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Bruno Andrade

Apr 06, 2026

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The Mercenaries’ Redemption
Spurred by Italian successes, Hollywood has thrown itself back into the Western, proving once again that—with the appropriate updates—there’s still some truth to the genre’s definition as “cinema par excellence.” It has also found—and the claim is now well-established—its number-one Western director, capable of prestigiously replacing the great old timers (of whom only Hawks remains active) and the middle-tier directors who have, in one way or another, disappeared or faded into obscurity (Mann, above all, and then Ray, Fuller, Boetticher, Daves, Dmytryk), with the exception of a few skilled men (Douglas, Mulligan) or bad ones (Marshall), and ultimately without a new generation having emerged: McLaglen is always pedestrian, G. R. Hill takes lessons from actors and screenwriters with some profit, Gries doesn’t always get it right due to excessive ambition, Pollack isn’t yet sure what he wants. Others, like Brooks, Penn, Polonsky reborn, make excellent forays into the prairie, but only to continue a discourse born, begun, and rooted elsewhere. The scepter therefore belongs unquestionably to the half-breed Sam Peckinpah, who has four great Westerns to his credit (not counting The Glory Guys screenplay) and has never made anything but Westerns. Everyone has seen them (or should have), and while Major Dundee—a densely woven fresco on the senselessness of war, like a chessboard with too many pieces—is a film that has been butchered, one we hope would not have been so controversial (though excellent) had it been shown in its entirety, Ride the High Country is a masterpiece, and the first, The Deadly Companions—the most Fordian and the most classic because it is the first—is perhaps just as extraordinary. It’s infuriating, today, to hear the know-it-all critics claiming that The Wild Bunch derives from the exaggeration of the Italian Western. Ridiculous. Let them go back and check the dates, and they’ll discover that Major Dundee was filmed the same year as Per un pugno di dollari, and that it already contained the style, tone, and energy that distinguish The Wild Bunch. Let’s venture a hypothesis: perhaps it is precisely because it was too new—because Peckinpah had understood with his mind what Leone and the Italian-Spanish merchants had grasped through the intuition of Roman budgets and a touch of madness—that the producers found themselves bewildered and surprised, and sought to scale that film down to more “normal” proportions, deliberately cutting out the most outrageous scenes. Second hypothesis: perhaps it is precisely from Major Dundee that the pretension of Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo was born.
The sheer scale of Major Dundee was the aspect of the film that convinced us the least. From the opening massacre—cut by the producer—to the endless duels, to the bloodbath fueled by bestial militarism, this was also conveyed through extraordinary encounters (the Chinese and camels from Ride the High Country gave way to an aberrant international cast of characters in a Juarez-esque Mexico) and the play of a chase that was constantly reworked and complicated, unfolding in a march (as in The Deadly Companions and Ride the High Country, though there it was an almost intimate march) that recurs as a fundamental element of all his films and is interrupted by digressions, ramifications, side episodes, and returns to situations barely touched upon earlier, to the point of suggesting an absence of logic, an incoherence in which one remains trapped, only to discover at the end the calibrated mastery. It is the outbursts of fury, of explosive, bellicose, and ferocious irrationality, that characterize these deviations, as if the logic of the march and the “mission ” (which, from the first to the last film, undergoes changes and becomes increasingly abject, and in any case never had a true justification except in Death) demonstrated their determined illogicality precisely in these “unforeseen events” that reveal all their nonsense. The prize for these unforeseen events undoubtedly goes to the nocturnal ballet of the Indian invasion, a brief surreal and hallucinatory sequence, in Peckinpah’s first film. In discussing the others, we have partly recounted Peckinpah’s final work. But the violent anti-militarism, yet still smug in its “super,” grandiose, horrifying overload of insistence, made us uncomfortable in the previous film. The usual objection: to speak ill of war, one shows it in all its bloodiness without holding anything back, but at the risk that the viewer ends up taking a perverse pleasure in it. The case of The Wild Bunch is different, even though it doesn’t skimp on the red, spurting from every body to end up in every corner of the 70 mm. screen. The Wild Bunch in this sense is more cohesive than Major Dundee, the narrative structure more refined, the pacing more essential, the dramatic elements more pared down.
This does not detract from the fact that the film is more dense than its predecessor and dramatically more effective. Especially in its progression, which gradually uncovers a more precise meaning, a clearer moral, a more mature lesson. There is the very fact that it does not center on the military, but rather on bandits who are themselves pursued by prison scum paid by capital—on neutral ground, Mexico, yet fraught with the uncertainties of a local situation on the brink of explosion. The revolution, with its delusional reactionary soldiers, and its peasant and Indigenous rebels. Ultimately, the pursued and the pursuer Ryan (always a magnificent actor, with a face to which age has added bitterness and irony) will have to come to terms with this very reality, confront it, and make a choice. As in The Professionals (which The Wild Bunch brings to mind, but whose meticulous dialogue it rejects because it is above all a Western and wants to be one through and through), the dirty Yankee thugs and mercenaries with no revolutionary past of any kind—as they were in Brooks’s film, but with only the camaraderie among some born of a shared war and then banditry—sell themselves to the highest bidder. But, almost imperceptibly, over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour film, the narrative draws them in with the conspiracy of the few values they have left—values they strenuously defend, yet are drawn into—and with the vision of a horror greater than their own. So in the end, mathematically speaking, there is nothing left—and there is nothing left for the more “Yankified” viewer to see, just as there is nothing left for the characters—but a single choice: to throw themselves into the fray, open fire, provoke a reaction, knowing there is no other way out. And it is the final massacre, which in its epic excess gives way to a quiet moral conclusion that arises from the facts without needing to be explained in words. Ryan and O’Brien pass among the Indians, to continue on their side. As in Shichinin no samurai, the peasant wins, the cause of the land and the poor prevails, and the mercenaries cannot resist its allure—the green paradise of truly human relationships represented by the village where the group had been welcomed—because it is their past, their childhood, their innocence. By grounding the characters in the soil of Western mythology and American heroic mythology, Peckinpah, through the system and without ever having, probably, doubted whether to break free from it (and the years of forced silence must have raised the question for him, if anything), addresses the American “average viewer” intoxicated by John Wayne and demonstrates how the model is ambiguous, how repulsive it has become, while nevertheless saving the little “healthy tradition” it entails: to leverage that, and to demonstrate how the only possibility for redemption and for a new, possible validity of that myth lies solely in the (at least partial) holocaust of the heroes and in the crossing to the other side of the barricade. One can debate the meaning of the operation, its political validity and legitimacy. But not its intrinsic interest for those who, from their small role as “directors of the system,” believe it worthwhile to move and manipulate the great American collective myths for the benefit of the community. And one certainly cannot dispute the magnificent cinematic result that this attempt has given us.
Saverio Esposito
(Ombre rosse, anno III, nº 8, dezembro de 1969, pp. 79-81)