The Wild Bunch
Short description
The Wild Bunch follows a group of ageing outlaws on the Texas–Mexico border who stage one robbery too many. Ambushed during a railway payroll heist, Pike Bishop and his remaining men escape into Mexico, where a revolutionary leader offers them a lucrative job: seizing a weapons shipment. The deal draws them into the Mexican Revolution and sets the gang against the authorities pursuing them, among them a former comrade now hunting them down. William Holden plays Pike, with Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Jaime Sánchez, Warren Oates and Edmond O'Brien among the credited cast of fifty-eight.
Sam Peckinpah directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Walon Green; Phil Feldman produced it for Warner Bros-Seven Arts. Made for about six million dollars, it was the third of twelve features Peckinpah directed, arriving between Major Dundee and The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
The film holds a 7.9 rating on IMDb from roughly 95,000 votes and a 7.6 on TMDB from over a thousand, while a critics' rating of 9.4 from sixty-eight reviews places it markedly higher with reviewers than with general audiences. With credits for 109 crew members, it remains one of the director's best-known works.
What's left behind the scenes
- A constant lack of funds made itself felt. For example, not all actors received costumes; as soon as one character 'died', their performer immediately washed the fake blood and bullet hole depictions off the costume and passed it on, like a baton, to other actors.
- According to editor Lou Lombardo, the film contains 3643 edit cuts; this is one of the cinematic records.
- The film is based on a story by actor and stuntman Roy N. Sickner. The screenplay was written by Walon Green and rewritten by Sam Peckinpah. However, Green did not believe this justified Peckinpah putting his name alongside his. Following this conflict, the Writers Guild revised its rules – now, for a director to be credited as a screenwriter, they must rewrite at least 60% of the script.
- Matthew Peckinpah, the director’s young son, played in the scene where two boys watch a fleeing robber.
- The train robbery was also not in the script. This scene was entirely improvised during filming.
- In 1999, the Library of Congress included 'The Wild Bunch' in the National Film Registry as a cultural treasure.
- 'The Wild Bunch' was the first film from Warner Bros. to use various sound effects to simulate gunshots from different weapons, at the director's request.
- At the beginning of the film, children torment a scorpion. This scene was not in the script; actor Emilio Fernández (General Mapache) suggested the image to the director, recalling his childhood games.
- In 1996, 'The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage,' a film about Sam Peckinpah and his work on 'The Wild Bunch,' was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
