In 1913, as America's once-wild frontier is becoming urbanized, suburbanized, and mechanized, the outlaw Pike (William Holden) and his gang flee to the only land left without laws: Mexico, where a brutal general-and a thousand bullets-await. Filmed in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, The Wild Bunch revolutionized American cinema, and arguably American society, with its graphic bloodshed. Where death was once swift and clean in Hollywood's imagination, The Wild Bunch pictured it as slow, chaotic, and brutal. “Listen, killing is no fun,” Peckinpah once said in response to shocked moralists. “I was trying to show what the hell it's like to get shot.” Now considered a classic, and restored to its original length, the film has inspired filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to John Woo; its violence has long since been topped, but its poetic, almost sensuous beauty has not.