The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch PDF Author: W. K. Stratton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163286214X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
For the fiftieth anniversary of the film, W.K. Stratton's definitive history of the making of The Wild Bunch, named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the American Film Institute. Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is the story of a gang of outlaws who are one big steal from retirement. When their attempted train robbery goes awry, the gang flees to Mexico and falls in with a brutal general of the Mexican Revolution, who offers them the job of a lifetime. Conceived by a stuntman, directed by a blacklisted director, and shot in the sand and heat of the Mexican desert, the movie seemed doomed. Instead, it became an instant classic with a dark, violent take on the Western movie tradition. In The Wild Bunch, W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie's success. Shaped by infamous director Sam Peckinpah, and starring such visionary actors as William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Ryan, the movie was also the product of an industry and a nation in transition. By 1968, when the movie was filmed, the studio system that had perpetuated the myth of the valiant cowboy in movies like The Searchers had collapsed, and America was riled by Vietnam, race riots, and assassinations. The Wild Bunch spoke to America in its moment, when war and senseless violence seemed to define both domestic and international life. The Wild Bunch is an authoritative history of the making of a movie and the era behind it.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch PDF Author: W. K. Stratton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163286214X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the fiftieth anniversary of the film, W.K. Stratton's definitive history of the making of The Wild Bunch, named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the American Film Institute. Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is the story of a gang of outlaws who are one big steal from retirement. When their attempted train robbery goes awry, the gang flees to Mexico and falls in with a brutal general of the Mexican Revolution, who offers them the job of a lifetime. Conceived by a stuntman, directed by a blacklisted director, and shot in the sand and heat of the Mexican desert, the movie seemed doomed. Instead, it became an instant classic with a dark, violent take on the Western movie tradition. In The Wild Bunch, W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie's success. Shaped by infamous director Sam Peckinpah, and starring such visionary actors as William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Ryan, the movie was also the product of an industry and a nation in transition. By 1968, when the movie was filmed, the studio system that had perpetuated the myth of the valiant cowboy in movies like The Searchers had collapsed, and America was riled by Vietnam, race riots, and assassinations. The Wild Bunch spoke to America in its moment, when war and senseless violence seemed to define both domestic and international life. The Wild Bunch is an authoritative history of the making of a movie and the era behind it.

The Wild Bunch. A Western and More

The Wild Bunch. A Western and More PDF Author: Brad Sylvester
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668543283
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 9

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Book Description
Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 95.0, University of Westminster, language: English, abstract: Few movies have so equally enthralled and shocked their audiences like that of Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western "The Wild Bunch". The epic Western is set in the year 1913 and follows the journey of protagonist Pike Bishop and his gang of aging outlaws as they look to make one last score in a rapidly modernizing American West. The movie is considered by many as one of the greatest Westerns of all time. Yet it would be a mistake to not recognize all the ways in which it goes above and beyond the traditional Western. What makes "The Wild Bunch" truly a remarkable movie is the innovative use of new cinematic techniques, it’s epic shootouts, and the subtle but powerful messages within it.

A Uniquely American Epic

A Uniquely American Epic PDF Author: Michael Bliss
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813178150
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
One of the most innovative films ever made, Sam Peckinpah's motion picture The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. From the outset, the film was considered controversial because of its powerful, graphic, and direct depiction of violence, but it was also praised for its lush photography, intricate camera work, and cutting-edge editing. Peckinpah's tale of an ill-fated, aging outlaw gang bound by a code of honor is often regarded as one of the most complex and impactful Westerns in American cinematic history. The issues dealt with in this groundbreaking film -- violence, morality, friendship, and the legacy of American ambition and compromise -- are just as relevant today as when the film first opened. To acknowledge the significance of The Wild Bunch, this collection brings together some of the leading Peckinpah scholars and critics to examine what many consider to be the director's greatest work. The book's nine essays cover an array of topics. Explored are the function of violence in the film and how its depiction is radically different from what is seen in other movies, the background of the film's production, the European response to the film's view of human nature, and the strong sense of the Texas/Mexico milieu surrounding the film's action.

Peckinpah

Peckinpah PDF Author: Paul Seydor
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068355
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
The book that re-established Peckinpah's reputation--now thoroughly revised and updated! When critics hailed the 1995 re-release of Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, it was a recognition of Paul Seydor's earlier claim that this was a milestone in American film, perhaps the most important since Citizen Kane. Peckinpah: The Western Films first appeared in 1980, when the director's reputation was at low ebb. The book helped lead a generation of readers and filmgoers to a full and enduring appreciation of Peckinpah's landmark films, locating his work in the central tradition of American art that goes all the way back to Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. In addition to a new section on the personal significance of The Wild Bunch to Peckinpah, Seydor has added to this expanded, revised edition a complete account of the successful, but troubled, efforts to get a fully authorized director's cut released. He describes how an initial NC-17 rating of the film by the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board nearly aborted the entire project. He also adds a great wealth of newly discovered biographical detail that has surfaced since the director's death and includes a new chapter on Noon Wine, credited with bringing Peckinpah's television work to a fitting resolution and preparing his way for The Wild Bunch. This edition stands alone in offering full treatment of all versions of Peckinpah's Westerns. It also includes discussion of all fourteen episodes of Peckinpah's television series, The Westerner, and a full description of the versions of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid now (or formerly) in circulation, including an argument that the label "director's cut" on the version in release by Turner is misleading. Additionally, the book's final chapter has been substantially rewritten and now includes new information about Peckinpah's background and sources.

