ABSTRACT
Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) achieved similar results. Its ‘dirty’ West, peopled with psychopaths and down-on-their-luck bad guys brought to life with the most elaborate and graphic violence yet filmed, exploded the boundaries of the Western, making it very difficult for subsequent filmmakers to work in the genre because of the enormity of Peckinpah’s accomplishment. How could one make a Western after The Wild Bunch? Many did, of course, but that film cast a shadow upon their work, a set of standards by which it would be measured and judged.
