A QUADRILHA SELVAGEM
EUA | 1969 | 141′ | Digital

Realização: Sam Peckinpah

“The Wild Bunch” foi um dos filmes que mudaram o cinema no fim da década de 60, constituindo um momento de viragem decisivo nos códigos que limitavam a representação da violência. Um western selvagem (realizado num momento em que o género praticamente desaparece nos Estados Unidos, tendo emigrado para a Itália e a Espanha), como o título, onde os últimos heróis (ou anti-heróis) se imolam numa orgia de sangue durante a revolução mexicana. Um dos filmes mais célebres de Sam Peckinpah.

 

The Wild Bunch – Passion & Poetry
Mike Siegel

In 1969 no one was prepared for a movie like The Wild Bunch. A masterful staging which teleported the audience hard into the world of the dying West and the emotions of the operating characters, that at the end with the death of the protagonists some viewer shed a tear – but those heroes weren’t actual heroes but brutal killers. Never before were such thrilling assembled action scenes seen: bloody shootouts in slow motion of different speeds pushed the audience into a dance of violence. A ballet of death. Sam Peckinpah realized as one of the first the fact that humans are simply fascinated by violence: the audience does not actually want to see it but they also cannot avert looking at it. They just can’t escape. The spectacle and sensation magically pulled them in. With that, Sam Peckinpah announced a truth. A truth which a lot of people refused to believe. A truth which affects our everyday life more and more negatively.

For Sam Peckinpah triumph and failure laid close to each other because The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs didn’t cause a catharsis. Especially The Wild Bunch has been recognized, years later, as the masterpiece it always was. Back in 1969 the ground breaking innovative staging had interfered with the actual issue of the movie that much, and the moral messages and human insights weren’t taken note of as much as they should have. 15 Years later Peckinpah would say “I didn’t write The Wild Bunch to shock the audience. I wrote it as something that I wanted to see with the material I was given. I make pictures for myself and hope that I’m part of the audience. That I am the audience!”

Then controversy, now The Wild Bunch counts as one of the best and most important movies of all times. The movie launched the most productive and best period in Sam Peckinpah’s work and changed the craftsmanship of moviemaking forever. No other film was so intensely disputed in 1969 as The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah’s comeback film after an official disbarment of three years. Yet this climax in his career simultaneously also meant in a way the beginning of the end of his career. But he could not have known that at that point…

By the late 1960s the era of Hollywood’s studio system started fading. Producing major flops against the audience’s taste, and new laws, enforced closure of studio-cinema chains and their mismanagement, just to name a couple of reasons. The time of sales and fusions had started. In the year 1967 the production Company Seven Arts, led by Elliott Hyman, merged with Warner Bros. The new leadership ranks included Elliott´s son Ken Hyman – the man Sam Peckinpah had congratulated two years before for The Hill (1965) at the Cannes Film Festival. After their encounter back then, Ken Hyman had screened Ride the High Country (1962) in Great Britain and decided that he someday wanted to work with Peckinpah. Now the time was right for his intention to become a reality: One of the first official acts of Hyman was to offer Peckinpah a job. The Diamond Story was the project’s name, a story about a huge diamond theft in the mines of Africa. But Peckinpah showed Hyman another screenplay, one that no one in Hollywood was willing to produce: The Wild Bunch. Stuntman Roy Sickner who was friends with Peckinpah and the author Walon Green both had written it, a story about a gang of American outlaws that scrapes along the far end of the Wild West. Keeping on to their old way of life, still robbing banks and trains in 1914, until the outlaws find themselves put in the turmoils of the Mexican Revolution. Walon Green had passed the script from studio to studio and remembered in 2000: “The script had been around for a number of years, nobody liked it, some hated it with a passion! But Peckinpah was the first person who saw a movie in it!” Peckinpah obviously saw something in the material that no one else could see. Even close friends asked themselves what fascinated him so much about it. Some thought it would be a slightly lesser version of The Professionals (1966) – a box office smash with a similar theme: the adventures of a bunch of gringos in Mexico. But Peckinpah believed strongly that The Wild Bunch was way ahead and deeper. Soon enough also Ken Hyman and Phil Feldman, who had been put aside Peckinpah as a producer by Hyman, believed in it. The Diamond Story was put away and Sam Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch got the go-ahead. While Peckinpah rewrote the screenplay the roles were cast. Ken Hyman´s last production had been the enormously successful movie The Dirty Dozen (1967) and for The Wild Bunch he wanted the same leading actors: Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Ernest Borgnine. Marvin and Peckinpah were friends, and Ryan also seemed ideal. But regarding Ernest Borgnine, Peckinpah was extremely wary. Much unlike the actor, the character in the script was young, blond and slim. Hyman could eventually persuade Peckinpah and he shouldn’t regret it.

