The Western is an incredibly diverse and effective genre. It can tell stories about love and betrayal, lone lawmen against outlaws, or outlaws against the law. It’s drawn in stars like Clint Eastwood, James Stewart, and Kevin Costner over the years, and is known for its clear distinctions and deep roots in American history. But that doesn’t mean that every Western star is a fan of every Western feature. In fact, there is one Western giant that John Wayne famously detested a film by Sam Peckinpah that took audiences by storm. If you guessed The Wild Bunch, you’d be right — and Wayne may even be right too.
John Wayne Didn’t Think the Violence in ‘The Wild Bunch’ Was Necessary
If you thought that Western actors were always supportive of advancements in the genre, you’d be wrong. In an infamous 1971 interview with Playboy, John Wayne said a lot of things that have irked people over the years, but there’s one section of this interview that is quite interesting when we consider his reasoning. Here, the Duke cited his distaste for the beloved Sam Peckinpah Western, The Wild Bunch, and he makes an interesting argument. “To me, The Wild Bunch was distasteful,” Wayne explained. “It would have been a good picture without the gore. Pictures go too far when they use that kind of realism, when they have shots of blood spurting out and teeth flying, and when they throw liver out to make it look like people’s insides.” For the True Grit star, movies didn’t need to look or feel as realistic as The Wild Bunch — an interesting way to use to describe Peckinpah’s over-the-top graphic violence.
Of course, by today’s standards, there are far more pictures out there that are infinitely more violent and grotesque than The Wild Bunch. Just look at any of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, including his own horse operas, The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained. But back in 1969, The Wild Bunch was about as violent as a movie could get — especially a Western. While the film itself has largely been considered analogous to the Vietnam War, its use (possibly overuse) of blood, gore, and brutality was deemed realistic by some and detestable by others.
Wayne, obviously, fell into the latter category. It’s worth noting that the Duke never thought that The Wild Bunch was a bad movie on its own. Quite the contrary, he claims that it would have been good without the added gore delivering an intriguing contrast to many who consider the film to be distasteful due to the glorification of the criminal element. Instead, Wayne takes particular issue with the style in which The Wild Bunch is presented, and one can’t totally blame him.
Wayne came from an “old guard” of Old Hollywood legends who didn’t need excessive violence to tell a good story. In fact, many of the Westerns of Wayne’s day — The Searchers comes to mind — still include violence as a main story element or feature. The fact that Ethan Edwards is a man of violence himself is a major part of his character and leads to that climactic moment at the film’s end. However, these films rarely (if ever) dwell on the violence itself. Violent activity was a means to an end, with the blood and guts all implied rather than captured. The Wild Bunch, and many of the “revisionist Westerns” that followed, changed that by presenting the violence itself as a theme to be wrestled with. Of course, the success of this tactic is debatable, and the Duke certainly had no love for it.
John Wayne Made His Most Violent Pictures Around the Same Time as ‘The Wild Bunch’
Ironically, around the time of this interview, Wayne made two of the most violent Westerns in his filmography, The Cowboys and Big Jake. Both of these films feature intense levels of violence (when compared to his earlier films) that no doubt alienate even some of his longest-running fans off. However, the difference was that the Duke’s pictures didn’t go as “over the top” with the consequences of violence as Peckinpah’s did. Even when blood was drawn in one of his films (in Big Jake, one villain is stabbed with a pitchfork), it never felt too gory or gruesome. Even the end of The Cowboys, which is a massacre, feels tame in comparison to The Wild Bunch.
The violence as seen in The Wild Bunch is more than realistic, it borderlines the type of blood-and-guts sequences you might otherwise see in a horror flick. While many of the wounds seen in the final shootout sequence look quite real to the naked eye, there is still a clear separation from reality as blood sprays and splatters in ways it likely wouldn’t realistically.
Ultimately, the Duke chalked all this up to one thing that he believed the Hollywood film industry was losing: the art of illusion. “We’re in the business of magic. I don’t think it hurts a child to see anything that has the illusion of violence in it,” Wayne explained. In his view, there was a clear difference between traditional movie violence — which echoes the fairy tale stories of knights killing dragons — and what Peckinpah was trying to achieve with The Wild Bunch. “Why do we have to show the knight spreading the serpent’s guts all over the candy mountain?” Wayne asked.
To be fair to the Duke, he does have a point. Many of his own Westerns got the same points across — the notion that violence and crime don’t pay — without nearly as much graphic material as Peckinpah did. Even when he did use more violent means, such as in Big Jake and The Cowboys, it was only window dressing for the larger idea rather than as a driving force of the narrative. We should also note that Peckinpah’s previous Western, Ride the High Country, managed to make this point and still feels actively more traditional in its execution. It’s understandable why Wayne was thrown off by The Wild Bunch, and the same goes for other audiences at the time too. There’s a reason that this feature is still mighty controversial, and that’s something that can’t be ignored. However, there’s also something to be said about what Peckinpah was trying to do here. It was gutsy (in more ways than one), but an important leap for the Western to make.
‘The Wild Bunch’ May Be Graphic but John Wayne Shouldn’t Have Written It Off
In his book, “If They Move — Kill ‘Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah,” David Weddle notes that the director aimed to make the audience consider the actual violence around them and to remove the “façade of movie violence” that previous Western pictures had pacified audiences with. “It’s not fun and games and cowboys and Indians,” Weddle quotes Peckinpah as saying. “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.” In the end, the director was less than pleased with the results, not because of how it looked on screen, but because audiences seemed to be riveted by his violent action sequences rather than appalled. Peckinpah saw the potential for violence within himself, and it was because of that, and seeing it in all of humanity, that he aimed to make this picture more as a warning than anything else. It’s a bleak Western, but one that makes you think when the credits roll.
Of course, Wayne was right to be cautious of violence in the movies. In the decades since, Hollywood has gotten increasingly more violent. To say otherwise would be to ignore the slew of action movies, slasher flicks, and violent dramas (historical or otherwise) that flood theaters, streamers, and television screens each year. Peckinpah’s warning did not seem to work. If anything, The Wild Bunch only promoted the use of violence and gore in future pictures, and there was nothing Wayne could do to stop it. “Haven’t we got enough of that in real life?”
Wayne asked in his Playboy interview. “Why can’t the same point be made just as effectively in a drama without all the gore?” A solid question, but one that, unfortunately, seems to have no definitive answer. To this day, The Wild Bunch is a triumph of the Western genre, and a fascinating exploration of human nature and the violent tendencies that spring from it. However, if you’re not so interested in watching fake blood and guts spill out on screen, you’ll be safe with any of John Wayne’s Westerns instead.