Violent Idyls

...otherwise you might as well be some kind of animal...

...The boys' love for their bikes and the road is rapturously conveyed...

...The man whose face is suddenly bathed in crimson perspiration and who sinuously gravitates to the dust is a twin of the pole vaulter who has just cleared or not cleared an improbably high crossbar...

...But Pike is idealized, and here the film goes soft...

...One of the outlaws, Angel, is a Mexican Indian...

...it records the last—ingenious, brutal, heroic—capers of the gang...

...Win or lose is unimportant, what matters is the nobility of the sport...

...But then, again, there are powerful images: an ugly, mannish Mexican woman in Mapache's camp, who sits in full military gear suckling an infant...

...The tele-lens clings to the figure, lovingly flattening out the landscape around and for the rider...

...Is not the epic as such an infantile form of art in both senses: a primitive art form and one appealing to puerile minds...

...George is killed...

...though, feels they blew the whole thing...

...Easy Rider has great surface impact...

...With the editing of Louis Lombardo, we are once more brought up against Bonnie and Clyde...

...When Wyatt speeds off to get help, he too is gunned down...

...his village seems to be full of good, exploited people...

...that his locations and groupings, as well as the faces and peripheral activities that fill a shot have the right look and feel about them...

...He is quite apt to fall into sentimentality and substitute a liquorice stick for his usual wormwood...

...we are left unenlightened about when, how, and by whose fault...

...but even in their behalf no easy sociologizing is trotted out...

...here, from the back, the posture and the way of holding his weapon characterizes each man...

...and, immediately afterward, Pike getting into the saddle and riding defiantly ahead...

...Hanson, the lawyer and black sheep of a prominent family, has drunkenly placed himself in protective custody lest his wrathful father catch up with him...

...Finally seen here was a 1968 Oscar-winning short, The Redwoods...

...I would willingly sympathize with these kids if their case were better argued, if the logic of it all were not simply that the victim is ipso facto innocent...

...And when Wyatt finally concedes, "We blew it...

...Two bruisers in a pickup truck drive past and provoke the boys...

...Sam Peckinpah's latest western appears neither so good as Vincent Canby would have it, nor so loathsome as Judith Crist proclaims...

...In the case of the children, it may be the example of the adults that is to blame, but corrupt they are, and this is something new in a western...

...But was it not so in Homer...

...That Wyatt and Billy have scarcely more conversation than their motorcycles, that they live by dope-smuggling and are hooked on the stuff, that their relationships with girls are trivial if not meaningless, that their freedom is considered a noble end in itself rather than the road to anarchy, is all meant to be swallowed like a happy-pill without questioning...

...Reduced to four, they are finally forced by their loyalty to a butchered comrade to take on the entire division of a semi-bandit Mexican general...

...We would like to think this is tongue-in-cheek, but no, it is pure treacle...

...The fact that the commune, unversed in agriculture, may face starvation is not meant to throw doubt on its sanity...

...Even more than that film, The Wild Bunch revels in bloodletting...

...Terry Southern, he is, if not a hippie, a hipster par excellence...

...George Hanson, the lawyer who is a child at heart, believes that super-humanly intelligent Venutians have infiltrated our world and deplores his countrymen's fear and hatred of those who are free, is a beautifully realized character...

...with two girls from that commune whom the restless young cyclists take to a swimming hole for some aestival dalliance...

...Despite an inventive twist or two, the plot settles all too comfortably into the usual western groove with all the beloved mythic commonplaces...

...Women are represented as particularly untrustworthy, and, next to women, children...

...The unsuspecting heart of the viewer is wrung by the death of a tree, presented as high but understated tragedy...

...Three actors are impeccable: Jean Roche-fort as an impoverished nobleman, Marthe Keller as his prankish daughter, and Jean-Pierre Marielle as a balding playboy...

...But cannot the essence be defective...

...Both the comedy and the acting tend to be a little too dogged, but then there are sudden oases of relaxed absurdity that prove quite winning...

...On the way, they have various encounters: with a toothless farmer whose Mexican wife and large brood share his quiet contentment...

...Although I have seldom if ever enjoyed the films of Philippe de Broca, his current Devil by the Tail strikes me as less pretentious and a trifle funnier than most...

...Doesn't the Iliad chronicle, catalogue, itemize deaths and the details of dying...

...Pike's motto is, "When you side with a man, you stick with him...

...not since baroque poetry and mannerist painting have there been such human fountains, blood spurting from them in manifold jets...

...The film, to the extent that it wants to achieve maturity, must outgrow the western...

...There is no doubt that Peckin-pah has a nice sense of time and place...