For finding the right locations, Peckinpah sent his friend Chalo González to Mexico. González didn’t survey the often visited countryside of Durango for the filming, but the historical wider area of Torreón and Parras, some 200 miles east in the state of Coahuila. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata actually fought there. Torreón, today a megapolis, then had an old railroad line and the idyllic Rio Nazas. The region around the small city Parras, approximately 75 miles west, is famous for his beautiful vineyards, the so-called Haciendas. A guide showed Chalo the ruins of the hacienda Ciénega Del Carmen. In the 1910s an earthquake disconnected the water supply, so the area became an arid wilderness, or so the legend goes.

González immediately sent photographs to Los Angeles and Peckinpah was more than apt: while Parras would become Starbuck / San Rafael, the location of the opening of the film, the ruin of the hacienda should be the town of Agua Verde, the estate of General Mapache. From a logistical perspective, Peckinpah’s location choice for Agua Verde was very inconvenient: There was no water or electricity. Not even a road led to that forgotten place. But for this movie, Peckinpah didn’t want to make any compromises and with Phil Feldman and Ken Hyman, he finally had the right partners behind him. They let him proceed as he liked.

In the meantime problems with the cast occurred: Lee Marvin got an offer, which he didn’t want to deny. Paramount offered him a huge amount for the main role in the western-musical Paint your wagon (1969). He accepted. Although the movie was never as successful as The Wild Bunch, at least Marvin’s song “Wandrin’ Star”, curiously enough, became a No.1 single in the charts! William Holden, still a big name in 1968, but affordable to book, undertook the role of Pike Bishop. This involuntarily chance of cast should appear to be a lucky twist of fate. Holden’s characterization should become the backbone of The Wild Bunch. At that time the director did not know that Holden could rely on his own character portraying Pike Bishop: driven by his own guilt and because of his advanced age he was also longing for the bottle. William had become a heavy drinker to numb his pain about the hard strokes of fate in his life: Years before he caused a fatal car accident whereby a young man died. In 1954 he fell helplessly in love with Audrey Hepburn, but she left him when she found out that Holden couldn’t be begetting children – he had a vasectomy years before. And judging Holden’s career from the perspective of quality, it went downside in the 60s. Holden´s and Peckinpah’s personalities would melt in the character of Pike Bishop.

In the winter of 1967 / 68 Peckinpah re-wrote Walon Green´s script. Peckinpah had an exceptional talent for enhancing good or mediocre stories to the heights of greatness, as he would often prove with his scripts based on novels such as The Siege at Trenchers Farm (Straw Dogs) or Das geduldige Fleisch (Cross Of Iron). From the start, he knew that Pike Bishop’s character would be the dramatic centrepiece of his film so he added scenes that would deepen Bishop’s guilt and clarify his moments of sadness and despair. Peckinpah added the character of Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins), who Pike leaves behind, also both flashback scenes depicting the capture of his best friend Deke Thornton and the death of the love of his life. He also changed the scenes in Angel’s village and also added the now famous “walk thing” as well as the exploding bridge. Many of Peckinpah’s other changes in the script may appear to be minor to some people, but they added immensely to the classic dramatic effect of the film, like the change from Pike’s line “Let’s get Angel!” to “Let’s go!” or Deke Thornton’s gesture of taking Pike Bishop’s gun.

