The Wild Bunch

October 1, 2018
The process of making a great film is often as fascinating as the film itself, a point amply illustrated by Stratton (Backyard Brawl) in his behind-the-scenes look at Sam Peckinpah’s brutal 1969 masterpiece, The Wild Bunch. Stratton traces the basis for the film, about a band of American outlaws fleeing to revolution-era Mexico to escape changing times, not to a professional screenwriter but to stuntman Roy Sickner, who came up with the idea on the set of another film in the early 1960s. Stratton also recounts Peckinpah’s earlier career, including the debacle of his previous film, also a Mexico-set western, Major Dundee, and the career revival he enjoyed thanks to an acclaimed TV version of Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Noon Wine.” For preproduction, Stratton discusses casting decisions, notably Peckinpah’s then-unusual move to cast almost exclusively Mexican actors (with the exception of Puerto Rican–born Jaime Sánchez) in the film’s Mexican roles. Finally, he suggests that, over the course of the shoot, cast and crew came to resemble their own version of the Wild Bunch: Hollywood outsiders, up-and-comers, and fading studio veterans trying to find their way in a rapidly changing industry. Stratton’s thorough research yields a fascinating perspective on how Peckinpah created a western of unparalleled realism and intensity.

Starred review from November 1, 2018

Much has been written about the revolutionary filmmaking of the late 1960s (Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution; Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), but Stratton (Floyd Patterson;{amp}nbsp;Boxing Shadows) has added a crucial piece of the puzzle with this 50th-anniversary history of The Wild Bunch, which famously reinvented the Western. Stratton paints a wonderfully full portrait of director Sam Peckinpah and his quest for a more realistic depiction of violence at a time when the brutality of the Vietnam War was increasingly penetrating American living rooms. The movie also stands out as a rare collaboration between U.S. and Mexican filmmakers{amp}mdash;much of the filming was done in Mexico, and Peckinpah hired Mexican actors to play Mexican characters, at a time when Hollywood consistently relied on white actors. What's most striking here is the depth of Stratton's research, with attention given to every aspect of, and player in, the film. VERDICT This engaging, well-researched book belongs in every library and in the hands of every student of cinema.{amp}mdash;Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2018

Much has been written about the revolutionary filmmaking of the late 1960s (Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution; Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), but Stratton (Floyd Patterson;{amp}nbsp;Boxing Shadows) has added a crucial piece of the puzzle with this 50th-anniversary history of The Wild Bunch, which famously reinvented the Western. Stratton paints a wonderfully full portrait of director Sam Peckinpah and his quest for a more realistic depiction of violence at a time when the brutality of the Vietnam War was increasingly penetrating American living rooms. The movie also stands out as a rare collaboration between U.S. and Mexican filmmakers{amp}mdash;much of the filming was done in Mexico, and Peckinpah hired Mexican actors to play Mexican characters, at a time when Hollywood consistently relied on white actors. What's most striking here is the depth of Stratton's research, with attention given to every aspect of, and player in, the film. VERDICT This engaging, well-researched book belongs in every library and in the hands of every student of cinema.{amp}mdash;Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2018
Muscular study of Sam Peckinpah's groundbreaking 1969 film, "the last Western."Texas journalist, historian, and poet Stratton (Floyd Patterson: The Fighting Life of Boxing's Invisible Champion, 2012, etc.) charts the evolution of Peckinpah's classic and perhaps best-known movie at the half-century mark. Peckinpah had had glimmerings of the story years before making it, with a script and cast that grew and changed considerably owing to several influences, not least of them the violent time in which it was finally made. Stratton pulls together big strands of story: the history of the Mexican revolutionary period, Peckinpah's own fascination with Mexico, the history of U.S.-Mexico relations, the history of moviemaking itself. On the latter, the author draws a straight line from John Ford's 1939 film, Stagecoach, to The Wild Bunch 30 years later, both for its less-than-virtuous heroes and its paving the way for "a stampede of Western movies with increasingly sophisticated characters and plotlines." Peckinpah wrote the movie with Lee Marvin in mind as the central figure, Pike Bishop, but Marvin's agent wasn't enthusiastic; in any event, Paramount lured Marvin with an unheard-of $1 million fee for another Western, the painfully terrible Paint Your Wagon. Peckinpah and his producer, Stratton reveals through some careful filmic detective work, considered Robert Mitchum, Sterling Hayden, and Charlton Heston before landing on William Holden, "a first-rate actor but also a deeply troubled man, a real-life killer himself." Holden wasn't the easiest actor to work with, but with Robert Ryan, who had "a deeply lined face that seemed to be cut from boot leather," he anchored what Stratton doesn't hesitate to brand "a love affair between two men"--a "bromance," that is, one that broadened to include such players as Ernest Borgnine, L.Q. Jones, Strother Martin, Jaime Sánchez, and Ben Johnson. And a blood-soaked, protest-inducing bromance at that....Essential reading for fans of the epochal (and reportedly soon to be remade) movie as well as movie-history and Western buffs generally.

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Starred review from November 15, 2018
The screenplay for The Wild Bunch (1969) came along at just the right time. Director Sam Peckinpah had just suffered a major career setback, and he wasn't sure he would ever be asked to direct another movie. Then he was hired to do rewrites on a script for a violent, bloody western. This was a movie he could make. The producer agreed, and Peckinpah went to Mexico to put the story on film. It was the perfect time to make a movie like The Wild Bunch: Hollywood's ratings system was in turmoil, the western genre was being reappraised by revisionist filmmakers, and onscreen violence was reaching new levels of graphic realism (Peckinpah was heavily influenced by the look and style of Bonnie and Clyde, which came out in 1967). Peckinpah produced a masterpiece, a film that is widely considered a work of art and that has acquired a cult following over the decades. Stratton does a fine job of putting the film in its historical context?even a handful of years earlier, the movie would probably never have been made?and in exploring the many facets of Peckinpah, a no-nonsense director who always knew what he wanted but was, almost paradoxically, unafraid of letting inspiration and serendipity guide his hand. The book is a valuable addition to the literature of American film history and will be greeted by Wild Bunch devotees with adoration.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)