The Wild Bunch

Get set for the heart-pounding, adrenaline-soaked, explosive new film season Art of Action. Part of BFI's Art of Action, a UK-wide film season celebrating high-octane cinema, we're bringing a wide-ranging selection of the best-ever action titles to our screens, each including an expert introduction. 

Enjoy any three films from this season (excluding Kubo and the Two Strings, which is Donate What You Can) for the special price of £24 when you book them at the same time. Simply select your tickets and the discount will be applied automatically at the checkout.

This screening will be introduced by Dr Brian Hoyle, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at University of Dundee.

Sam Peckinpah’s dizzyingly savage revisionist western follows a group of outlaws in the dying days of the wild west, as the lawless frontiers of their youth give way to the mechanised brutality of the 20th century. 

The film continues to be influential today; though the western has since fallen out of fashion, most modern takes on the genre follow in the bloody footprints of the Wild Bunch (not least Rockstar Games’ videogame behemoth Red Dead Redemption 2).

William Holden (Sunset Boulevard, Network) stars as Pike, the leader of a ragtag group of ageing outlaws chasing that elusive one last job. After a job gone wrong, the gang (including Warren Oates and the great Ernest Borgnine) flee south to Mexico, where they will come face to face with the impending death of their way of life.

Peckinpah revolutionised the western (and action cinema in general) with the Wild Bunch, filling the film with complex, multi-angle, quickly-edited scenes of balletic violence, and his spectacularly grisly use of ‘squibs’ and slow-motion brought a visceral intensity to the genre. As the BFI put it “Peckinpah set a new standard for screen violence with his film’s bloodthirsty, slow-motion orgies of action and gunfire”