No, it’s not a new disc. This is also not exactly a disc review, but Warner’s reissue allows us to write about Sam Peckinpah’s film for the first time in years. We’re happy to recount the film’s twisted release history, and its path on home video. The point of course, is to encourage Warner Bros. to undertake a new remaster, perhaps reinstating some additional trims here and there. The title is still Gold in the WB vault, and few commercial titles as good as this one are begging to make the jump to 4K. Very little in it dates — we even love cameraman Lucien Ballard’s liberal use of the zoom lens. This time Sam ‘did it right’ as he never quite did again.

The Wild Bunch — Reissue
Blu-ray
Warner Bros.
1969 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 145 min. / Street Date June 15, 2025 / Available from Moviezyng / 14.98
Starring: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, Jaime Sanchez, Ben Johnson, Albert Dekker, Strother Martin, Emilio Fernández, L.Q. Jones, Bo Hopkins, Dub Taylor, Paul Harper, Jorge Russek, Alfonso Arau, Chano Urueta, Elas Cárdenas, Bill Hart, Rayford Barnes, Sonia Amelio, Aurora Clavel, Enrique Lucero, Elizabeth Dupeyrón, Fernando Wagner, Jorge Rado, José Chávez, Walt La Rue.
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Art Director: Edward Carrere
Costume Design: James R. Silke
Wardrobe supervisor: Gordon T. Dawson
Film Editor: Lou Lombardo, associate Robert L. Wolfe
Special Effects: Bud Hurlburd
Head wrangler: ‘Chema’ Hernández
Composer: Jerry Fielding
Screenplay by Walon Green, Sam Peckinpah story by Walon Green, Roy N. Sickner
Produced by Phil Feldman
Directed by Sam Peckinpah

Welcome to a summing-up of the … history? … of the general exhibition and video presentation of The Wild Bunch, a movie that blew everybody away back in the summer of ’69. We film students are supposed to claim that our formative film experience hinged on work by Orson Welles or Jean Renoir. No, we were just as soaked in the Peckinpah- Wild Bunch experience as were some of the celebrity student filmmakers of the time, like John Milius.

For some movie fans the arrival of The Wild Bunch was as big an event as the first landing on the moon, a short time later that summer of 1969. We saw the center-spread ad in Playboy  and wondered what the mysterious tagline was all about: “Nine Men Who Came Too Late and Stayed Too Long.” Plus another line that finished with “Suddenly the Sky Was Bathed in Blood.”  Warners booked a preview with a theater filled with retirees, not exactly the audience for a movie with a new level of violent bloodshed. Did the walkouts and furious complaints shake the studio’s faith in the movie?

In Los Angeles The Wild Bunch premiered at the Pix Theater on Hollywood Blvd., which later became a legit house, the Henry Fonda Theater. We had first seen the picture on a modest screen at an Air Force base, for an audience of enthusiastic airmen. We didn’t know that the ‘official release version’ had been cut by ten minutes only a week or so into its premiere run. Could cutting ten minutes really have given theater owners the ability to book an extra showing each day?

In foreign markets the film was released at its full uncut length; in a few it was enlarged to 70mm with 6-track Stereophonic sound. It received two Academy nominations, for Jerry Fielding’s original music score and for best original screenplay. The Wild Bunch was not described as a big success yet it played constantly as a second feature for a minimum five years. From 1970 to 1973 or so, I must have gone to see the show 15 times, hoping that some random ‘long version’ print would show up. I instead got a primer on how Technicolor prints age as they are ‘baked’ by hundreds of screenings.

The movie was already legendary at UCLA in the Fall of 1970. Critical studies professor Howard Suber decorated his office with several of the film’s ‘door panel’ posters. This was the first we’d heard of the existence of a longer version of the film ‘out there somewhere.’  Critic and author Janey Place, then a teaching assistant, described the uncut version she’d seen on Hollywood Blvd., that included spectacular scenes pictured only in random production stills. A 16mm non-theatrical film catalog said it had the uncut Wild Bunch for bookings, but it was too expensive — $300 as opposed to the $30 – $40 rents charged by Films Incorporated. It’s likely that some film clubs first saw the uncut film projected in 16mm.