The Deadliest Outlaws

The Deadliest Outlaws PDF Author: Jeffrey Burton
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574412701
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century Tom Ketchum and his brother Sam formed the Ketchum Gang with other outlaws and became successful train robbers. In their day, these men were the most daring of their kind, and the most feared. Eventually Tom Ketchum was caught and sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train. He became the first individual--and the last--ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang for more than forty years. He sorts fact from fiction to provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Will Carver and Butch Cassidy. The Deadliest Outlaws initially was published in a limited run of one hundred paperback copies in England. This second edition in hardcover contains additional material and photographs not found in the earlier printing.

CinemaTexas Notes

CinemaTexas Notes PDF Author: Louis Black
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477315446
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Austin’s thriving film culture, renowned for international events such as SXSW and the Austin Film Festival, extends back to the early 1970s when students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin ran a film programming unit that screened movies for students and the public. Dubbed CinemaTexas, the program offered viewers a wide variety of films—old and new, mainstream, classic, and cult—at a time when finding and watching films after their first run was very difficult and prohibitively expensive. For each film, RTF graduate students wrote program notes that included production details, a sampling of critical reactions, and an original essay that placed the film and its director within context and explained the movie’s historical significance. Over time, CinemaTexas Program Notes became more ambitious and were distributed around the world, including to luminaries such as film critic Pauline Kael. This anthology gathers a sampling of CinemaTexas Program Notes, organized into four sections: “USA Film History,” “Hollywood Auteurs,” “Cinema-Fist: Renegade Talents,” and “America’s Shadow Cinema.” Many of the note writers have become prominent film studies scholars, as well as leading figures in the film, TV, music, and video game industries. As a collection, CinemaTexas Notes strongly contradicts the notion of an effortlessly formed American film canon, showing instead how local film cultures—whether in Austin, New York, or Europe—have forwarded the development of film studies as a discipline.

"If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!"

Author: David Weddle
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
“A probing biography of the enfant terrible of 1960s and 1970s film-making . . . exhaustive and endlessly intriguing.” —Booklist Written by the film critic and historian David Weddle, this fascinating account does critical justice to an important body of cinema as it spins the tale of David Samuel Peckinpah’s dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved. Sam Peckinpah was born into a clan of lumberjacks, cattle ranchers, and frontier lawyers. After a hitch with the Marines, he made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features. In 1955 he began writing scripts for Gunsmoke; in less than a year he was one of the hottest writers in television, with two classic series, The Rifleman and The Westerner, to his credit. From there he went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a filmmaker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and political upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies, Peckinpah and his generation of directors—Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman—broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war, and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer energy, audacity, and originality; no one cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah. “Groundbreaking.” —Michael Sragow, The Atlantic

Sam Peckinpah

Sam Peckinpah PDF Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781934110645
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Collected interviews with the combustible director of The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, and other films

Ride, Boldly Ride

Ride, Boldly Ride PDF Author: Mary Lea Bandy
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520258665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
"This book is a survey of the movie Western that covers its history from the early silent era to recent spins on the genre in films such as No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, True Grit, and Cowboys & Aliens. The authors provide fresh perspectives on landmark films such Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Wild Bunch, and they also pay tribute to many underappreciated Westerns including 3 Bad Men, The Wind, The Big Trail, Ruggles of Red Gap, Northwest Passage, The Westerner, The Furies, Jubal, and Comanche Station. The book explores major phases of the Western's development--silent era oaters, A-production classics of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the more psychologically complex presentations of the Westerner that emerged in the post-World War II period.. They examine various forms of genre-revival and genre-revisionism that have recurred over the past half-century, culminating especially in the masterworks of Clint Eastwood. Central themes of the book include the inner life of the Western hero, the importance of the natural landscape, the tension between myth and history, the depiction of the Native American, and the juxtaposing of comedy and tragedy"--Provided by publisher.

The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost

The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost PDF Author: Pearl Baker
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803260894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Robbers Roost was a hideout for outlaws and hunted men long before Butch Cassidy found it in 1884. The impenetrable wastes and wilds of this high desert country in southeastern Utah, cut through by canyons along the Green and Colorado rivers and bounded on the west by the Dirty Devil, discouraged lawmen from pursuit. Growing up on a ranch that included Robbers Roost, Pearl Baker heard many of the legends about?and talked to many who remembered?the notorious Wild Bunch. In the 1890s they spread over Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and Arizona rustling cattle, stealing horses, robbing banks and trains, and often taking cover at Robbers Roost. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Flat Nose George and the Curry boys, Elzy Lay, Gunplay Maxwell, the McCarty boys, Peep O'Day, Silver Tip, Blue John, and Indian Ed Newcomb?they all come to rip-roaring life while courting death in The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost. In his introduction to the Bison Books edition, Floyd A. O'Neil, director of the American West Center at the University of Utah, discusses landscape, the law and the Wild Bunch, and Pearl Baker's lifelong preparation for this lively book.