Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s Behind the Scenes Pic!
There is no sweatier, manly testosterone-fueled piece of Macho cinema than Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. That’s a film filled with men’s men being as badass as possible for two plus hours.
It was credited for killing the Western as a genre, which I don’t really understand. I think maybe it was more timing than this movie filling a whole genre with lead. Audiences tastes were growing away from the black and white good vs. evil of typical western tales by the late ‘60s. I view The Wild Bunch as carrying the torch of Leone’s Man With No Name Trilogy, which were grayer, more intense and stylized than the great works from Ford and other successful western directors. Peckinpah was a gritty, fucked up crazy dude and his movies reflected that.
The Wild Bunch is incredibly violent, but quite a brilliant character study of a group of people who at any other point of their journey would be the bad guys, but somehow become incredibly sympathetic.
Hope you guys dig the image, which features William Holden, Warren Oates the great Ernest Borgnine being lined up for a shot (camera, not revolver)!
Thanks to reader Pat Barnett for sending this one along. Click for a big version! Enjoy!
With all this monkey talk going on, I figure it’s time to go back to the original for tomorrow’s Behind the Scenes Pic.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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