The Wild Bunch - 50th anniversary

[Le Chiffre]

Released June 18th, 1969. Not only one of the greatest Westerns ever made, but one of the greatest movies, period, in my book. It was for its first twenty-five years, only shown in various studio versions that shortened the film by as much as 18 minutes, but eventually became available in Sam Peckinpah's director's cut, which runs 145 minutes.

Variety on the film's innovations:
https://variety.com/2019/film/awards/sa ... 203140103/

In addition to the look of the film, the use of slow motion was startling.
Peckinpah shot action sequences using up to six cameras from the same angle, all running at different speeds. He and his editors, Lou Lombardo and Robert Wolfe, had miles and miles of negatives to use. They used thousands of edits in intersperse different speeds of slow motion with real-time footage in what Kathryn Bigelow would eventually refer to as gestalt editing. Nothing like it had ever turned up in American movies before it.

I don't know if Welles's editing plan for TOSOTW was influenced in any way by THE WILD BUNCH, but Welles did later praise Peckinpah's CROSS OF IRON as the greatest anti-war film since ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

Why “The Wild Bunch” ranks among the most influential Westerns:
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019 ... PFCbFNQ5ss

The Wild Bunch at 50: the enduring nihilism of Sam Peckinpah's western:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/j ... DvADe6MvVs