The Wild Bunch

This is arguably one of the greatest westerns ever made. And argument is what Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece has always caused, with its slow-motion blood-letting, its surrealistically choreographed gunfights and its portrayal of Pike Bishop's amoral Texas outlaws as heroes. Yet William Holden's laconic Bishop, however violent, belongs to a truly romantic breed as he leads his bunch to their ultimate fate against the revolutionary guerrilla forces of murderous general Mapache. Meanwhile, the forces of law and order led by old amigo Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) are closing in for the kill... Lucien Ballard's photography gives a funereal hue to this elegy to the passing of a certain breed of chivalry. You can see why John Wayne is said to have hated the film; Peckinpah was practically reinventing a genre, with no place left for false nobility.