Our first opportunity to see the film uncut didn’t come until early April in 1974. I was in line for a FILMEX screening at Hollywood’s Paramount Theater (now the El Capitan) when word came that Sam Peckinpah’s personal print of Bunch was about to be screened at the Beverly Canon in Beverly Hills. Jerry Harvey, the programmer for Los Angeles’ progressive “Z” Channel cable station, had arranged the screening, with Peckinpah in attendance. We ran down there in no time but were about 20 places too far back in line to get in. The theater manager assured the crowd that it was okay: a second show would follow. It was the only time I waited a full three hours to see a movie. Peckinpah and actor Warren Oates came out after a few minutes, and thanked everyone for waiting.

The second show was packed as well. Peckinpah kept his introduction short to give the theater owner a break on the time. If I recall properly, we weren’t charged an admittance fee; it may have been planned that way from the start. We’re told that this special screening introduced the idea of a ‘director’s cut’ to film programmers and marketers, and of course, special venues like the “Z” Channel.

Peckinpah’s personal print of the movie was unlike the later 1995 restoration. It was in 35mm Technicolor. It had an intermission just before the train robbery sequence (at 1:12:04). Three minutes of Jerry Fielding’s cantina music played over an intermission card styled to match the opening titles. A train whistle signalled the beginning of the second half. This is where most of us saw the legendary missing scenes for the first time. It was all so good that it seemed crazy that anyone would want to remove it: Sykes’ reveal that Crazy Lee was his grandson, the flashbacks to Thornton’s capture by the Pinkertons and Pike receiving his crippling leg wound.  ↑  Most impressive was an epic battle scene between Mapache’s Mexican Army troops and Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries, that established General Mapache as an effective general, not just a dissipated sadist.  ↓  In Peckinpah’s print, the Spanish dialogue for this scene was not re-looped for English.

We don’t believe that the personal print contained any of the bits of action and gore that Peckinpah later described as being trimmed behind his back, after the film’s editing wrapped. The one thing we did notice was an alternate take in the ride-out from Starbuck aka San Rafael. When the railroad posse comes across the body of Buck, the outlaw that Pike shoots in an act of mercy, they linger a moment while Deke Thornton dispatches two bounty hunters to take the body back to Harrigan. The perceptive DVD Savant correspondent Gregory Nicoll had deduced this event by noticing that Thornton’s posse unaccountably shrinks by two members.

Peckinpah’s same print screened again at The Los Angeles Film Exposition (FILMEX) on March 29, 1976, as the finale of a two-day western marathon. I was in the film prep room when the projectionist that set it up told us of Peckinpah’s personal call, which I think was from the set of Cross of Iron: “If there’s one scratch on that print, it’ll be your ass!”  It was the same night as the Academy Awards, yet the big theater in the Century City Plitt was also packed. The excellent projection at the Plitt made the show look and sound better than it ever had before.

The network TV debut for The Wild Bunch came in 1973. Since so much of the film’s content was un-showable on Television, we were keen to see what left after the censors were through. As expected, most of the violence was trimmed away, and all of the blood. When the time came for the apocalyptic finale, the cutting gave way to an amorphous new series of disconnected shots, dissolved together as if to create a blurry dream. The famous extended battle wasn’t much longer than a minute. The weird screening was noted in various editorials, as seen in  this letter to The New York Times.

A weak ‘director’s cut’ print was shown at the West L.A. Nuart theater very briefly in 1979. I saw it with Rocco Gioffre, and we noted that it looked washed out. Technicolor had ceased printing 3-strip imbibition prints just a year or so before, so it may have been an Eastman dupe. It did not have the intermission. The version was likely the initial U.S. release cut, before it was cut down.

Around 1980 The Wild Bunch became one of the first Warner Home Video VHS releases, in its shorter standard cut.  ←  It looked and sounded very good, considering that it was also pan-scanned. The letterboxing of widescreen movies for home video was still several years away. Sometime in the middle ’80s, a multi-disc laserdisc was quietly released of the longer cut, albeit also pan-scanned.  ↘

At that time the new Criterion label had begun putting out films like Forbidden Planet in letterboxed laserdisc editions, and a store called Dave’s the Laser Place catered to industry types that had $$ to spend on the new format. I remember going to Dave’s for the first time and purchasing the uncut Bunch disc from a very grumpy Dave. I then sat on it for a couple of years until I could afford a player of my own.

