gregorygalloway:
The Wild Bunch premiered in Los
Angeles, CA on 18 June 1969.
The film was immediately declared
a masterpiece by some critics (e.g. Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert) and
criticized for its violence by others. Sam Peckinpah had been effected by the
sanitized violence on TV and in the movies, especially compared with the
violence of the Vietnam War shown on the nightly news. He saw the violence in
The Wild Bunch as “ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it’s not fun and games
and cowboys and Indians. It’s a terrible, ugly thing, and yet there’s a certain
response that you get from it, an excitement, because we’re all violent
people.“
The film was a box office success
and earned 2 Academy Award nominations: Best Original Screenplay (Walon Green,
Sam Peckinpah, Roy Sickner) and Best Original Score (Jerry Fielding). Both
awards went to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (screenwriter William Goldman
and composer Burt Bacharach).