Sam Peckinpah: ‘Dying is not fun and games’

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

From its stark opening sequence, in which children observe a swarm of ants devour scorpions, through to its violent bullet-riddled ending, The Wild Bunch (1969) is an unrelenting journey into a world of nihilistic violence.

Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads an ageing gang of criminals on one final assignment in 1913: robbing a railroad store. Unfortunately, Bishop's former comrade Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who was blackmailed into chasing down his old friend for sleazy railroad tycoon Harrigan, is waiting in ambush with a gang of bounty hunters. The group becomes aware of the ambush and mayhem ensues. A deafening chorus of gunfire, shattering glass, and whinnying horses serves as the music to an epic gunfight that would serve as the focal point of a lesser western, but serves as simple prelude to the rest of Sam Peckinpah's cruel, elegiac tour de force. 

The remaining members of the group pass the laughing youngsters again on their way out of town, who are now burning the ants and scorpions alive. 

After establishing his stall early on with the inhumanity of cackling infants and slow-motion deaths, Peckinpah spends the next two hours thrilling us. A riveting, beautifully filmed train robbery, an exploding bridge, and a final machine-gun massacre all figure in this storey of hardened criminals caught up in the attempt to sell stolen weaponry to the dissolute General Mapache (Emilio Fernández) during the Mexican revolution. Repeated sequences of scotch consumption and hilarity hammer home the film's overall tone of cheerful submission in the face of a terrible conclusion. Any viewer who downs a shot each time the gang drinks will find themselves slurring long before the end credits, while the grizzled felons' combined laughing is almost as prevalent as gunfire.

The following article by Roger Ebert, from 1969, following a press screening of The Wild Bunch, gives an idea of the contemporary response to the film’s notorious depiction of violence and the director Sam Peckinpah’s defence of it.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which is possibly the most violent film ever made, stirred up a bitter controversy. Film critics split into many camps at an extraordinary press conference, and even co-stars William Holden and Ernest Borgnine seemed slightly squeamish about the movie. But just about everyone agreed that The Wild Bunch will be this summer’s top box-office draw, for better or worse.

The film was screened for some 350 film critics during the weeklong Warner Bros. 7-Arts international film festival, festival, a showcase for six new Warners’ films. The audience reaction was extreme. Some people walked out. Others closed their eyes. When the lights went up, the applause was matched by boos and hisses. And then the arguments started. They are likely to continue all summer, providing fodder for countless articles and talk shows.

Peckinpah’s film is set in the Southwest and Mexico, circa 1913. The bunch of the title are a group of professional killers and bank robbers who have nearly reached the end of the line. They’re anachonisms, 25 years too late for the wild West, hoping to pull off one more good job and retire. A life of violence has unsuited them for anything else. They’re crude, filthy, bloodthirsty, raunchy and stupid. But they have a kind of honor and loyalty to each other.

The film opens with an extraordinary bloodbath of about seven minutes in length: a temperance parade is caught in the cross-fire between the Wild Bunch and a group of scurvy railroad gunmen led by Robert Ryan. Several civilians are gunned down just for the hell of it. The opening scene is the most violent I’ve ever seen on the screen – except for the closing scene.

By the films end, the bunch has escaped into Mexico and gotten involved in a scheme to steal U.S. army rifles for an ersatz rebel general. They’re double-crossed, caught between the general, Ryan’s men, and the Army. And in a final incredible bloodbath, some 200 men, women and horses die in an orgy of violence. You have never seen anything like it.

Having said this much, let me say that I admire The Wild Bunch and consider it an important act of filmmaking. It is easy enough to protest against the automatic violence of the Italian Westerns; it is legitimate to worry whether movie violence is somehow connected to the violence in American life. But The Wild Bunch, it seems to me presents death and violence in such definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence, and a reaction to it.

