Movie-A-Day #52: The Wild Bunch (1969).

Today marks the birth of Sam Peckinpah, the wonderfully belligerent and hard-drinking director who was a poet of cinematic violence – when he could stop self-sabotaging long enough to finish a film, that is.“The Wild Bunch” was his master work, a western that shocked audience sensibilities with its lovingly fetishistic treatment of brutality. It holds pride of place among a handful of films at the time that forever redefined the way violence was shown on screen. Many other films have since been surpassed it in terms of graphic gore, but few have captured the human price of that violence in quite the same way.