“It Ain’t Like It Used to Be. But It’ll Do:” How Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ Became Both a Eulogy for a Mythic Past and a Template for a New Kind of Action • Cinephilia & Beyond

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is the film alliterative praise was made for: bold, balletic, ballistic, and bloodily beautiful. If Sir Christopher Frayling described Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West as “something to do with death” then add “life” to that imprimatur and slap it on Bloody...