The Wild Bunch.

Somewhere in the fiction of Norman Mailer occurs the sentence, "They knew the hilarity of men for whom things had ended in utter disaster." That describes, to perfection, The Wild Bunch. There is scarcely a minute of this two-and-a-half-hour movie that isn't informed by a sense that the world is being smashed to smithereens. and the only thing you can do about it is try to do most of the smashing yourself--with gusto. Director Sam Peckinpah's movie is a berserker son, of rage in pursuit of death.

The film came out in 1969, when many things in our country seemed to be smashing up, and it affected young moviegoers in a peculiar way. At a time when scarcely any American movies dealt directly with the Vietnam War, The Wild Bunch was taken as an analogue of the war, a nightmarish vision of American might devastating the lives of third-world countries.

When I was an adolescent seeing the movie for the first time, the Vietnam interpretations didn't quite work for me, and now, viewing the uncut version (long available as a video but only recently being shown in theaters), I find the theory utterly preposterous. For The Wild Bunch, at its best, is apolitical or even prepolitical in the way violent children are. This movie is about the death instinct manifesting itself in middle-aged criminals who have knocked themselves out, and the outlaws, of course, are neither imperialistic nor ideological. They end up in Mexico because Mexico just happens to be there as they flee south from their pursuers. When Jaime Sanchez as Angel, the one Mexican outlaw in the gang, starts hymning the beauties of his country as the gang approaches the border, the American Lyle (Warren Oates) just shrugs his shoulders and says that it looks like another piece of Texas to him. Exactly. If the Bunch had to flee north, they would have been content to perpetrate mayhem in Minnesota. Later in the movie, the outlaws do give support to some insurgents who are trying to overthrow a tyrant, but, as we shall see, when Sam Peckinpah tries to inject a note of lefty hopefulness into his work, his film rings false. Peckinpah was never comfortable with man as political animal because his true bent was for portraying humans as strictly animal, or at least Peckinpah's idea of an animal: not innocent or fecklessly graceful but predatory, hungry, bewildered, eternally pernicious.

That vision is realized at once, before the movie is thirty seconds old. The gang, headed by Pike Bishop (William Holden), is riding into a Texas town to rob a bank and, on the way in, passes a group of children huddled in a circle as they play at something. Marbles? Actually, they're torturing two scorpions by stirring hoards of angry red ants over the poisonous arachnids. Soon they set all the animals ablaze.

The Bunch goes to work robbing the bank at the center of town while the kids, on the outskirts, are doubtlessly finding something else to torture. Meanwhile, their parents are having a revival meeting. Literally situated between sadistic imps and, homicidal outlaws, how appallingly naive, how blunderingly innocent these nice, middle-class folk look! And soon, marching to the strains of "Bringing in the Sheaves," they are headed right between the escaping robbers and the concealed bounty hunters hired by the railroad. It is the townspeople mostly who get slaughtered in the crossfire, a scene that, with its intricate choreography of random slaughter, still shocks.

Shocks, but doesn't arouse much pity. Peckinpah has been compared to the Eisenstein who made the Odessa steps massacre sequence in Battleship Poteinkill. But, if you've ever seen that silent classic, you remember and pity the lady whose pincenez is shattered by a cossack's bullet, the appalled student shouting his horror, the dying mother whose collapse propels the baby carriage on its famous descent. These victims aren't so much characters as images of outrage, yet they are apparitions which move us to mourn. The slaughter that opens The Wild Bunch is very different. A woman dragged by a panicked horse is for Peckinpah just so much crinoline whipped along in the dust; the men are animate department-store mannequins who miraculously spurt blood.

So, is there no humanity in this movie? There is, but where we find it shocks us just as much as it did in 1969, shocks us more than the bloodletting which has long since been outdone in sheer goriness by The Terminator and Die Hard and Natural Born Killers.

