This is one of the 10 Westerns you must see in your lifetime: Released 55 years ago, it remains an irresistible monument.

At the turn of the century, in a small town in South Texas near the Mexican border, a group of robbers prepares to attack the offices of a railroad company. But the hunted hunters follow… The confrontation degenerates, and only five survivors manage to reach Mexico, then torn by civil war. The final reckoning will only get more brutal…

“Deep drama Sam Peckinpah, is that he was born too late. A descendant of famous pioneers, Peckinpah was born at a time when his ancestors were part of California legend: unable to live their epic history, he had to be content to collect its echoes.

And it was still too late, ten years too late, that he came to the cinema, embarking on a tumultuous career filled with battles lost because they were doomed to constant misdirection.” wrote film historian Michael Henry Wilson in an excellent book “At Heaven’s Gate: 100 Years of American Cinema”Armand Colin published in 2014.

This reflection naturally applies to his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, a Twilight Western that is rightly considered Hollywood’s definitive answer to the wave of Spaghetti Westerns.

“I Made a Movie About America’s Guilty Conscience”

It’s a dying West with a damaged modernity (we’re in 1911, witnessing the first cars…) that the filmmaker portrays, within which the leader of this gang, Pike Bishop (an enthusiastic William Holden), seems to want a vacation. From a world he no longer understands. Like Peckinpah.

The filmmaker gave his film extreme violence, which was very rare at that time. “I want the audience to feel the most powerful, the most terrifying, cataclysmic, irresponsible violence that can overwhelm a person.”– said the film director. “I made this film because I was very angry against the whole Hollywood mythology of outlaws, criminals, against the romanticism of violence (…C) a film about America’s guilty conscience.

The bet succeeded beyond its expectations: viewers at the time were shocked by this wave of violence, which even became apocalyptic in the final series of the anthology, which was sublimated by Peckinpah’s editing skills.

55 years after the speech, Wild Horde It remains an absolutely irresistible film.