[ More details for the record. Someone at Warner Home Video had gotten creative with the laserdisc transfer. In the scene where Thornton’s posse is blown up on a bridge spanning the Rio Grande, the editor replaced normal white flash frames with red flash frames. The editor must have been marking his territory. The same thing happens in WB’s early video copies of Bullitt.  When Steve McQueen’s Mustang slams into a guard rail, a white flash frame is also replaced by a red flash frame. ]

In 1990, a special film series at the Mann Fairfax theater featured a round-up of 70mm studio prints not seen in ages. Some Road Show releases suffered cuts when reprinted in 35mm for general release, so it was an opportunity to see if one’s favorite film was perhaps a little longer, like Otto Preminger’s  In Harm’s Way. This was the famous series at which a variant 70mm cut of  Blade Runner was ‘accidentally’ rediscovered, leading to a massive re-cut and reissue of the Harrison Ford Sci-fi thriller. The same series was concurrently shown in San Francisco, I believe.

Bo Hopkins, Paul Harper and Peckinpah’s son attended the Saturday morning Wild Bunch screening at the Fairfax; I believe I talked editor Les Kay into coming with me. The screening was a mess, but an educational mess. The 70mm stereophonic sound print they had on view had come from Australia, and reflected how the feature had been shown on Australian screens. Aussie censorship simply massacred the movie. A constant chatter of hot splices removed almost every instance of swearing, even mild swearing. The violence was simply chopped out, with no excuses, having literally been spliced out by hand. With the continuity garbled, the movie went by in a blur. Every action sequence was incomprehensible. What audience could sit through such a remnant?

That makes us wonder if English prints of movies were censored as well, in this first year of the U.S. film rating system. Did Sydney and Melbourne have London- style ‘private film clubs’ where movies might play nearly intact?  Author Jim Kitses hadn’t reported that such censorship befell Wild Bunch in England; his book  Horizons West listed it at a full 145 minutes.  ↘

In 1993 we were primed for a re-premiere and reissue of The Wild Bunch finally officially restored to its (initial) 145-minute running time. It was to be screened at the Cinerama Dome, we were told. Then Variety reported that the release was cancelled, because the MPAA ratings board had rated it NC-17. By its own rules, the censors had made a mistake: they evaluated it as a new release, ignoring the fact that the long cut had been rated ‘R’ back when the film was new.

A simple correction was indicated, but the MPAA treated its pronouncements as sacrosanct … ‘you cannot petition the Lord with prayer.’  It took two years to straighten things out. The reissue finally came in 1995, along with a full video release on VHS and laserdisc.

When the DVD format premiered a couple of years later, one of Warners’ earliest releases was again The Wild Bunch. A much improved DVD appeared in 2006, in a disc set called Sam Peckinpah’s The Legendary Westerns Collection. Warners’ one Blu-ray edition was first issued in 2007, and has been reissued at regular intervals.

Last year Warners and Criterion finally came through with a lavish 4K Ultra HD disc set, with multiple versions of Peckinpah’s western  Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It likely had been licensed to Criterion years years before. The studio’s own home video arm gave us a grand 4K of  The Searchers this year along with a 4K of High Society.  But we’ve been advised that 4K restorations will be special occasions.

Assuming that the aura surrounding The Wild Bunch hasn’t faded, we’d say that Peckinpah’s film is an excellent candidate for special treatment. If they wanted to go further, they might try to reinstate the trims that were in the director’s personal print — or the rumored bits of trims that the Peckinpah critics claim were taken out at the last moment. We’d of course be very happy to have just  the existing ‘original director’s cut’ remastered in 4K.

Hopefully the Warners people are thinking along the same lines with other titles as well. That Searchers disc is a wonderment.

Our assessments of films don’t remain fixed — of the dozens of impressive features we saw new in the ’60s and ’70s, most now seem like different movies, whereas the obvious thing is that we have changed.

Bonnie and Clyde,  The President’s Analyst,  Rosemary’s Baby only grow in stature. The Wild Bunch holds its own — it seemed a masterpiece when new and never faded. That’s not the case with many of Sam Peckinpah’s other movies, but no need to get into that now. Bunch all but stands alone in terms of achievement. Most of his worthy pictures experienced severe studio interference, but this title came through relatively unscathed — Warners chopped it down on release, but didn’t destroy the long version. It was 1969, Hollywood was imploding, and all kinds of crazy things happened.

It’s been at least 5 years since we screened The Wild Bunch. We’ve re-read our old  2006 review and still like how it reads, so that’s worth checking out. Instead of repeating it or trying to recompose a better review, we took a few notes on our new viewing, and will end with some 2025 observations / ruminations.

•  The first thing up is the progressive title design. Cutting to those stylized freeze frames always worked well, as the effect looks modern yet rough-hewn. Nobody knows the story is playing out in 1913 … who made westerns that take place at that late of a date?

