ByTowne ByTowne Cinema
ByTowne Cinema
325 Rideau St. Ottawa K1N 5Y4
Info Line: (613) 789-FILM
The Wild Bunch
Print this pageMust-See Cinema! Peckinpah’s groundbreaking Western!
Reissued Director's Cut (1995)
Sam Peckinpah’s Western epic – perhaps the greatest American movie – is a brilliant, suspenseful action picture about a band of outlaws on the run in south Texas and Mexico in the days before the First World War. It has been restored to its full 2 hour and 24 minute length, and the restored scenes – mostly flashbacks to painful moments in the life of the gang’s leader, Pike Bishop (William Holden) – deepen and complicate the viewer’s responses to the film’s violent set pieces. The voluptuous carnage in the opening shoot-out and in the climactic massacre is more disturbing than ever, because it’s now tinged with the melancholy of an aging killer. The complete film makes clear that this was always meant to be Pike’s story: a portrait of a Western survivor who becomes, in the end, an artist of death.
– Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker
This web site is very useful, but the hard copy of the ByTowne guide still has its merits. People rely on it and love it. Plus, its calendar pages can be pulled out and posted on your fridge door, something that we still can't achieve with the web site. Get your copy today at many local stores, coffee shops and info centres around town! 