...Can one remonstrate with the frequency of refrains in a ballad...

...The bestiality of the herd-men to the outsider comes as a cruelly convincing reminder of the hate that rips America—perhaps the world—a-sunder...

...The entire population lines the main street on both sides, women rush up with sundry farewell goodies, everyone is singing a schmaltzy Mexican song...

...This last is truly lovely: Peckin-pah is a master of the rear tracking shot, for which he uses a telephoto lens...

...Later, it is Angel's own mother who betrays him...

...there are no really good people anywhere, only the less bad and the much worse ones...

...But though the central plea leaves me cold, there remain the dignity of the exteriors, the spry sauciness of the rock numbers on the sound track, the good eye in many of the shots, and the ability to convey the cyclist's passion...

...As for the third coauthor...

...The others, with the exception of the inanely grinning Maria Schell, are at least sporadically amusing, and Daniel Boulanger's dialogue, in the French anyway, manages to be unexpectedly literate as well as funny...

...the landscape is uplifting and various ways of embracing or brushing past it are eloquently depicted...

...Peckinpah is half Indian, and that may have induced our guilt feelings to turn him into an auteur before his time...

...the Mexican soldiery into feckless layabouts, the bounty hunters into scum (this, at any rate, we don't question), and the plain townsfolk into arrant fools...

...chickens scurrying underfoot and underhoof at the damnedest times...

...The gun arcing away from him is the now useless pole, and he the winning or defeated athlete-hero hitting the sandlot...

...Whereas the un-resonant "animal" is not much better than the lush vibrato of "damn yellow-livered trash," such literary weaknesses have a way of being absorbed by the able film-making...

...Still, I wouldn't be surprised if this film that so aches to achieve spontaneity were chiefly remembered for its artful transitions, whereby the next scene is sneaked into the end of the current one with shots of the next locale dizzyingly vibrating through what is present...

...To me...

...find themselves hemmed in on all sides: by the railroads with their bounty hunters, by the vanishing frontier, and by their own advancing years...

...Jerry Fielding's score is serviceable and unobstreper-ous but a long shot from, say, En-nio Morricone's for the Italian western, Once Upon a Time in the West, where the score almost becomes a participant in the action...

...The presentation is one-sided...

...Pike trying to mount his horse and falling off because an old leg wound acts up as his men make sarcastic remarks...

...Wyatt...

...The film has a good many of these oversimplifications, exaggerations or platitudes along its lengthy way...

...His opposite number, Deke, a former gang member who to save his own skin reluctantly leads the bounty hunters, is a considerably more ambiguous character, yet he too is sentimentalized...

...Pike is brought down by the combined bullets of a Mexican prostitute and a little Mexican boy, both of whom shoot him in the back...

...After wreaking conspicuous slaughter, they are themselves finally riddled to death...

...Indeed, there is too much gore in the film...

...They are forced to sleep outdoors and are set upon in their sleep by the ruffians...

...There is an equally fine rear tracking shot following a reverse pan as the four outlaws go forth to liberate Angel from Mapache's hands...

...Except for Angel's concern for his villagers (he sacrifices his share of the loot for them), and the dignity of some of these folk, there are no unalloyed positive values in the film—even the gang's solidarity is labile and continually threatened from within...

...They are photographed either in slow motion or, conversely, in a quick montage of single-frame or very short takes...

...In the morning, he gets the young men out of jail, dons his disused football helmet, and happily goes along for the ride...

...The plot is fairly typical and not worth detailing...

...All this is not so offensive here as in Bonnie and Clyde, from which much of it derives, because there is less obvious sympathy drummed up for the members of the gang, except perhaps for Pike and Angel...

...Throughout the film we see kids enjoying the bloodshed and brutality around them and, whenever possible, joining in the fun, if only by torturing animals...

...The Wild Bunch deals with a group of hardened outlaws who, in 1913...

...The reverse side of the coin is the turning of the railroad people into absolute rotters, the U. S. Cavalry into bumblers (quite an innovation...

...This document about the decimation of the superb trees, and their approaching extinction while Congress fiddles, is deeply moving —though perhaps an ecological oversimplification—and a work of art...

...The objection requires reflecting upon...

...the others are envious, hateful, murderous slaves...

...the blues and beiges predominate, absorbing the flesh tones and virtually excluding the warmer colors of the palette...

...By the use of slow motion, Peckinpah makes these deaths look rather like the similarly decelerated performances of shot putters or high jumpers in Riefenstahl's and Ichikawa's great films of the Berlin and Tokyo Olympiads...

