The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 30-April 5
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
For all his macho excess and drunken bluster, from Ride the High Country to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Peckinpah resolutely set the tone for the revisionist western that would come to reflect a hard-nosed re-appraisal of the simplistic heroism projected by Golden Age directors as the heart of the American project. His greatest movie as well as his defining reel of de-romanticization, employing innovations like slow-motion sequences and quick cuts, is The Wild Bunch. The extraordinarily versatile William Holden, leading a cast that developed a preternatural chemistry, radiates stubborn intelligence and toughness as Pike Bishop, leader of a tight but constitutionally restless band of border-straddling outlaws, circa 1913. He knows the law of the gun and the feud is giving way to modern civilization, and resigns himself and his boys to one last score that ends up fatefully tinged with bloody old-school loyalty. Typically brilliant, Robert Ryan plays Bishop’s former partner Deke Thornton, who has been co-opted into hunting down the gang and is filled with bitter self-loathing. In one of the film’s many memorable scenes, Thornton looks disdainfully at his posse of low-life bounty hunters. “We’re after men,” he says, “and I wish to God I was with them. The next time you make a mistake, I’m going to ride off and let you die.” His longing is not so much for honor as for the impunity that comes with lean, ruthless strength and efficiency. Jonathan Stevenson (March 31, 8:30pm; April 1, 1:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Peckinpah series)