Sam Peckinpah deftly directed one of the all-time outstanding entries in the western genre with The Wild Bunch. The movie is gifted with a brilliant screenplay, which was co-written by Peckinpah, and features an extraordinary ensemble cast, including William Holden, Robert Ryan and Ernest Borgnine. Holden displays enormous power and draws on the relaxed and easy-going, and possibly insensitive, characters he commonly portrays, but here he's imbued with a tough indignance and embitterment.
The editing possesses a variety of impetuses such as the comprising of slow-motion; which have come to be imitated to the level of cliché nowadays in exaggerated action sequences. It was released during the heights of the Vietnam War and provoked unfavourable and inhospitable reactions from many audiences, but even the movies more controversial sequences contain an imaginative style of expression, and the conclusive consequences make for a mesmerising and outstanding film.