinpah films rarely succeed at providing strong, complex, interesting female characterizations. Next to the rebellious Peckinpah, old timers like John Ford, Howard Hawks and even Alfred Hitchcock are curious and respectful gentlemen who provide their actresses with strong roles.

There seems to be few if any defenses for Peckinpah's sexism. One is that Peckinpah’s misogyny was part and parcel of his larger misanthropy. Or, paraphrasing critic Joe Bob Briggs, another admirer: “What’s so good about the male characters?”

My fellow audience members pointed out other flaws, of which I was well aware. A series of flashbacks, essential to understanding the two central characters, (played by William Holden and Robert Ryan) play in clumsy contrast to the grit and virtuosity displayed in the rest of the film with their flat lighting and obvious indoor sets. Peckinpah’s men also guffaw long and hard at not-so-funny things. One large battle scene’s sole purpose seems to be give Wild Bunch antagonist Mapache (played by legendary Mexican director/actor/producer Emilio Fernandez) a shred of humanity. The scene is good, but couldn’t this simple idea have been put across with equal simplicity?

Regardless, the The Wild Bunch’s power remains. I still believe the first twenty minutes the greatest ever put on film; Jerry Fielding’s great counterpoint music score employs a low minor-key murmur to increase the sense of unease, horror, and despair from the very first frame to last; authentic Mexican folk tunes punctuate many scenes; and Lucien Ballard’s cinematography uses sepia tones, tints and hues that were inspired by daguerreotypes taken in the period in which the movie is set.

Finally, The Wild Bunch features a rogue’s gallery of the greatest male character actors in film history, from an unrecognizable Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates and Ben Johnson on down to Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones and Albert Dekker; a fiesta of great faces and pungent performances that I don’t believe was seen again until the HBO series The Sopranos, The Wire and, most of all, Deadwood. (Deadwood fans, if you haven’t seen The Wild Bunch, you have serious catching up to do.)

Special nods need to be made at the Mexican cast, including Jaime Sanchez, as fellow bandit Angel; Señor Fernandez; Jorge Russek; and Alfonso Arau (who later directed Like Water for Chocolate). Peckinpah's confidence in his actors and the intelligence of the audience is so great, there’s only a little English dubbing and absolutely no subtitles in the Spanish language scenes. All the performers are passionately on their marks and enrich this dangerous but visionary stew. They should all take a bow.

Still, maybe the ride ain’t what it used to be. The Wild Bunch hints broadly at great and terrible despair about the human condition on the part of its director: that human beings—especially men—are incurable killers and there’s nothing to be done about it. We’re doomed to a dusty end in fire and blood. Only vultures will remain.

In Peckinpah’s later films, this despair became explicit and absolute, ideological and, at times, blundered toward parody (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). The Wild Bunch both made his reputation as an artist and destroyed it. When he turned away from the theme of violence, as in The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner, the opening for the wider and richer territory he'd explored as a young TV writer and director could have happened, but not enough people paid attention, good as those films were. Sam Peckinpah became a stereotype he often encouraged—the brawling drunken tempestuous macho artist. Eventually, even many of his most loyal friends threw up their hands.

It’s one thing to confront our inherent violence (as we need to). It’s another to say there’s nothing we can do about it. This is nihilism, an inherently boring worldview that's as smothering and intolerant as any fundamentalist theology. It's a view that kills curiosity and without that, a man fast runs out things to say. Without hope, whether secular or religious, even small basic kindnesses becomes impossible. (“Sorry Haiti, sorry Chile. We’re all dyin’ anyway. Pass me that bottle.”) No one can live under such brute terms and there may be no better picture of that than the hard life and unmistakable art of Sam Peckinpah.

Maybe even Sam himself glimpsed some sort of light as his end approached. In a touching hopeful irony, his last directorial efforts were two music videos, produced for fledgling MTV that starred a young musician: John Lennon’s son, Julian.