Before Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, virtually every western before them was xenophobic and single-minded towards Mexicans and Native Americans. While Pike’s (William Holden) posse shoots up a bunch of back-stabbing Mexicans in the finale, the film itself is not contemptuously judgmental. In fact, Holden’s gang (featuring Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Jaime Sanchez and Ben Johnson) loves the fiesta culture that's south of the border after they’ve fled from U.S. government-hired bounty hunters.

Of course, the violence itself in how it was depicted was changing: Movie characters had used to grab their stomachs, keel over and die. By the late 60's, characters now in movies were ripped apart by bullets, and Peckinpah’s balletic editing style emphasized the carnage, the punishing slow death, plus the livid pathology of homicide. The Wild Bunch paved way towards a cinema of ultra-violence, lending freedom of violent realism to the Coppolas', the DePalmas’ and the Scorseses’ of the modern movie era, but it was also positively changed treatment of violence in movies by showing that nihilistic violence had its consequences; innocent bystanders got shot too, and that violence itself isn’t altogether that clean. The trenchant metaphor at the beginning was crucial: adolescent children torture scorpions by turning them over and flicking red ants on top; these kids have awareness of violence instilled in them at a very young age. And not before long, they will see violence first-hand, up close.

The Wild Bunch is something of a subversive western, but to me has its longueurs – a brief patch of storytelling in the middle is a tad musty, and feels like westerns of old. But it quickly picks up steam whenever it is about consequential violence, machismo, real toughness through pain, and radical when it thematically is all about the changing times on how the ways of the old west were dying out.

Some will balk at what I'm about to say but I hope I get a few heck yeahs': I always felt the ending would have really nailed it if it had caught an airplane flying overhead in the final shots. That would have been a true symbol that the 1800's were now dead and that the 1900's had arrived with the impending industrial revolution and a cultural revolution to go with it. None of that is there, but I will always hand it to The Wild Bunch that it filled me with the imagination to wish it was there.