The Wild Bunch is a 1969 American epic revisionist Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates.

The Wild Bunch was filmed in Technicolor and Panavision, in Mexico, notably at the Hacienda Ciénaga del Carmen, deep in the desert between Torreón and Saltillo, Coahuila, and on the Nazas River.

The Wild Bunch is noted for intricate, multi-angle, quick-cut editing using normal and slow motion images, a revolutionary cinema technique in 1969.

[16][17] In 1913 Texas, Pike Bishop, the leader of a gang of aging outlaws, seeks to retire after a final robbery of silver from a railroad payroll office.

Needing money, they head for Mexico accompanied by the cantankerous Freddie Sykes and cross the Rio Grande to the rural village where Angel was born.

Angel spots his former lover Teresa in Mapache's arms and shoots her dead, angering the general and nearly getting them killed, but Pike defuses the situation.

Angel gives his share of the gold to Pike in return for sending one crate of rifles and ammunition to a band of peasant rebels opposed to Mapache.

Pike and the gang bury most of the gold and return to Agua Verde, where the townspeople and soldiers are drunkenly celebrating the weapons sale and Mapache is dragging Angel through town on a rope tied to the back of his car.

Mapache refuses to sell Angel back to the gang, and after a period of reflection while visiting a brothel, Pike and the others arm themselves to rescue their friend by force.

Feeling outdated and tired, Thornton allows the remaining posse members to greedily strip Pike and his men of their possessions before taking them back to Texas for the bounty, while he stays behind.

After some time, Sykes arrives with the elder from Angel's village and a band of rebels, indicating that they caught up with the bounty hunters, avenged the gang's deaths, and buried them properly.

In April 1965, producer Reno Carrell optioned an original story and screenplay by Walon Green and Roy Sickner, called The Wild Bunch.

[18] In 1967, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts producers Kenneth Hyman and Phil Feldman were interested in having Sam Peckinpah rewrite and direct an adventure film called The Diamond Story.

The principal photography was shot entirely on location in Mexico, most notably at the Hacienda Ciénega del Carmen (deep in the desert between Torreón and Saltillo, Coahuila) and on the Nazas River.

[23] Peckinpah's epic work was inspired by his hunger to return to films, the violence seen in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), America's growing frustration with the Vietnam War, and what he perceived to be the utter lack of reality seen in Westerns up to that time.

Multiple scenes attempted in Major Dundee, including slow motion action sequences (inspired by Akira Kurosawa's work in Seven Samurai (1954), characters leaving a village as if in a funeral procession, and the use of inexperienced locals as extras, would become fully realized in The Wild Bunch.

[24][25] Peckinpah considered many actors for the Pike Bishop role before casting William Holden, including Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and James Stewart.

Other actors considered for the role were Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, Ben Johnson (later cast as Tector Gorch), and Arthur Kennedy.

Among those considered to play Dutch Engstrom were Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, Alex Cord, Robert Culp, Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Jaeckel, Steve McQueen, and George Peppard.

[32] The editing of the film is notable in that shots from multiple angles were spliced together in rapid succession, often at different speeds, placing greater emphasis on the chaotic nature of the action and the gunfights.

Also, when the gang inspects Mapache's new automobile, they perceive it marks the end of horse travel, a symbol also in Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970).

He tried showing the gun violence commonplace to the historic western frontier period, rebelling against sanitized, bloodless television Westerns and films glamorizing gunfights and murder: "The point of the film is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut ... it's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians.

The characters suffer from their knowledge of having betrayed a friend and left him to his fate, thus violating their own honor code when it suits them ("$10,000 cuts an awful lot of family ties").

Bishop remembers his betrayals, most notably when he deserts Deke Thornton, in flashback, when the law catches up to them and when he abandons Crazy Lee at the railroad office after the robbery, ostensibly to guard the hostages.

Critic David Weddle writes that "like that of Conrad's Lord Jim, Pike Bishop's heroism is propelled by overwhelming guilt and a despairing death wish.

[46] It includes an audio commentary by Peckinpah scholars, two documentaries concerning the making of the film (one of them is the Oscar-nominated The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage),[47] and never-before-seen outtakes.

"[50] He observed, "Although the movie's conventional and poetic action sequences are extraordinarily good and its landscapes beautifully photographed ... it is most interesting in its almost jolly account of chaos, corruption, and defeat".

"[50] Time also liked Holden's performance, describing it as his best since Stalag 17 (a 1953 film that earned Holden an Oscar), noting Robert Ryan gave "the screen performance of his career", and concluding that "The Wild Bunch contains faults and mistakes" (such as flashbacks "introduced with surprising clumsiness"), but "its accomplishments are more than sufficient to confirm that Peckinpah, along with Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn, belongs with the best of the newer generation of American filmmakers.

[57] In the 2012 BFI Sight & Sound poll for The Greatest Films of All Time, The Wild Bunch received 27 votes from critics and directors such as Michael Mann, Paul Schrader and Edgar Wright.

"Our sources also tell us that the remake will update the story to a contemporary setting, revolving around the CIA, dangerous drug cartels, and a thrilling heist against the backdrop of the Southern California-Mexico border.