"When you side with a man, you stick with him. If you can't, your like some animal"

That line is spoken by Pike Bishop (William Holden) halfway through the film and to me it sums up the code of honour these men live by, it may not always make sense but to them it's a way of life and they are far to old and Stubborn to change.
The Wild Bunch is Sam Peckinpah's final nail in the coffin of the traditional western, it's bloody and violent, a film inhabited by real men's men, there's no hero's here, only grizzled veterans who have done whatever it takes to survive in this unforgiving period of history.
One of the best cast…

One of my favourite films of all time,I watched this for the first time on blu-ray and was astounded at the quality of EVERYTHING. Peckinpah directs this 1969 masterpiece with genuine love for the genre and with real vigour in his quest to re-establish himself in the film industry after his troubled time on "Major Dundee" and his firing from "The Cincinnati Kid" .
Shot in Mexico, this was a labour of love for Peckinpah who cast some of the best middle-aged actors around at the time. Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates,Robert Ryan and a rejuvenated William Holden give arguably some of the best performances of their careers in this blood-soaked epic. Holden especially is perfectly cast as the ageing leader…

One of the last great Western blockbusters, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is culturally significant for pushing the boundaries of the moral codes of the time by employing then-extreme violence and carefree gunplay. It is probably the most well known film to garner the X rating, and survives and thrives in the minds of western fans everywhere. The film works because it's not just a display of frenetic violence and bloodshed. There's actually a great story, with a great adventure and a great screenplay as well. It feels appropriate that I label this film as one of the last great blockbuster westerns, because the tale embodies the turn of the century, when the dominance of the cowboy slowly but surely…

"It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do."

What struck me first about The Wild Bunch (like Ride the High Country) is its commentary on aging, both in terms of people growing old and of history shifting gears. The titular Wild Bunch is a group of old men who are struggling to live in a changing world which no longer needs them, a world in which they are no longer the heroes they once were. They are scorpions with powerful stings slowly being devoured by the fire ants of the next generation. This theme also fits perfectly into the symbolism of the western: these aging men embody the wildness (literally) of the frontier, slowly receding into the horizon…

It’s not a radical—or original—observation that the Western is the quintessential American genre. Stories about the slow birth of America coupled with a time in which half of it trudged forward while the other half was as yet untamed provide a canvas with which to say any number of things about the country, its values then and/or when the story is being told, and make a statement about the human condition that’s a grounded one, rather than speculative. The Western functioned this way many times over before 1969, with films ranging from Shane to The Searchers making bold, lasting statements that last to this day. The genre even went a little postmodern before that year, with international filmmakers like Sergio…

It's not an easy thing to admit when you know--deep down--that your time has come, and the world has turned. It's a prospect which faces the old, and men of every age, because time is a relentless force that yields to no man, inevitable. The Wild Bunch represents an end of an era, and the birth of another. ​Just as the "traditional western" was in decline in 1969, the Wild West was in 1913. Time catches up to every man, and even in film, the maxim of "adapt or die" rings out like the explosive roar of a machine gun, heralding the end of an age and a kind of man that will not go quietly into that good night.…

A classic revisionist Western, Sam Peckinpah’s realistic portrayal of the final days of the lawless west is an excellent movie. 

The best aspect of the film is the realism throughout the film. Our band of outlaws aren’t good people, Peckinpah shows these men as bastards who’ll do anything to survive but still have that code of honor amoung each other so that they don’t dissolve into animals. The “good guys” are also shown to be vulture-like as they scrounge over dead bodies and yell at each other over who shot who, the only bounty hunter who has decency was an ex-member of the bunch. Peckinpah puts a light of realism on the Western genre that usually told black and white…