Director/co-writer Sam Peckinpah’s provocative, brilliant yet controversial breakthrough Western was shocking for its graphic and elevated portrayal of violence and savagely-explicit, orgiastic carnage, yet hailed for its truly realistic and reinterpreted vision of the dying West in the early 20th century (at a time when mass-produced murder was possible with the Gatling gun). The film opened with innocent village children intrigued by putting red fire ants and scorpions together and setting fire to the swarming pile. The much-imitated, influential film was book-ended by two extraordinary sequences, both massacres. The gang of desperadoes were first assaulted in the film’s opening ambush following a failed bank robbery in a Texas border town, and then brutally destroyed in the film’s conclusion – as united comrades in a selfless, redemptive act – by a savage and vindictive Mexican warlord named Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) after a double-crossing arms deal.