•  Critics had nothing to say about the main titles but several thought the flashbacks were marred by ‘wavy’ ripple-glass dissolves, along with echoed dialog on the soundtrack … “Hold ’em here! Hold ’em here!  Peckinpah and his editors reportedly wanted ‘European’ straight-cut flashbacks, which had already been seen in some movies. I don’t think the convention of visually stylizing scenes from ‘the past’ had yet been established outside of ‘art’ movies like  The Pawnbroker. Besides, Peckinpah’s flashbacks skip around in time a bit, as with Thornton’s capture and an added shot of his punishment in a prison in Yuma. Straight-cut transitions between present and past may have looked too modern for 1913, too Alain Resnais for a ‘gritty western.’

•  Trustworthy quotes say that the malicious Scorpion vs Ants children’s game was suggested to Peckinpah while dining with Emilio Fernández, as a metaphor for the slaughter in the streets of Starbuck/San Rafael. The two scorpions against a multitude of ants is actually a better match for the final battle. That slow dissolve from the burning weeds to the aftermath in the street is a world-class image.

Other critics noted that H.G. Clouzot used the image of a ragged kid tormenting an insect in his  The Wages of Fear. In both films the imagery insists that ‘childhood innocence’ is a sentimental myth. Luis Buñuel would surely approve. Eric Ambler’s  The Purple Plain has a similar scene with a boy and a lizard, that could have been straight from Buñuel.

•  Speaking of Mexican directors hired as actors … doing so was a good way of getting value from an expensive rule likely still in force in the Mexican film industry: duplicate or ‘shadow’ personnel were hired for films like  The Magnificent Seven, either to appease the Mexican guilds, or because a tax break or some other kind of inducement required it. Emilio Fernández had mostly phoned in his ‘shadow director’ contribution to Mag 7 while collecting a princely salary . . . but on Bunch he was a genuine artistic collaborator. At least three Mexican directors had supporting roles: Chano Urueta,  (El monstruo resucitado), Fernando Wagner, Alfonso Arau  (Like Water for Chocolate). They were all seasoned actors as well. Their authority insured full industry cooperation, and their expertise gave Peckinpah’s film a ‘Visconti’ level of authenticity.

•  Before we saw the full uncut movie, Pike Pishop’s bad leg wound had been referenced only in a bit of dialogue. When he had trouble mounting his horse without a stirrup, we weren’t sure what the issue was. The idea of a main character receiving a leg wound was the first ‘parallelism’ we saw between Wild Bunch and Major Dundee; we eventually realized that the two films share dozens of plot points and action details. One movie is a structural remake of the other. Peckinpah’s dialogue “this time we do it right” is self-reflexive.

•  The scene where Pike painfully remounts and rides away is a thing of visual and musical harmony, and it uses a telephoto Zoom lens. It brings up the entire question of who is responsible for the film’s superior visual direction?  Looking at Peckinpah’s early films, it is clear that the formal beauty of Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch can be credited to camera artist Lucien Ballard. The visuals in those movies are consistently superior to the work in  The Deadly Companions, Major Dundee and even the films shot by John Coquillon. So distinctive is Ballard’s work that you’d think he was calling the shots, or that Peckinpah let him block parts of scenes. If that was the case it was surely a blessed collaboration, freeing Peckinpah to direct his actors.

The Wild Bunch uses a lot of telephoto Zoom lens work, which is normally considered a weakness. Ballard’s aggressive Zooms somehow never offend — he’s never caught with a random or ugly composition.

•   The precedent of Bonnie and Clyde surely helped Peckinpah and Phil Feldman talk Warners into paying for extended special squib effects to make the opening and closing shoot-outs into giant spectacles. The lengthy final battle was filmed from more angles, with more cameras, than even George Stevens was known to use. An editor associate I worked with was married to a woman who had worked in the Warner Brothers’ front office that year. She said that the production manager in Mexico sent panicked telegrams asking for enormous quantities of fake blood, blank ammo and squib & bullet-hit pyrotechnics, ASAP. Peckinpah had expended the show’s full supply in just a few hours.

•  The editors and Peckinpah really went to town with all that slow-motion filming, which was really multi-speed filming. The director may not have always been cooperative with his crew on the set, but he loved editing, especially when given enough time (and a harmonious, non-paranoid work situation). The film is packed with brilliant editorial experiments, intercutting all that smartly-planned multi-speed footage. Jumping between different speeds and different angles makes moments of violence seem to go on forever. The editorial constructions go far beyond Sam Peckinpah’s avowed initial inspiration,  Seven Samurai.

