Why John Wayne Hated ‘The Wild Bunch,’ and More Facts About the Western Classic

There are violent movies, and then there’s The Wild Bunch, a film so bloody, so vicious, so cutthroat that even Martin Scorsese can no longer enjoy it. “I just stopped watching it over the years,” Scorsese, no stranger to onscreen bloodshed, told Rolling Stone in 2017. “It’s so mean-spirited. … The beauty of the film is extraordinary. But yeah.”

Released on June 18, 1969, directed by Sam Peckinpah, and starring the likes of William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oates, The Wild Bunch told the story of an aging outlaw gang looking for one last score in Mexico. And it’s regarded as one of the best Westerns of Peckinpah’s career—or anyone else’s. “What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969,” The Baltimore Sun’s Michael Sragow wrote in 2003.

All these years later, how much do you know about The Wild Bunch? See if you already knew the film factoids below.

1 It raced Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to the screen

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William Goldman’s script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid referred to the title characters’ gang of outlaws as the “Wild Bunch,” as they were called in real life, Mental Floss recounts. The Wild Bunch was about a fictional band of ruffians, but there were similarities between the two stories, and Warner Bros. was rushing The Wild Bunch to screen to beat Fox’s Butch Cassidy. The latter film reached theaters three months after the former, with its “Wild Bunch” dubbed the “Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.”

2 Sam Peckinpah and his crew used cutting-edge cinematography

W.K. Stratton, author of the book The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film, told Variety about the movie magic Peckinpah used in the Western. For starters, the telephoto lens with which Peckinpah filmed the Agua Verde showdown was so rare that Warner Bros. only had one of them. The resulting effect gave Holden, Borgnine, Johnson, and Oates a “visually heroic” look, Stratton said.

Also, Peckinpah shot action sequences with as many as six cameras running at once, all at different speeds. That gave The Wild Bunch’s editors “miles and miles of negatives,” with which they could intersperse slow-motion shots with real-time shots. “Nothing like it had ever turned up in American movies before it,” Stratton explained.

3 John Wayne found the movie “distasteful”

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One high-profile Wild Bunch naysayer was Western-genre veteran John Wayne, who called the film “distasteful” in a 1971 Playboy interview. “It would have been a good picture without the gore,” he said. “Pictures go too far when they use that kind of realism, when they have shots of blood spurting out and teeth flying, and when they throw liver out to make it look like people’s insides. The Wild Bunch was one of the first to go that far in realism, and the curious went to see it.”

To Wayne, illusion was “the basic principle” of the film industry. “I don’t think it hurts a child to see anything that has the illusion of violence in it,” he added. “All our fairy tales have some kind of violence—the good knight riding to kill the dragon, etc. Why do we have to show the knight spreading the serpent’s guts all over the candy mountain?”

4 Mel Gibson and Will Smith hoped to make remakes

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Various filmmakers and actors have tried to make a new version of The Wild Bunch. In 2004, David Ayer was attached to a remake described as “a thriller involving heists, drug cartels and the CIA, set in contemporary Mexico,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Before his death in 2012, Tony Scott planned to helm a Wild Bunch remake in a project that would have reunited the director with Man on Fire screenwriter Brian Helgeland, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Then, in 2013, Will Smith was in talks to star in and produce a Wild Bunch remake that would “follow a disgraced D.E.A. agent who assembles a team to go after a Mexican drug lord and his fortune,” per TheWrap. And in 2018, Deadline reported that Mel Gibson had signed on to co-write, produce, and direct a remake for which he later courted Michael Fassbender, Jamie Foxx, and Peter Dinklage. There’s been no news on that front recently, though, so perhaps no one feels bold enough to touch Peckinpah’s original.