Chapter 26
Talk about a western!
The Wild Bunch, which I made in late 1968, ended up being one of the all-time greats, though it was not much fun to make. It was my first picture for director Sam Peckinpah. His vocabulary had increased beyond “okay,” though there were times I wished it hadn’t. Still, the results were worth it.
The story is simple: a bunch of bank robbers shoot up a town and are pursued to oblivion by the law. In Peckinpah’s hands it became a masterpiece, an illustration of how the age of the gunfighter was giving way to civilization, and—of course—slow-motion bloodshed. And what a cast—William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, Edmond O’Brien, Strother Martin, and L. Q. Jones.
At the age of fifty-one, I got to do more action scenes in this film than in any of my previous pictures.
At one point, after we had robbed this railroad office, we were supposed to make a dash for the horses under a rain of gunfire. My foot was still recovering from being busted in The Split, a fact that Sam had known for a while but only now addressed on the set.
“Shit,” he said. “How the hell am I gonna get you through the field of fire to your horse?”
I said, “I can run a little bit.”
He waved that idea away, but didn’t have one to replace it.
I said, “What if I roll and shoot at the same time?”
Without another word, he went back to the camera, rolled, and said, “Action!”
I guess that meant “yes.” So I threw myself to the ground and rolled across the street, bam, bam.
When I got onto the horse he said, “Okay, cut.” Then he came over to me. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I should have thought of that.”
As with many—actually, most—pictures, we never realized how great it would be while we were making it. I’ll never forget the first time the picture was shown. It was in Jamaica at a big film festival that Warner Brothers threw. They flew in film critics from around the world to see five pictures. It was first class all the way, from fancy hotels to banquets.
One night they showed The Wild Bunch. The next morning they held a symposium where reporters could ask us questions. As we sat on this stage, the very first question out of the box was “Why was this picture ever made?”
We were astounded because we thought we’d done something pretty good.
Bill Holden asked, “What do you mean?”
The reporter said, “This is the blood-thirstiest film we’ve ever seen. It’s terrible!”
We tried to explain that violence with a purpose is not gratuitous, it’s art. We explained that Peckinpah was just portraying what really happens when people get shot. He was the first to do this, in fact. He was the first to show how people get shot from the front to the back, or the back to the front, and how the bullet comes out the other side in a spray of blood. Pow! It tore through you and you fell dead
(I don’t dispute that The Wild Bunch was extremely violent—the climactic shootout took twelve days to film and more blank rounds were discharged than live rounds were fired during the Mexican Revolution of 1914. In total ninety thousand rounds were fired, all blanks. The onscreen body count is more than 150. The Wild Bunch was even bloodier than Bonnie and Clyde, which had been criticized harshly in 1967 for its violence.)
But it was no use. They’d already decided that the work and the people who made it were pretty much worthless.
We thought it better to just shut up and take our lumps. Well, the picture opened in the United States and I was astounded. Most of the critics—even some who had lambasted us—wrote, “This is one of the greatest westerns ever made.”
Often, a viewer needs to let a picture sink in before making up his or her mind about it. That’s one reason I’ve always been opposed to opening-night reviews of plays: sometimes a work of art needs to be digested before it is embraced or dismissed. It’s not always like food, where you know right away that something is to your liking or not. Hell, how many years did it take for critics to decide that Citizen Kane is one of the greatest American films of all time? It didn’t even win the Best Picture Oscar the year it was released.
William Holden, who did have a drinking problem, kept the boozing to a bare minimum, at least during the shoot. And he never came to the set inebriated. Part of that, he told me, was because he wanted to marry his girl, but she refused unless he gave up the bottle. He would stop for a while, but he couldn’t control it. It was just too much for him, I guess. He died a dozen years later, falling and hitting his head during a bout with the bottle. What a useless, stupid way to go.
We had some great veteran actors on that film. Edmond O’Brien, who played crusty old Freddie Sykes, was half-blind at the time he made the film. He really had to work hard to hit his marks, but the old pro did it.
Like John Wayne, Ben Johnson was a real-life cowboy who’d knocked around the industry since the 1940s. Also like Wayne, John Ford discovered him and had took him under his wing and put him in almost every movie he did. He could ride a horse. I mean, he could really ride a horse! He’d do anything the director asked and never complain no matter how long the hours were. A couple of years later, when he got his Academy Award for The Last Picture Show, he said, “You know something? I deserve this.”
It brought down the house.
Warren Oates was someone Sam Peckinpah really liked, and he used him whenever he could. Like Lee Marvin, he was a former marine who was damn convincing in these all-man kind of roles. He was lean and wiry and very active, and I was stunned when we lost him to a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.
I’d worked with Robert Ryan before on The Dirty Dozen and in 1956 on Bad Day at Black Rock. Ryan was a stone-cold pro (and former marine). You’d never believe it looking at his weathered mug and six-foot-four frame that he’d once starred in Antony and Cleopatra with Kate Hepburn. You’d also never believe it, watching this two-fisted guy on screen, that he was a real pacifist at heart. He had guts: he stood up to McCarthy during the Red Scare, he marched for civil rights, and he was opposed to nuclear proliferation. It’s usually the case, isn’t it? The guys who have been to war understand why it’s a last-resort kind of thing.
Jaime Sánchez was Angel, the youngest of the Wild Bunch. He was barely thirty at the time, and he was like a kid in a candy store. He just loved playing with his gun and he got to be a real fast draw. But it got to be irritating, having him constantly pull his six-shooter on us.
One day while we were waiting for Sam to call us, Holden stood up, took him by the neck, and said, “Put the goddamn thing in your holster and keep it there.”
I backed him up, but poor Jaime had no idea where that was coming from. I think we were just privately pissed that he had more energy than the rest of us.
There’s a scene near the end of the movie, right before the big shoot-out, where Bill Holden, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson are enjoying one last fling in a whorehouse. I’m sitting outside, whittling a stick. I don’t know how many people have asked me, “How come you weren’t in the whorehouse, too?” I always respond, “How do you know I wasn’t? Maybe I was finished.”
It was a strange “bunch” of actors to be thrown together, but somehow our different methods and backgrounds all meshed on-screen. It’s gratifying when that happens. It’s even more gratifying when audiences respond.