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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
A terrific Oscar-nominated documentary explains what Sam Peckinpah knew in his heart: It's not just blowing up a bridge, but the way you blow up a bridge, that counts.
Oct 20, 2000 | "The Wild Bunch"
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Starring William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien
Warner Studios; widescreen (2.35:1)
Extras: Documentary "The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage"
The must-see extra on the DVD of "The Wild Bunch" is Paul Seydor's Oscar-nominated documentary "The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage," which was previously available only in a limited-edition laser gift box.
When I met Sam Peckinpah's second daughter, Kristen, on the set of "The Osterman Weekend" (1983), I gingerly asked her what it was like to grow up in the wake of such a volatile, galvanizing character. "You have to understand," she told me, "how inspiring it is to be around someone so completely devoted to his art." Watching "The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage," everyone can understand. Pacing in white jeans and shirt sleeves (or no shirt at all) in the blazing sun, this compact, concentrated figure is both charismatic and devastatingly poignant. Whether he's commanding his armies or glowering inscrutably from his director's chair, his presence emits an electric and emotional hum. He's the magnetic center of the chaos that surrounds him -- T.S. Eliot's "still point in a turning world."
This documentary's joltingly fresh footage of Peckinpah working at his peak conveys a rare, urgent feeling, a sort of turbulent hopefulness. It gets across Peckinpah's intuitive command of epic filmmaking and complex storytelling at a time when it looked as if the world could be his, before he was stigmatized with the grandstanding public persona of "Bloody Sam." Too many movies about moviemakers lack one essential ingredient: a keen account of how a director interacts with cast, writer, cinematographer, crew. But a corkscrew twist of fate enabled Seydor to create an uncanny 34-minute chronicle of precisely those relationships. "The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage" is a magical salute to movie production on a grand scale. It's also a moving tribute to Peckinpah the committed artist -- the 20-hour-a-day filmmaker.
Sharing producer's credit on the picture is record producer Nick Redman. A longtime proponent of the work of Peckinpah and his composer, Jerry Fielding, Redman had already begun collecting "Wild Bunch" items when Warner Bros. research manager Bill Rush made an amazing discovery: 72 minutes of silent black-and-white 16 mm footage of Peckinpah and company on location in northern Mexico. No one at the studio was able to give these home movies valid shape and point; some bureaucrats even dubbed them worthless. Redman took them on as a creative challenge -- and called in Seydor.
Redman knew that Seydor was uniquely qualified for the job of cutting these home movies together: A gifted film editor ("Turner & Hooch," "White Men Can't Jump"), he's also a former college professor and the author of "Peckinpah: The Western Films," which Redman aptly describes as "the first academic treatise I'd ever read by a person who understood what a montage was." Redman suggested that Seydor treat the footage as an opportunity to create a documentary version of his book's chapter on "The Wild Bunch." Actually, Seydor does more. Drawing on the work of Peckinpah interviewers and biographers from Stephen Farber and Aljean Harmetz to Garner Simmons and David Weddle, he has conceived of the film as a new entry in the Peckinpah legacy.
