They held up banks, robbed trains, and killed when they had to. Yes, the characters played by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine in “The Wild Bunch” were criminals. The archenemy of Love’s gang is an even more brutal bunch, headed by one Rufus Buck, a character who has no discernable positive qualities whatsoever. We instantly warp speed to his adulthood where he, known at Nat Love, leads a gang of thugs and outlaws which seem to have more in common with a modern-day street gang than with those of the Old West. Unfortunately, we are never privy to the next chapter in the young boy’s life. And it doesn’t let up until the son exacts revenge upon the outlaw who changed his life forever. “The Harder They Fall” opens with the brutal killing of a pastor and his wife in front of the couple’s impressionable 10-year-old son. But alas, the jacked-up gunfire and cold-blooded fisticuffs just keep coming. We find ourselves begging for just one quiet, thoughtful moment before the next bloodbath in the next town. And the end result is an assault to the senses which leaves the viewer physically and mentally drained after over two hours. Samuel has infused the classic Western with the extreme ultra-violence of Quentin Tarantino. Now, music producer and songwriter Jeymes Samuel has directed his first full-length feature film, “The Harder They Fall,” which features violence so over-the-top it makes Peckinpah’s carnage seem mild. I’m not necessarily saying this a negative development but it is an obvious trend. And while films like “3:10 to Yuma” and “Wind River” don’t feature the outright bloodletting of “The Wild Bunch,” the guns seem to have more firepower, the outlaws are a little more ruthless, and the high plains are a little more immoral than in the typical John Wayne movie. A half century after Peckinpah reinvented the genre, Westerns today are all a little rougher and more abrasive than those of bygone times. The world was changing – in popular culture, in life, and even at the movies.įast forward to 2021.
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And their world was populated with every miscreant and degenerate on the plains.
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The protagonists of “The Wild Bunch” were callous, unsympathetic real men. Gone were the happy yet determined pioneer families of the 1940s and ‘50s. “The Wild Bunch” featured more bloodshed than we had ever seen it redefined the Western – into a grittier, more hard-boiled version of its former wistful interpretation. In 1969, Sam Peckinpah introduced moviegoers to the violent Western.