Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch

A collection of essays of Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch.

Stephen Prince (Edited by)

9780521586061, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 December 1998

244 pages, 36 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.6 cm, 0.33 kg

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is one of the most influential films in American cinema. The intensity of its violence was unprecedented, while the director's use of multiple cameras, montage editing, and slow motion quickly became the normative style for rendering screen violence. Demonstrating to filmmakers the power of irony as a narrative voice and its effectiveness as a tool for exploring and portraying brutality, The Wild Bunch fundamentally changed the Western, moving it into a more brutal and psychopathic territory than it had ever occupied. This volume includes newly commissioned essays by several leading scholars of Peckinpah's work. Examining the film's production history from script to screen, its rich and ambivalent vision of American society, and its relationship to the Western genre, among other topics, it provides a definitive reinterpretation of an enduring film classic.

1. Sam Peckinpah, savage poet of American cinema Stephen Prince
2. The Wild Bunch: the screenplay Paul Seydor
3. Peckinpah the radical: the politics of The Wild Bunch Christopher Sharrett
4. 'Back off to what?' Enclosure, violence, and capitalism in The Wild Bunch Michael Bliss
5. Ballistic balletics: styles of violent representation in The Wild Bunch and after David A. Cook
6. Revisioning the Western code: myth and genre in The Wild Bunch Wheeler Winston Dixon
7. The Wild Bunch: innovation, retreat, and the unproductive schism David McKinney.

Subject Areas: Films, cinema [APF]