The script underwent an extensive rewrite by Peckinpah before the director was satisfied with it. He wanted to convey a sense of the reality of the ‘old west’, as opposed to the artificiality of most Westerns to that time. Peckinpah had a definite effect that he wanted to achieve with this film. In response to a critic who asked after attending a screening, “Why was this film made,” the director replied, “We wanted to show violence in real terms … Dying is not fun and games. Movies make it look so detached. With The Wild Bunch, people get involved whether they like it or not. They do not have the mild reactions to it.”

    Peckinpah’s goal with The Wild Bunch was to portray, in an accurate way, the vicious times and the viciousness of the men who lived in those times. To photograph it, the studio chose veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard. Ballard, whose resume included The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit (the latter released the same year as The Wild Bunch) for Henry Hathaway, would employ all the tricks of his trade to give Peckinpah what he wanted. Shooting began in Mexico in March of 1968, and continued until the end of June. Ballard would film important sequences with as many as six cameras, each running at different frame rates, from the normal 24 frames per second to the very slow motion 120 frames per second.

    On one pivotal scene, he employed a telephoto lens to keep all elements of the shot in focus despite the long distance to cover. This scene, known as “the walk,” was not in the finished script—the idea occurred to Peckinpah during production. Over 333,000 feet of film were exposed, using an incredible 1,288 camera set-ups. As the shooting ended, this mass of celluloid was turned over to editor Lou Lombardo (handpicked by Peckinpah) to be cut into a movie. He and Peckinpah remained in Mexico another six months, assembling the mountain of film into the director’s vision. Utilizing thousands of cuts, with some shots lasting barely three or four frames—one-sixth of a second—intercut with slow-motion scenes of spurting blood and falling bodies, they constructed a thoroughly original version of the Western film. One who’s influence can still be seen, in films as diverse as Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables to the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit.

    It’s 1913, and the old West is dying. Railroads, telegraphs, and now telephones have connected formerly wide-open spaces, and even smaller towns are becoming civilized. A troop of Cavalry rides into the town of Starbuck, Texas. Most are older, grizzled men, saddle-worn and tired. They ride into the center of town and dismount, heading into the Railroad office. They are actually a band of outlaws in disguise, led by Pike Bishop (William Holden). Bishop is old, worn-out by a life on the run, and wants just one more big score with which to retire. The core of his gang—Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), the Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector (Warren Oates; Ben Johnson), and Sykes (Edmond O’Brien)—are much the same as he, ready to settle down and leave the life. The days they knew are fast disappearing, and it’s getting harder to live by their guns.

    As they enter the office, they are watched by a posse of men hiding on rooftops and in alleys. These are bounty hunters hired by the railroad, and they’re led by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a former friend and partner of Bishop’s, until he was caught and sent to prison. Paroled on condition that he help hunt down his former comrades, he has anticipated Bishop’s actions, and has laid a trap for the bandits.   

    The shootout that results is spectacular, bloody, and disastrous, both for the townspeople and the outlaws. Only six escape the trap—Bishop and Dutch, the Gorch boys, Sykes, and a young Mexican kid, Angel (Jaime Sánchez). When they finally stop running, they discover that their friends died for nothing—they’ve murdered innocent people, for nothing. The bags they escaped with, full of what they thought were silver coins, actually contain only steel washers. Their defeat was total.

    They manage to cross the river into Mexico, and seek refuge in Angel’s home village. They find it destitute, picked clean by federal troops under the command of a General named Mapache (Emilio Fernández). Mapache, more bandit leader than soldier, is fighting rebels who seek to overthrow the corrupt regime of Victoriano Huerta, who had staged a coup resulting in the death of President Madero. The gang decides to go to Agua Verde, and throw in with Mapache, hoping for protection from the railroad posse, and perhaps opportunity for that one good score that they are seeking.

    As they enter the General’s camp, Angel spots his former girlfriend, now one of Mapache’s camp followers. Enraged at her betrayal, he shoots her, and is immediately arrested by the federales. That night, as the Gorch brothers amuse themselves with a few of the women hanging about Mapache’s headquarters (reportedly actual prostitutes hired by Peckinpah, in order to be able to say the studio paid for whores for the production), Bishop and the General discuss a possible job for the outlaw gang. Mapache does have something in mind—his German military advisor, an officer named Mohr (Fernando Wagner) has supplied intelligence regarding a US Army weapons shipment passing within striking distance of the border. Those weapons would give his troops a decided advantage over the rebels, in addition to satisfying the German’s desire to secure samples of the American military’s latest ordnance for his country to evaluate. In exchange for $10,000 in gold, Bishop’s men will rob the train carrying the munitions, and bring Mapache the sixteen crates of rifles, plus the ammunition for them.