...The dialogue rides high and wide from the awful to the quite acceptable, but the dominant strain runs to things like "Well, why don't you answer me, you damn yellow-livered trash...

...Lucien Ballard's cinematography is skillful but his colors are insufficient...

...In a small Southern town, the brutish constabulary throws them into jail, where they meet George Hanson...

...There is a curious, devil-may-care bravado about these four silhouettes pacing and pacing and pacing into the lion's maw...

...In another small town, the local rednecks and police taunt and humiliate the trio...

...George's ideas about the Venutians are not intended to invalidate the wisdom of his pronouncements...

...The right kind of face and appropriate stance become the performance (William Holden, for instance, does not look Pike enough...

...Thus Dennis Hopper, who directed, co-authored and co-stars, was an Actors Studio hotshot who abandoned all that for the hippie scene...

...Yet upon closer scrutiny and speculation, only one thing in the film holds up completely: Jack Nicholson's dialogue and performance as George Hanson...

...Hippies are basically free, good, and love mankind and life...

...The film concerns Wyatt and Billy, motorcycle hippies from California, who smuggle (rather uncon-vincingly) heroin out of Mexico, sell some immediately to a rich pusher and, with the rest secreted in their gas tanks, zoom off to New Orleans and the Mardi Gras...

...Superficially very different, yet in fact closely related, is Easy Rider, a vaguely underground film made by youngish men who are, in one or another sense of the word, independents—even hippies of sorts...

...but what makes sense in a denizen of the Bronx slums is incomprehensible in a Californian...

...Yet his girl leaves him to be the mistress of Mapache, the swinish general...

...The landscape, no longer open and unspoiled, is industrialized, suburbanized, shanty-towned...

...There are no particularly noteworthy performances in The Wild Bunch (though Jaime Sanchez as Angel is winning without becoming sticky) nor particularly bad ones...

...Take, for instance, the scene where the gang is leaving Angel's village...

...The members of the gang stick together and have a certain code by which their leader, Pike, can, albeit with difficulty, make them behave...

...Yet that, too, is uneven...

...The world of Peckinpah and his co-scenarist Walon Green is predominantly evil...

...The gore is of the essence...

...Laszlo Ko-vacs' photography has a pleasantly informal, spontaneous look...

...But there are differences...

...True, but those are for us the least worthy parts of the poem—and hasn't the epic as a genre bit the dust precisely because it depended overmuch on war and violence and unlikely derring-do...

...the camera seems to bob with him out of sympathy, and a terrible decency pours out of that careworn but gallant back...

...with another hippie who leads them to a commune struggling to survive on meager crops in a scorching summer...

...But killing and dying for sport should not look Olympic or Olympian: The gods who kill us for their sport should not get off the hook so cheaply...

...At this point, the smoke of the camp-fire makes the image blur and swim before our eyes, and the scene becomes appropriately hallucinatory and ominous...

...And Peter Fonda, who produced, co-authored and co-stars, is an actor intimately associated with the drug world...

...Here Pike rides on, his shoulders squared against the jibes, the horse and rider jogging up a sandy slope until they suddenly disappear over its edge...

...Can one cavil at the number of holes in travertine...

...Wyatt and Billy get to New Orleans, where they have a strange relationship with two whores whom they take on an LSD trip...

...Then they continue on their way to Florida, from which Billy, like Rat-so in Midnight Cowboy, expects salvation...

...Billy gives them the finger, is shot and mortally wounded...

...The men who hunt them down or exploit their services, on the other hand, are cruel, greedy, generally craven, and have no code whatever...

...Trevor Greenwood (no relation to the redwoods) and Mark Harris have had the further good idea to use as part of the score the trumpet solo from Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question," one of the most haunting passages in our modern music and here perfectly fitted to the harrowing theme...

...When the figure vanishes from the image, we feel the stab of loss...

...But he is much less sure about the staging of the main action in a scene, except where seedy debauchery or sudden flare-ups of violence are concerned...

...But that is a kind of shorthand, not art: It is much more closely related to traffic signs than to metaphors...

...The result is, first, that a great deal of horror sneaks in sub-liminally, making it more bearable but still present...

...It is, rather, an important bad film, avoidable by people who want genuine art, but recommended to all those interested in the faltering steps by which the American cinema might titubate into maturity...

...secondly, that much of the dying takes on a balletic quality which, again, makes it easier on the eye, though ultimately more appalling...

...it may also give him a keener understanding of his subject matter...

...The camera is on a dolly, the point of view of the departing horsemen, and we are treated to a cordon of picturesque physiognomies, among which we single out the compassionate lineaments of the village elder...