Principal photography began March 25th, 1968 in Parras de la Fuente, the birth town of revolutionary/president Francisco Madero (1879 – 1913). Thanks to the artificial house facades and Edward Carrere’s extraordinary scenography, the market place reminded of a typical American-Mexican border town at the beginning of the 20th century. The first days of filming covered the robbery of the railway station of Starbuck. Subsequently, Peckinpah transformed the filming location into a battlefield. No one was prepared for what was to come. With special high-speed-cameras and various lenses, Peckinpah filmed the shootout between Pike Bishop’s gang and the bounty hunters, hired by the railroad company, from countless angles over and over again. Peckinpah’s closest co – worker, of course, became cinematographer Lucien Ballard. Early in the morning, they would drive together to the set for discussing the whole shooting day. Gordon Dawson, who had solved the almost unsolvable costume problems on Major Dundee, was also along for the ride. In the meantime Dawson ‘drove up the ladder’ and actually only wanted to write screenplays. Peckinpah had to badger him for a long time, but Dawson eventually found his way to Mexico. This time the director made even higher requirements on him: The uniforms were severely affected through the many bullet holes, but should be quickly available for the re-takes. Given his prior experience with Peckinpah, Dawson was prepared. Otherwise, it could’ve fared like the man responsible for the munition: He totally underestimated the effort and intensity which Peckinpah invested in each rehearsal, so that already on the first day of filming of the shoot-out his ammunition supply was almost exhausted. Sam Peckinpah fired him straight away. He wouldn’t be the last one.

One reason why Sam Peckinpah’s action-scenes seem so dangerous in his movies is the fact that the filming actually was dangerous itself – Bo Hopkins, still a rookie at that time, caught a splinter of wood into his eyelid. Not only the set, but also the cast was equipped with dozens of squibs, small bursting charges simulating bullets. Peckinpah wanted to stop the recordings, but Hopkins just demanded a glass of booze and finished the filming day as planned. That is how Peckinpah’s Stock-Company got a new member. Stuntwoman Yolanda Ponce got it worse: she should get under Pike Bishop’s horse. When the stunt rider accidentally let his horse move backwards, the powerful horse’s hoof broke her basin.

As if he had smelled the danger, Ernest Borgnine already arrived in a plaster cast to the filming: Shortly before, he had broken his toe while filming The Split (1968). While in Parras gunfire whipped through the air, Peckinpah equipped his hotel with a cutting room for his editor Lou Lombardo. So he was always able to remain in control and simultaneously saved time. Because the director shot plenty of material, the cutting got a little bit difficult. But Lombardo had been in on it and Peckinpah trusted him.

First, the cutter always created an assembling for the particular scenes, using all printed footage. To get to an adequate length Peckinpah switched it, which often gave the cutting a totally new course. After the furious opening, the team had meanwhile moved to El Romeral where Peckinpah would set the tone of the film regarding his leading actors. The long sequence at their hideout, where Edmond O’Brien’s character would await them after the robbery, involved serious acting and a lot of dialogue by all six members of the bunch. William Holden later stated to Peckinpah´s biographer Garner Simmons that when Peckinpah found out at the first rehearsal that almost none of the six actors had learned their lines, thinking that they would fine – tune it during rehearsals anyway, Peckinpah threatened to replace any of them if they would not have their lines down 100% in about twenty minutes of time. From then on it became clear that Peckinpah’s vision went far beyond your regular action summer blockbuster.

With the actors all in character, Peckinpah next filmed the scenes in Angel’s home village, shot at El Rincon del Montero near Parras. Exactly where Peckinpah showed his whole expertise: before his rewrite, the scene would have served only Angel´s character. Peckinpah changed the scene to confer his protagonists more depth. Through such art, it was possible for him to lift The Wild Bunch far beyond any action-western. The audience is pulled emotionally into the plot so that it develops sympathy and compassion, although the protagonists are violent and lawless.