Peckinpah (previous credits: Ride the High Country, Major Dundee) has, first of all, made a magnificently directed and acted film. Holden, Borgnine, Ryan and Edmond O’Brien are particularly effective in roles that make their previous tough-guy characterizations look transparent. Peckinpah has marshaled an army of stuntmen and special effects men for his battle scenes and for a tremendous scene of the destruction of a bridge.

And the final bloodbath is the most effectively photographed battle since Orson Welles’ Fallstaff. Dying behind a machine gun, Holden maniacally mows down dozens of soldiers, civilians, anyone within range. I never thought, a lady in the audience complained, that I’d live long enough to see William Holden shoot a woman.

Peckinpah introduces a new technology of violence in those scenes. Blood actually spurts from gunshot wounds; we are shown the face of violence rather than the comic-strip substitute supplied by most Westerns.

All of this held little weight with most of the critics here, I gather. They considered the film to be an exploitation of violence – and they let Peckinpah and his co-stars have it with both barrels at a press conference the next morning.

I have only one question, said the lady from the Reader’s Digest. Why was this film ever made?

We wanted to show violence in real terms, Peckinpah said. 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.

Why did everyone bleed so much? another lady asked.

Lady, Borgnine said, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

But both Borgnine and Holden seemed to be rather dazed by the film themselves. Holden reportedly doesn’t like it much; he feels it’s too violent and needs additional cutting. Borgnine told the press conference: When I was handed the script, to be quite honest with you, I did not read into it all the controversy it seems to have stirred up. I had made violent films before, of course; Westerns and war pictures. Ths is a script about people who have outlived their time, who have anachronisms. I accepted it on those terms.

When we were actually shooting, we were all repulsed at times. There were nights when we’d finish shooting and I’d say, My God, my God! But I was always back the next morning, because I sincerely believed we were achieving something.

What about the rumors, one critic asked, that there was a near-mutiny on the set in reaction to Peckinpah’s overkill?

No mutiny, Peckinpah said.

Another critic asked: Don’t you think you may have occasionally passed over that thin line between what an audience is willing to accept, and what it isn’t? We felt that when the general slits the kid’s throat, that was the point beyond which we really had difficulty...

I know what you mean, Peckinpah said. There is a very, very thin line, and I think we operated as close to it as we dared. We hope that, for most audience, we stayed on this side of the line. But I am willing to admit that we may have passed over it at some point. We feel the violence is a catharsis, a release, but sometimes the line is hard to find.

To tell you the truth, Peckinpah added after a short pause, I really cannot stand to see the film myself anymore. It is too much an emotional thing. I saw it last night, but I do not want to see it again for perhaps five years.

– Sam Peckinpah: Dying is not fun and games, by Roger Ebert, June 1969.

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Werner Herzog: Stories and Images

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Directed by Werner Herzog)

Werner Herzog was born September 5, 1942, in Munich, Germany. With Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, Herzog led the influential postwar West German cinema movement. During his youth, Herzog studied history, literature, and music in Munich and at the University of Pittsburgh and traveled extensively in Mexico, Great Britain, Greece, and Sudan. Herakles (1962) was an early short, and Lebenszeichen (1967; Signs of Life) was his first feature film. He became known for working with small budgets and for writing and producing his own motion pictures. Herzog’s films, usually set in distinct and unfamiliar landscapes, are imbued with mysticism. 

In Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (1970; Even Dwarfs Started Small), the microcosm of a barren island inhabited by dwarfs stands for a larger reality, and in Fata Morgana (1971), a documentary on the Sahara, the desert acquires an eerie life of its own. One of Herzog’s best-known films, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972; Aguirre, the Wrath of God), follows a band of Spanish explorers into unmapped territory, recording their gradual mental and physical self-destruction. 

Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1975; Every Man for Himself and God Against All or The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser) is a retelling of the Kaspar Hauser legend. Herzog’s most realistic film, Stroszek (1977), is a bittersweet tale of isolation concerning a German immigrant who, with his two misfit companions, finds the dairy lands of Wisconsin to be lonelier and bleaker than the slums of Berlin. Herzog’s other films include Herz aus Glas (1977; Heart of Glass), Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979; Nosferatu the Vampyre, a version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that is an homage to F.W. Murnau’s film of the same name), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Schrei aus Stein (1991; Scream of Stone). 

Later in his career Herzog focused primarily on documentaries, including Glocken aus der Tiefe (1995; “Bells from the Deep”), which examines religious beliefs among Russians, and Grizzly Man (2005), an account of Timothy Treadwell, an American who studied and lived among grizzly bears in Alaska but was mauled to death along with his girlfriend. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) centres on a German American pilot shot down in the jungle during the Vietnam War; the story inspired Herzog’s narrative film Rescue Dawn (2007). Among his later documentaries are Encounters at the End of the World (2007), which highlights the beauty of Antarctica; Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which explores in 3-D the prehistoric paintings at the Chauvet cave in France; and Into the Abyss (2011), a sombre examination of a Texas murder case. 

Herzog’s other narrative films include Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), a drama about a police officer (played by Nicolas Cage) struggling with drug and gambling addictions, My Son, My Son, what Have Ye Done (2009) and Queen of the Desert (2014) with Nicole Kidman, James Franco and Damian Lewis. Herzog’s films are characterized by a surreal and subtly exotic quality, and he is hailed as one of the most innovative contemporary directors. He often employs controversial techniques to elicit the desired performances from his actors: he ordered that the entire cast be hypnotized for Heart of Glass, forced the cast of Aguirre, the Wrath of God to endure the arduous environment of South American rainforests, and required his actors to haul a 300-ton ship over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo. Herzog’s subject matter has often led to such offbeat casting choices as dwarfs in Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen and Bruno S., a lifelong inmate of prisons and mental institutions, in The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek. His volatile love-hate relationship with the brilliant but emotionally unstable actor Klaus Kinski resulted in some of the best work from both men, and both are best known for the films on which they collaborated. Herzog celebrated their partnership with the well-received documentary film Mein liebster Feind (1999; My Best Fiend). In addition, Herzog occasionally took acting jobs himself, with notable roles including a stern father in the experimental drama Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and a criminal mastermind in the big-budget action movie Jack Reacher (2012). 

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Werner Herzog, director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu, on the art of storytelling and the importance of searching for fresh images:

When I sit down to write a script I never attempt to articulate my ideas in abstract terms through the veil of an ideology. My films come to me very much alive, like dreams without logical patterns of academic explanations. I’ll have a basic idea for a film and then over a period of time, when maybe I’m driving or walking, it becomes clearer and clearer to me. I see the film before me, as if I were in a cinema. Soon it is so perfectly transparent that I can sit and write it all down. It is as if I were copying from a movie screen. I like to write fast because it simply gives the story a certain urgency. I leave out all unnecessary things and just go for it. A story written this way will have, for me at least, much more coherence and drive. And it will also be full of life. For these reasons it has never taken me longer than four or five days to write a script. I just sit in front of the typewriter or computer and pound the keys.

Whether I have an ideology is not something that I have ever given much thought to, though I do understand where the question might come from. People generally sense I am very well-orientated and know where I’ve come from, where I am standing now and where I am going. But it is not an ideology as most people think of it. It is just that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding into stories and images that seem to be coherent to others. Even after watching my films it bothers some people that they still cannot put their finger on what my ideology might be. Please, take what I am saying with a pair of pliers, but let me tell you: the ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what scares those people who try so hard to describe, analyse and criticise me and my work. I do not like to drop names, but what sort of an ideology would you push under the shirt of Conrad or Hemingway or Kafka? Or Goya or Caspar David Friedrich?

I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious and rickety image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.

As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is a very real certain danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. We need images in harmony with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. One must go to war, if need be, to find these unprocessed and fresh images.

- Werner Herzog in ‘Herzog on Herzog’