The Wild Bunch - The Original Director's Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Albert Dekker, Alfonso Arau, Elsa C?rdenas, Emilio Fern?ndez, Ernest BorgnineBrand: Warner Brothers
Primary Contributor: Ernest Borgnine
Primary Contributor: William Holden
Primary Contributor: Ryan, Robert
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; German (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 134 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-01-10
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of The Wild Bunch - The Original Director's Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Movie Review: The Wild Bunch is Still Wild
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw The Wild Bunch when it was first in the theaters. The scale of the large screen almost made the scale of violence of the movie to hard to take. But there are so many underlying themes and images that I find myself drawn back to it over and over again. This DVD version, with all the special features and using the director's original cut, brings those underlying ideas out into the open.
The first couple of times watching the film I focused on the physical violence -- the number of bodies and blood. Even though there are gallons of blood, it is still understated from reality. Bullets go through bodies and blood follows, but we do not have to sit through the additional tearing of flesh that a 45 would do. After seeing the physical, I began to see the psychological. There definitely are some sick and perverted characters, but it is the seemingly sane ones that bother me. William Holden is so calm (and his hero image from other films carries over to this one) that it is hard to believe that he is the mastermind behind the crime. Robert Ryan is trapped into leading the posse, but he also seems entirely out of place. At least Ryan finds an appropriate place in life at the end.
The end itself, with the peasants collecting things left from the massacre contrasts with the perverse body robbing of Ryan's posse.
Perhaps one of the most telling scenes in the movie is the kids putting a scorpion on an ant hill and enjoying the torment the scorpion goes through. They take even greater delight by setting all the insects on fire. That scene is really a summation of the whole film.
The Wild Bunch takes a strong stomach to watch, but it says so much about human nature that it forces us all to think about who and what we are. A simple comment on it: one of the most compelling films ever made.
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Summary of The Wild Bunch - The Original Director's Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Outlaws on the Mexican-U.S. frontier face the march of progress, the Mexican army and a gang of bounty hunters led by a former member while they plan a robbery of a U.S. army train. No one is innocent in this gritty tale of of desperation against changing times. Pump shotguns, machine guns and automobiles mix with horses and winchesters in this ultraviolent western.One of the best action movies ever made, in a cleaned-up print restoring crucial parts of the story. No cavalry ever rode in with more epochal impact than the Wild Bunch in the legendary opening scene. Their steel-eyed leader, Pike (William Holden), and his robbers in stolen army uniforms help an old lady across the street, and then spark a massacre led by Pike's old crony Thornton (Robert Ryan), sprung from jail to hunt down his old gang. In just a few minutes, Sam Peckinpah sets the scene--a dusty Texas town in 1913--sketches a dozen vividly individualized characters, and choreographs one of the most realistic, influential, brilliantly photographed shootouts under the pitiless sun. The cast is superb (even Ernest Borgnine!), the dialog crackling, the bitterly ambiguous moral of the story hard-earned. It's the deeper, dark flip side to 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Consider buying the letterbox Wild Bunch, the review collection Doing It Right, and the Peckinpah bio "If They Move... Kill 'Em!" --Tim Appelo
One of the best action movies ever made, in a cleaned-up print restoring crucial parts of the story. No cavalry ever rode in with more epochal impact than the Wild Bunch in the legendary opening scene. Their steel-eyed leader, Pike (William Holden), and his robbers in stolen army uniforms help an old lady across the street, and then spark a massacre led by Pike's old crony Thornton (Robert Ryan), sprung from jail to hunt down his old gang. In just a few minutes, Sam Peckinpah sets the scene--a dusty Texas town in 1913--sketches a dozen vividly individualized characters, and choreographs one of the most realistic, influential, brilliantly photographed shootouts under the pitiless sun. The cast is superb (even Ernest Borgnine!), the dialog crackling, the bitterly ambiguous moral of the story hard-earned. It's the deeper, dark flip side to 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Consider buying the letterbox Wild Bunch, the review collection Doing It Right, and the Peckinpah bio "If They Move... Kill 'Em!" --Tim Appelo
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