Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8910 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2006-01-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English, German, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 145 minutes

Features

• Condition: New
• Format: DVD
• AC-3; Closed-captioned; Color; Dolby; DVD; Full Screen; Special Edition; Subtitled; Widescreen; NTSC

Amazon.com
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

On the DVD
The three documentaries in this two-disc set seek to illuminate the enigmatic Sam Peckinpah and the power of his film achievements without denying his own ornery, self-destructive failings. The feature-length Starz special Sam Peckinpah's West: Legacy of a Hollywood Renegade features testimony from Peckinpah intimates (including his beloved sister), colleagues (Kris Kristofferson, L.Q. Jones, editor Garth Craven) and critics (notably David Thomson and Paul Schrader). Covering all the Westerns up through the modern-day Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the doc includes extended looks at the underappreciated The Ballad of Cable Hogue and the first of the director's mutilated films, Major Dundee. Oddly, it doesn't note that Ride the High Country, which "overnight" established Peckinpah as a filmmaker, also marked his first run-in with Hollywood: a new regime at MGM threw the film away on the bottom half of a double bill.

Peckinpah chroniclers David Weddle, Nick Redman, Paul Seydor, and Garner Simmons--all heard on the commentary track--also got together for a 2004 pilgrimage to Parras, Mexico, the village that supplied the location for General Mapache's stronghold in The Wild Bunch and, of course, the film's apocalyptic finale. This is recorded in Redman's A Simple Adventure Story: Sam Peckinpah, Mexico and The Wild Bunch, which intercuts the latterday, not-so-wild bunch's moseying through sleepy Parras with the 1969 action scenes that invested the place with mythic resonance. Weddle: "...you walk around a corner and here's a part of your imaginative life--there!"

Seydor's Oscar-nominated 1996 short The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage assembles black-and-white "making of" footage from the Wild Bunch shoot and, rather than filming new talking-head footage, uses oral-history recollections of cast and crew members mingled on the soundtrack with Peckinpah's own words, voiced by Ed Harris. High point: Peckinpah/Harris's whispery murmur, "I want to do a walk thing..." as the director spontaneously begins to orchestrate the most powerful action climax in modern cinema. Album-jacket promises of "additional scenes" and "previously unseen outtakes" are apparently references to the same material: just outtakes and alternate camera angles, none notably revelatory. Technically, the disc improves on the 1997 release, which split the film over two sides of the disc and was not enhanced for widescreen televisions. --Richard T. Jameson