Bill Mesce - The Wild Bunch: The American Classic That Changed Westerns Forever

Since I cannot rouse heaven, I intend to raise hell.

Josh (David Warner) in The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Fifty years.

The world can change in a half-century; not a little bit, but so much so that if someone from then could visit now , people of today wouldto steal a line from Planet of the Apes (1968)think you were something that fell out of a tree (Schaffner).

Fifty years ago the hippie movement was in full flower: ragged bell-bottom jeans, Army surplus jackets, peasant skirts and sandals, peace signs and love beads, long hair, acid, grass, magic mushrooms, free love, Woodstock. At the other end of the demographic scale, businessmen looked, well, the same way businessmen have always looked (and still do): narrow lapels, short hair, cuffed pants and brogans. Somewhere in between were the self-styled cool suburbanites in broad lapels, shag cuts, ankle boots, Peter Max ties, Nehru jackets, mini-midi-maxi skirts with go-go boots (Knauer, America 7879). One emblematic story of the time from my mother: going to a party, being introduced to a newly-minted young priest who opened up his somber black jacket to reveal an explosively paisley lining.

Six years after The Beatles had opened the modern rock era in 1963 with bouncy but innocent tunes like Love Me Do and Please Please Me, rock had grown more ambitious with The Whos rock opera Tommy , and darker and more carnal with Led Zeppelins Whole Lotta Love (Knauer, 1968 44). The top three TV series in 1961 had been Wagon Train , Bonanza , and Gunsmoke , but in 1969 it was the transgressive Rowan & Martins Laugh-In with its rapid-fire humor confronting issues of race, politics, and sex, while The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had finally lost its long-running battle against CBS execs who cancelled the show forin the networks eyesgoing too far in its ruthless lampooning of government, religion, social conventions, and in its obvious anti-war sentiments (Brooks 1262; 1264; 949).

The war the Smother Brothers were so anti about was grinding on in Vietnam. Three years after U.S. Marines had landed on the beaches at Da Nang, Richard Nixon was elected president, in part for campaigning on getting America out of the warand then in 1969 began withdrawing troops so gradually that nearly half of the nations 58,000 war dead would be suffered in the four years after Nixon took office (Vietnam War).

In one of the most-viewed events in television history, people around the world watched in amazement as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, the first human being to walk on an alien landscape, a startling technological advance coming just eight years after Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space (Barnouw 427).

The Cold War was still on, it was yet another summer of race riots in inner cities, and, antagonized by the war in Vietnam, the psychological gap between young and old had never been wider. America had witnessed, in the short span from 1963 to 1968, the assassinations of a young, inspiring president in John F. Kennedy, a champion of civil rights in Martin Luther King, and a presidential hopeful in Robert F. Kennedythe nations young hoped he could course-correct a country they saw as going horribly wrong (Knauer, America 8081).

And on June 18, 1969, Sam Peckinpahs Western The Wild Bunch premiered in Los Angeles. Afterward, Peckinpahs career, the Western genre, and American movies would never be the same.

But then, neither would America.

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Fifty years.

In an odd bit of synchronicity, thats about the same span, give or take, from the beginning of the classical Western period1860to the setting of The Wild Bunch , put by various sources as 19131914 (Wright 5). That period also covers most, if not all, in some cases, of the life span of the movies main characters. The men of the Bunch would have seen a time when personal transportation was defined solely by the horse replaced by the first mass-produced automobiles and the early years of powered flight; muzzle-loading rifles and the first generation of cap-and-ball revolvers give way to pump-action shotguns, semi-automatic pistols, bolt-action rifles, and machine guns.