    Bishop agrees, with one proviso: He needs Angel for the raid. The General has to release him. He agrees to this, and the gang begins planning what needs to be done in order to rob the train carrying the weapons—a train sure to be guarded by the US Army. Angel begins speculating on what a help those weapons would be to the rebels. After some discussion, Bishop tells him he can have one case of the rifles—in exchange for his share of the gold.

    Later, as the train approaches a water tower, the gang lies concealed in a small culvert. The locomotive pulls to a stop underneath the tower, and the fireman pulls down the spigot to replenish the engine’s boiler. As it lowers, Angel rides it down, revolver aimed at the railroad man. Within moments, the train is under Bishop’s control. While Dutch holds the two sentries on the flatcar carrying the weapons at gunpoint, Angel uncouples the cars to the rear of the flatcar, the ones carrying the troops guarding the shipment. The train pulls forward, slowly at first, but quickly gaining speed. The officer in command of the detail of soldiers is asleep, as are most of his men—but they aren’t the only ones on the train. Thornton and his posse are also in the car, and he’s not asleep. He sees the locomotive, along with the shipment of munitions, pulling away from the motionless passenger cars. He rouses his men, ignoring the sleeping soldiers, and they unload their horses from the baggage car. The officer awakens just as the posse rides off in the hunt for Bishop’s gang.

    The locomotive reaches the rendezvous point, to find Sykes and Tector waiting with a wagon. They transfer the load, Bishop opens the throttle to full, and throws the train into reverse, sending it racing back down the track towards the stalled cars. It passes Thornton and his men, but they keep up the pursuit of Bishop. The gang manages, just barely, to cross the Rio Grande into Mexico ahead of Thornton’s posse, and they dynamite the bridge behind them, dumping their pursuers into the river.

    They ride on in the direction of Agua Verde, but Mapache, running true to form, has no intention of holding up his part of the bargain. They find themselves surrounded by a troop of his Cavalry, demanding that the weapons be turned over to them now. Bishop, however, is too old a hand to trust someone such as the General, and has a pair of surprises in store for the Mexican troops. The first is that rifles weren’t the only type of weapon on the train—there was also a Browning M1917 .30 cal. water-cooled machine gun, which has been set up and readied for action in the back of the wagon. The second shock for the Mexicans is the announcement that the wagon has been rigged with dynamite, and Bishop will detonate it if they try to take it by force.

    They withdraw, and the gang settles in for the night. They are surprised when rebels from Angel’s village come to claim their part of the shipment, but there’s no trouble between the groups. Bishop and his men are far more concerned about Mapache, how to safely deliver the cargo to him and get paid for it. They know he’ll kill them and take the rifles if he can—they can’t simply drive the wagon into his camp, which would be suicide. They need a plan.

    That plan would lead to one of the most famous scenes in film, and a sequence of on-screen carnage that would be unequalled until the first twenty minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). Overall, the movie stands as one of the most violent ever produced; one that, in effect, redefined violence in the cinema. The MPAA’s initial review of the movie was not favorable—it was threatened with an X rating due to the film’s violence before the board decided on an R for its final rating (when the film was resubmitted prior to its 1993 re-release, the MPAA gave it an NC-17 rating, which delayed the release until Warner Bros, could appeal). Shortly after its initial release in 1969, the film was cut, from 143 minutes to 135. Surprisingly, none of these edits involved scenes of violence, or were motivated by MPAA threats. These cuts were made in order to shorten the film to allow for more showings.

    The Wild Bunch was the latest in a string of films that were pushing the boundaries of on-screen realism, as well as altering the cinema’s definition of ‘Hero’. Not only was the violence called into question, but also the characterization of the original American archetype—the Cowboy—as men with few, if any, redeeming qualities. 1967’s The Dirty Dozen had drawn criticism for much the same reason—painting another archetypal American Hero, the US Soldier, in an unflattering light. In contrast, that same year, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde had transformed a pair of Depression-era criminals into modern-day folk heroes, the spiritual successors to Robin Hood. It was little wonder that older moviegoers, whose concepts of “heroes and villains” had been ingrained by the preceding half-century of film, were less than enthusiastic about the age of the anti-hero.

    John Wayne, who spent a lifetime before the cameras portraying American heroes, had definite opinions on the direction the Western movie was taking. The man who had described 1952’s High Noon as, “… the most un-American thing I have ever seen” and spoke proudly of helping to drive Carl Foreman, the blacklisted screenwriter of that movie, out of the country, did not keep silent about The Wild Bunch. He was quoted as saying that the movie was destroying, “… the myth of the old west.” In an interview with Playboy Magazine’s Richard Warren Lewis in May 1971, he expanded on those thoughts. “To me, The Wild Bunch was distasteful. It would’ve been a good movie without the gore … All our fairy tales have some kind of violence—the good knight riding to kill the dragon, etc. Why do we have to show the knight spreading the serpent’s guts all over the candy mountain?”