For the only fully realized humanity that Peckinpah gives us is the humanity of his killers. The sere strength of Holden's Pike, the bawdiness and foul-mouthed loyalty of Ernest Borgnine's Dutch (best performance of his career), the tormented doggedness of Robert Ryan's Thornton, Strother Martin's whinnying viciousness, Jaime Sanchez's macho pride, Warren Oates's dim-witted resentfulness, and--most intimidating of all--the power-mad, whisky-soaked horror of Mapache as played (or maybe just embodied) by the legendary Mexican director-actor (and convicted criminal) Emilio Fernandez--all these characters haunt our memories long after the movie is over. Peckinpah's affection for them is almost palpable and is often most apparent at the most unexpected moments. For instance, just after Pike shows some rebellious followers just who's boss, he's unceremoniously dumped into the dirt by an uncinched saddle. Dragging his aging body back onto his horse and retaking the lead position amid muttered taunts, he gets a look of pure love from his second-in-command, Dutch, and in the look you can sense Peckinpah's love for his character.

It's a love devoid of sentimentality. Just when you're beginning to feel their pain, Peckinpah reminds you that these men are pain-inflicting barbarians. Dutch, fired upon by Mexican soldiers, grabs a prostitute and uses her body, not as a bargaining chip to stop the shooting but simply as a buffer to take the bullets meant for him. Riddled with shot, her rag-doll corpse is hideously flung aside. And Dutch is the nearest you get to lovable in The Wild Bunch! No, Peckinpah's sympathy for his criminal heroes isn't a product of self-deception.

Not so his feeling for the virtuous Mexican villagers who seek to overthrow Mapache. They are all in the tradition of John Steinbeck's The Pearl: statuesque in their stoic nobility, full of folk music and earthy wisdom. (There's a village elder on hand spouting plenty of the last.) When the outlaws ride out of the village after doing it no particular kindness (the gift of contraband rifles comes much later), its inhabitants line up on either side of the road to say a farewell so full of veneration that Christ and the Twelve Apostles would find it embarrassing.

Peckinpah even uses the villagers to flee momentarily from his own nihilism. Before he became a director, Peckinpah was strongly affected by Kurasawa's marvelous Seven Samurai. That film concerned warriors who aid peasants against brigands. Peckinpah sought to create a similar action in The Wild Bunch by having his desperadoes smuggle a case of rifles to the insurgent villagers. But what a difference! Kurasawa fully dramatized the interaction of warriors and peasants and even created a fifteen-minute coda in which the samurai witness just what they've achieved with their martial arts: the return of the broad rhythms and changelessness of peasant life. But in The Wild Bunch the Mexican peasantry is merely employed to give the anti-heroes a chance to do something civic.

However, the powerful climax of The Wild Bunch is pure nihilism. Trapped in Mapache's stronghold by the bounty hunters and unable to save Angel from the Generalissimo's tortures, Pike Bishop has spent the night with a prostitute who dandles her baby while Bishop is dressing in the morning. Tormented by the memory of friends and lovers betrayed and physically weary, Pike wistfully contemplates the mother and child and seems to long for such domesticity in his own life. Then he hears his two most abject followers, Lyle and Tector, bickering with a prostitute in the next room because she won't service them both for the price of one. Disgust suffuses Holden's face (Holden is really superb at this moment) and he buckles on his weapons. He walks in on the argument. "Let's go." Lyle, stupid though he is, instantly understands and responds, "Why not?" Tector and Dutch are gathered and what is left of the wild bunch marches to confront Mapache. Not to rescue Angel, for that is clearly impossible. They're marching, consciously, willingly, joyfully, to death. The following massacre, however overwhelming, is nothing but the inevitable conclusion to the quiet decision made by Pike to get out of the world.

The Wild Bunch is powerfully made, vivid, unforgettable. But "the greatest American film ever made"? That's what the New Yorker says in is capsule review in the "Goings on about Town" section, and several critics haven't been far behind in their praise. Greater than Citizen Kane? Than City Lights? The Godfather? Greed? Intolerance? Better than the best work of John Huston or Stanley Kubrick? Really? I'm afraid that some terrible chickens are coming home to roost in the cultural precincts of our country. The era of kneejerk acceptance of nihilism as the most honest honesty of them all arrived with Hemingway and shows no sign of departing. Death-embracing Sam Peckinpah takes his place as one of its heroes.