The Wild Bunch - They knew no law

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Movie
German title The Wild Bunch - They knew no law
Original title The Wild Bunch
Country of production United States
original language English , Spanish
Publishing year 1969
length 145 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Sam Peckinpah
script Sam Peckinpah
Walon Green
Roy N. Sickner
production Phil Feldman
music Jerry Fielding
camera Lucien Ballard
cut Lou Lombardo
occupation

The Wild Bunch - They knew no law is a late Western of Sam Peckinpah from the year 1969th

action

The film is set in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution . The aging outlaw Pike Bishop and his gang do not do well with thefts. During a robbery on the till of a railroad company, they are ambushed by unscrupulous bounty hunters who were hired by the railroad company to bring Bishop down. These are led by Bishop's former companion Deke Thornton, who is given the choice of either fighting Bishop or going back to prison. Passers-by, women and children are also killed in the wild shooting.

Bishop's gang escapes, but they have to realize that the stolen goods are worthless metal parts. On the run from Thornton, they encounter the brutal Mexican General Mapache, who assigns them to ambush a train with modern American weapons. Since they urgently need money, they agree. The coup succeeds, but when Mapache finds out that a Mexican member of the Bishop gang has embezzled some of the weapons in order to give them to Mexican opposition activists, Mapache has him captured and tortured. Bishop and his last companions want to save him. It comes to a final showdown watched from afar by Thornton's men, in which Bishop and his remaining three companions kill almost the entire Mapaches garrison before they are killed themselves.

background

Sam Peckinpah's western is now considered a masterpiece. At the time of its premiere, however, the film was heavily criticized. One of the motifs of the film, the representation of excessive violence, caused incomprehension and outrage in large parts of the audience. Peckinpah commented on this at the time with the words: "America closes its eyes to hunger and violence ; one must open its eyes to this America".

One scene during the opening credits already indicates this critical attitude in the film: Children “play” with scorpions who are held captive in a demarcated area, have to fight ants and are repeatedly brought to lie down by the children with sticks. With this the scorpions have no chance of escaping. Later, grass is laid over the area and set on fire. Scorpions and ants burn alive.

The children do all of this with grins on their faces; they have a joy in killing, not even badly. In the first shooting, innocent men and women are deliberately killed by the "men of the law". This shows the extent, senselessness and absurdity of violence. The final massacre was also the inspiration for the stylistically similar showdown in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow II .

The motif of the two old friends (Bishop and Thornton) who are forced to fight each other for fateful reasons can already be found in Peckinpah's first Late West, Sacramento (1962), and - even more pronounced - in Pat Garrett's Billy the Kid (1973 ).

In Germany, the film was initially released from the age of 18. The unabridged DVD release was given an age rating of 16 and over by the FSK .

Awards

Reviews

  • Time Out judges: "The film is one of the most gripping lamentations in Wild West film history."
  • Joe Hembus notes that The Wild Bunch is "Peckinpah's definitive film about the lost heroes of the late west and the violence of America." This violence is "deliberately dealt with" and "reflected on through his technique."
  • For Phil Hardy the film shows "that in Peckinpah's world innocence and brutality live side by side". The Wild Bunch helped "establish the end of the west as one of the main themes of the 1970s westerns."
  • Ulrich Gregor saw "a gloomy, but also very spectacular and aestheticized image of violence and lawlessness"
  • Lexicon of international film : “A masterful western about the conditions on the edge of the Mexican revolution (1913). Extremely blatant in the violence scenes, but with convincing aesthetic power, corruption, violence and abuse of law and power are portrayed. In 1996 the unabridged version of this important western hit German cinemas for the first time. "

Remake

In late September 2018 it was announced that Oscar winner Mel Gibson was working on a remake of the film as a director and screenwriter for Warner Bros.

literature

  • Bernd Kiefer: The Wild Bunch - You knew no law . In: B. Kiefer, N. Grob with the collaboration of M. Stiglegger (Ed.): Filmgenres - Western . Reclam junior, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-018402-9 , p. 291-297 .
  • Steadycam . No. 38 . Cologne July 1999 (extensive dossier on the film).
  • Stephen Prince (Ed.): Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, ISBN 978-0-521-58606-1 .
  • Wolfgang von der Weppen: They play their string out to the end. The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah . In: Andreas Baur, Konrad Bitterli (ed.): Brave lonesome Cowboy . Nuremberg 2007, p. 61–130 (German, English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joe Hembus: Western Lexicon - 1272 films from 1894-1975. 2nd edition, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1977, ISBN 3-446-12189-7 , p. 606 f.
  2. ^ Phil Hardy: The Encyclopedia of Western Movies. Woodbury Press, Minneapolis 1984, ISBN 0-8300-0405-X , p. 319.
  3. ^ Ulrich Gregor: History of the film from 1960. Bertelsmann, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-570-00816-9 , p. 471.
  4. ↑ The Wild Bunch - They knew no law. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  5. ↑ Markus Haage: Mel Gibson is making a remake for “The Wild Bunch”! In: Neon-Zombie.net. Markus Haage Medienverlag, September 25, 2018, accessed on September 25, 2018 .