The action is a glamorous spectacle. The 2 and 3- frame cuts hit with the impact of a bullet. Audiences are now accustomed to fast-cut impressionistic editing. We now read the cuts in Bunch as fast but always perceptible, and we can feel their psychological effect. Lou Lombardo’s editing was not nominated by the Academy, which is a shame. The actual Oscar nominees were They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,  The Secret of Santa Vittoria,  Midnight Cowboy,  Hello, Dolly, and the winner  “Z.”

Creating those impressionistic montage cuts, with action interrupted by cutaways at different speeds, had to a be a crazy period of experimentation. Only editors who have worked with film on a bench can appreciate the level of skill and talent that was needed. This sophisticated editing was accomplished with spliced film, without the benefit of non-linear ‘Avid’- style editing that allows cut assemblies to be made in a few seconds, that once took minutes to splice and re-splice on film.

•  A visual detail that we love: in the escape from Starbuck there’s a spectacular horse fall in the middle of the street. It’s covered from more than one position, but a nice wide shot is the primary angle. It wasn’t until the 20th or so viewing that we noticed, in plain sight, that the horse is being tripped by a rope in plain sight. Extending to the right of the frame is a line; about 30 feet back a sturdy caballero grips it, his heels dug in as the line goes taut. Amazing!  At (13:38).

•  In the railroad highjack sequence, while the train sits at idle at the water stop, a repeating hissing steam sound effect forms a rhythm that serves as a suspenseful audio backdrop, covering small noises while the Bunch take over the train. A friend who knows steam engines told me that the sound effect is an artificial construction, and not taken from real life. The sound of a couple of brake valves being opened has been cut into a loop and repeated. Can that assertion be true?  We’ve never read a mention of this elsewhere, and steam railroad devotees are quick to point out technical inaccuracies.

•   This is a real nit-pick, about the direction that a river’s water flows in both The Wild Bunch and Major Dundee. Both rivers are supposed to be the Rio Grande in Texas, right?  Assuming that it flows West to East, in both movies it looks as though, more often than not, the Rio Grande is flowing the wrong way.

•  Our attitude to the film’s bloody violence has waxed and waned over the years. For the longest time it felt liberating; as we get older we’ve grown to resent ‘glorious’ depictions of gun violence. Any E.R. medic knows what gun violence really entails; here in the U.S. there’s a sociopathic disconnect between cause and effect. When asked to comment on Sam Peckinpah’s films, Howard Hawks and Budd Boetticher simply said that they directed their movie killings the way they were in real life — fast, hard, and without any ‘balletic’ muss and fuss. They probably didn’t want to discuss Peckinpah any more than they wanted to invite a political argument. Screen violence will always have a glamorous angle, and it didn’t come with Peckinpah or a permissive rating system. Rewatching the old ‘light adventure comedy’  Gunga Din, we’re just as appalled by that movie’s cavalier attitude toward killing third-world ‘others.’

It took me a while to find where our favorite English film critic Raymond Durgnat commenting on The Wild Bunch. He had no sharp paeans or put-downs to offer. He was instead perplexed by Peckinpah’s over-arching worship of his outlaw heroes. We don’t expect an old-fashioned moral judgment, and not even Bonnie and Clyde went full-on amoral with its trendy, ‘chic’ outlaws. The sentimental flashback cameos at Peckinpah’s finale elevate the Bunch to a heroic pantheon. They were great because they were liberated from society’s hypocrisy … ?   Durgnat used the word mythomania to describe the dynamic at work, without further comment.

Warner Home Video’s The Wild Bunch  is a reissue of the existing 2006 Blu-ray . It is the exact same disc as before, that has been quietly reissued several times before. On a high-end AV system it can look very good. It also has a nice selection of extras, partly organized, I believe by the late Nick Redman. The list is below.

Once again, after seeing how stellar The Searchers and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid look in last year’s improved 4K presentations, we can only imagine how terrific The Wild Bunch would be in a carefully remastered UHD disc. Sam Peckinpah’s personal print was sharper with better color than all the 35mm prints I saw; it would be sensational to see it earn status as a special WB media project. We’re glad that WB’s reissue gave us another opportunity to write about this show.

The Wild Bunch
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Supplements:
Commentary by Peckinpah biographers/documentarians Nick Redman, Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle
Additional scenes (unusued daily scenes and trims)
Peckinpah Trailer Gallery.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 5, 2025
(7372bunc)

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