The best scene from a movie ever? I don’t know, but there can be no question that this little bit of magic from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) would have to enter the conversation. I mean this film has it all: the rapidly vanishing west, the emergence of culture changing technologies, and an internecine band of outlaws who have lived past their moment but ultimately refuse to succumb to omnipresent animal logic of mercenaries. And this scenes marks just that moment, making their march to General Mapache all the more beautiful. And while this is an admittedly singular reading, and one that elides the film’s insane misogny, at the same time I can’t think of another scene in film that captures the spirit of how I feel at this moment any better—why not?
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Barbara,
Borgnine rocks in this, as does Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jamie Sanchez, and William Holden. I think it is in my top three greatest movies of all-time list, maybe even top two.
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It’s funny that you should post this now as I have been thinking quite a bit about The Wild Bunch lately. I’ve been playing around with Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption which borrows heavily from Peckinpah for the second act of the game. Like the Wild Bunch, Redemption is set just before the start of WWI and much of it is set in a Mexico that is on the brink of Revolution. Though the politics are a bit different in the game than in the movie, there is a Mapache character, and a quasi-Pancho Villa, and a car, a machine gun, Mexican soldiers, etc. etc. Like The Wild Bunch, Red Dead Redemption meditates on the predicament of the Westerner in the face of encroaching modernity, in the sense of rapidly evolving technologies of communication, transportation, and warfare as well as social, economic and political changes. I’d love for you to play it and hear your impressions.
Mikahil,
I am working on getting the PS3 so that I can play Red Deaad Redemption. Any game that quotes heavily from The Wild Bunch is a great game based on that fact alone.