To achieve that goal, Peckinpah needed totally natural, authentic and at the same time very intense portrayals from his actors. At first, the director needed to put some pressure on it, but slowly the movie developed a life of its own. Little by little the actors became one with their characters. In the original script this memorable sequence was written quite differently: in Walon Green’s draft Angel left the bunch behind to visit his village all by himself, ashamed of his criminal gringo friends. This certainly would have fitted Angel’s character in the story, but Peckinpah rightly felt that the film needed, besides all his dramatic moments, a sequence of laugher and joy for the beaten outlaw gang. And if one should choose two or three signature scenes from The Wild Bunch, the “Las Golondrinas” ride out of the village would surely be among them.

At the beginning of May 1968, the whole crew moved to the terrain of the Hacienda Ciénega Del Carmen. Bulldozers paved the route through the desert, so that all the trucks, the equipment, generators, and water could be transported. The whole filming was for everyone involved extremely strenuous. What is probably the most famous scene of the picture was invented by Peckinpah while he prepared the final shoot out, widely known as the “battle of bloody porch”. The atmosphere should increase slowly and the director had a longer scene in mind, which should build up emotions to erupt in the finale, rather than the short three lines describing the moment in the script.

So he filmed Holden, Borgnine, Johnson and Oates how they, side by side, guns in their hands, march through the camp of the Mexican soldiers. The musical background for the scene is a perfect choice regarding mood and pace for the walk, a drunken version of Francisco Avitia Tapia’s song, ”Corrido de Santa Amalia“. Better known as El Charro Avitia, he had written the song in the 1950s. Through filming the scene with a very long lens the scenario densified for the audience to an intro for the next happening.

But for the four characters, it meant the end of the road – an end that left no one unaffected. Angel, who is held captive, is brutally cold murdered by General Mapache whereupon the bunch shoot and kill him. The soldiers are so shocked that they lift their hands for surrender. The four outlaws look at each other in triumph. But instead of withdrawing, they play their bloody game up until the end – or how Peckinpah describe it: “They played their string out to the end”. Peckinpah had dozens of gunmen, hundreds of soldiers, hand grenades, a machine-gun, six cameras and one vision. Step by step the crew worked itself through the logistic nightmare. Every shot was filmed with different cameras running at different speeds. Beginning with a wide shot and working steadily further into the event. For every new take, costumes had to be put in order, “victims” had to be rewired and set, props and the walls restored again. Already on the first take, Ernest Borgnine asked for a break. Everyone looked astonished because usually it´s the director and not an actor that interrupts filming. Borgnine claimed that the whistling that could be heard could only originate from live ammunition. At first, everyone was amused but soon the incredulous laughter was replaced by amazement: Some of the background actors, in reality, soldiers of the Mexican army, indeed carried live ammunition with them.

Even today, 54 years later, one can find with some effort, shell casings and projectiles of live ammunition at the hacienda. After two debilitating weeks, Peckinpah finally had all the footage he needed for one of the most spectacular sequences of all time in the can: the six-minute long, extremely brutal shooting is copied up even until now. But the impact on audiences that the visually and technically brilliant scene had went far beyond sheer spectacle: although these men had been ruthless killers, there was a feeling of sadness and loss once they met the end of their journey. In a 1984 interview with French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, Peckinpah commented on it: “It is the effect of a film, not the technique, that I am interested in. The effect on the audience! The audience was pulled into the screen and involved with the characters. Bill Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates… they had become important to you. Action does not work without people, without characters. Action for its own sake, I think is … crap!”

Following that energy-sapping sequence, the train robbery was filmed outside of La Goma, 10 miles west of Torreon. The job of stealing weapons for Mapache should be one of the rare triumphs for the gang. Through the tension building and the realism of that scene, Peckinpah set a criterion movie makers barely lived up to until today. The director renounced every possible optical trickery and led the actors perform most of their stunts themselves. The ever-present danger came to everybody’s attention when the train accidentally hit a flatcar, but besides both vehicles, nobody was hurt. To be able to outpace their pursuers, the gang then blows up a bridge sky-high – a milestone in action-movie history! And every connoisseur of the genre recognizes immediately: It is almost a miracle, that no one was harmed at this epic scene. What nobody could see in this scene, however, was the gigantic trapdoor built in the middle of the bridge, solely developed for that particular dangerous take. As the countless explosive charges detonated the door opened simultaneously and five stuntmen along with their horses plunged into the spray of the Rio Nazas. Even before that scene one of the cameras had “suffered” the same fate and immediately crew members lunged into the flood to salvage it. Yet none of this excitement could be found in the final shooting script, dated February 18th, 1968: in the screenplay, the bunch escaped with much less spectacular cable crossing. Peckinpah added the bridge sequence at the last minute, it was also the last scene to be filmed on location.

