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Like many great directors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles, Sam Peckinpaw (1925-1984) was difficult to control. He fought with producers and studio heads and, as is usually the case, he lost. Hence, about half his 15 films were severely cut, sometimes by more than a third. When THE WILD BUNCH was pre-shown to critics in New York in 1969, it was withdrawn and slashed by 20 minutes. For over ten years, that was the version people saw. 

Even in its truncated form it is a powerful experience. The film opens with an homage to H. G. Clouzot's WAGES OF FEAR (1952) as small boys in a dusty border town torture insects in the amidst of an evangelical prayer meeting. Into the scene rides a bunch of tough looking bank robbers not even John Ford could assemble, all dressed as U.S. Army Cavalry: Ernest Borgnine, Edmund O'Brien, and Warren Oates, among others. (You will know them when you see them.) They are led by William Holden, at this point in his career showing the effects of long dissipation, and giving perhaps his finest performance of many. Upstairs over the bank, Robert Ryan and Albert Dekker are staked out preparing to spring a trap. 

A 1913 Over the Hill Gang is about to meet the exasperated power of South Western Capitalism. Both the bank robbery and the trap are mis-executed, and, as so often in Peckinpaw films, the naive innocents are caught in the crossfire and cut to pieces. 

Most of the gang escapes into Mexico with the loot, however, and Ryan takes out after them. The rest of the film is about how these middle aged and old men, held together by a code of loyalty dating back to their youth, are tracked down. The code, wily experience and plain grit sustain them through a series of adventures, notably a brilliantly staged, photographed and edited train robbery. Eventually, the code leads them to destruction when they try, in desperation, to deal with the Mexican Revolutionary Army of Malapache (a pawn of German military "advisors"). Organized Capitalism, political revolution, and the coming World War I, are forces beyond the scope of the gang's code and tenacity. 

A wild, exciting film, indeed, it became more so when restored to a length of 142 minutes in 1981. (Subsequently, another three minutes have been added.) The cut version not only sacrificed some of the horrific power of the gunfights but, as so often happens, much of the continuity, the background detail, and many of the character relationships. For instance, the crucial basis for the love-hate bitterness between Holden and Ryan had been almost completely excised. 

Sam Peckinpaw was the product of ranch life; he was sent to military school; he was a U.S. Marine. He once said that he had spent his life coming to terms with the wartime savagery and stupidity he saw and took part in. Perhaps that is why he often made films in far places, especially the volcanic mountain country around Durango, Mexico, where he might be left alone to celebrate, rue and laugh at the folly of so-called Civilized Man. Although his most admired films, often shown in crippled versions, are Westerns, he also displayed his hurt disdain in the English University drama STRAW DOGS (1971), which by its end proves every bit as brutal as the Westerns. 

Strangely enough, before he destroyed himself with drugs and booze, he directed but one true War Movie, late in his career, the heavily cut CROSS OF IRON (1977), a cruel tale of the German Army on the Russian Front. A longer, much superior European version has only recently become available, but in either version, James Coburn's raucous ending laughter over documentary photos of hanged partisans is Sam Peckinpaw's artistic epitaph, one he just essays at the denouement of THE WILD BUNCH.