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Peckinpah is sometimes guilty of overkill himself. Action sequences—like an attack by the Villa forces on Mapache —occasionally destroy the continuity of the elaborate story, and flashbacks are introduced with surprising clumsiness. These, happily, are not typical moments. More characteristic are the sweeping visual panorama of the whole film (stunningly photographed by Lucien Ballard) and the extraordinarily forceful acting from a troupe of Hollywood professionals. Holden hasn't done such good work since Stalag 17, and the bunch —Ernest Borgnine, Warren Gates, Ben Johnson, Edmond O'Brien, Jaime Sanchez—all look and sound as if they had stepped out of a discarded daguerreotype. As the reluctant head of the band of bounty hunters, Robert Ryan gives the screen performance of his career.
Final Tenacity. For all this, The Wild Bunch is Sam Peckinpah's triumph. His hard-edged elegies for the West come from a life spent absorbing its folkways. Born into a California pioneer family, Peckinpah is a hard liver who has found some of his script ideas by doing research in barrooms and bordellos. Because he is scrappy and unwilling to compromise, he has spent a good deal of his professional time warring with the money men in the front office, who truncated Major Dundee and fired him from The Cincinnati Kid after three days of shooting. "You have to worry and fight until you get what you want," he once said, and if Peckinpah has battled more than most, his tenacity has finally paid off.
The Wild Bunch contains faults and mistakes, but its accomplishments are more than sufficient to confirm that Peckinpah, along with Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn, belongs with the best of the newer generation of American film makers.