In late June, after 81 days of filming, the movie was in the can and the actors and crew members returned to California. Just the director, Lou Lombardo and another cutter, Robert Wolfe, stayed in Mexico for another three months. Peckinpah, once bitten, twice shy, wanted to finish the movie afar from the orbit of Warner Bros.’ cutting-department. In the autumn of 1968 it was about time to return: Lombardo and Wolfe headed back to Hollywood with an over three hour long version of the movie – Sam Peckinpah himself already had started pre-production of his next movie for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.

While Peckinpah was shooting his next film, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue (1970) in Nevada he was supervising post-production on The Wild Bunch, the film had to be trimmed down to a running time of less than 150 minutes, while Jerry Fielding composed and recorded the musical score in Hollywood. When Sam first listened to Jerry Fielding’s music, he flew into a towering rage: Peckinpah wanted solely Mexican folk music – just a few guitars and other customary instruments. The composer however delivered in advance some classical arrangements, with string orchestras recorded. He recognized that the tragic storyline and the intense staging needed a musical counterbalance. But Peckinpah simply dismissed Jerry Fielding’s score and refused further working with him. The otherwise taciturn intellectual drove infuriated to Phoenix and covered Peckinpah with verbal assaults, lasting several minutes. He insisted on listening together to the recording on a good sound system – because Peckinpah’s equipment in the improvised working space in remote Echo Bay, Nevada was far from good. Fielding’s vehement critic obviously impressed him, if not even reminded him at his own time when he had to struggle for every single movie, because during the presentation Sam was suddenly willing to listen to Jerry Fielding’s arguments. Those arguments convinced the director and as a result, Fielding got a free hand for the musical accompaniment. Peckinpah’s change in spirit, of course, should prove right: As one of the supporting pillars of the movie, Jerry Fielding’s film music was nominated for an Academy Award.

After he had finished principal photography on Cable Hogue in April 1969, The Wild Bunch was pre-viewed in Kansas City on May 1st, 1969. It became a very important screening for the film: the audience reaction showed Peckinpah that he had gone too far with some of the more graphic violence in the film and he decided afterwards to censor himself, so to speak, to balance the film in favour of its dramatic impact rather than shock effects, of which more than enough would remain intact, anyway. He also disliked the standard sound effects, which in a way had been the same for decades in studio films. Peckinpah had become almost fanatical achieving an acoustic quality beyond the Hollywood standards of the time. For weeks he had already re-recorded big parts of the dialogue of the film with almost all the principal actors. This process of “looping” is quite expensive, also due to the fact that by then many actors are spread all over the map on other films. But again Peckinpah did win the day and wound up with the quality he was after, knowing that well – written and well – spoken dialogue also need to be fully understandable. Now, during the final sound mixing of the film, Peckinpah insisted that, for the realistic effect he was after, each different type of firearm would have its own specific sound effect when fired.

Finally, in June of 1969, the movie was with a length of almost 145 minutes ready for cinema release. The previews and press screenings contained a complete range of possible reactions: exultation, applause, and appreciation mixed with horror and revulsion. Peckinpah’s realistic depiction of violence never existed before. Some of the audience couldn’t bear that and had to leave the showing without waiting for the end of the movie. Even pacifists vocalized threats and not few were close to actually using physical violence. Simultaneously, the movie radiated an enormous power and fascination to the contemporary audience. Whether applause or insults, Sam Peckinpah was very satisfied with the participation of the viewers, because his goal, provoking and encouraging discussions, was undoubtedly reached. Sam Peckinpah himself never regarded The Wild Bunch as a western only, as he stated in 1984: “Making a western, such as The Wild Bunch, I was not consciously making a western, in quotes, I was merely commenting on our times! Which, unfortunately, has become all too true.“