In the halls, the women fainted. The usherettes had flasks of salt available. Rex Reed, the critic of “Holiday Magazine”, reviled this “pretentious and bloody thing”. Arthur Knight, in the “Saturday Review”, raged against “this revolting film”, and William Wolf, in “Cue”, added a layer: “Ugly, useless, disgusting. » The leagues of morality got involved, tireless crows of misfortune. We were in May 1969. “The Wild Horde” had just been released on the screens, and made a sensational entry into the history of cinema. Today, Sam Peckinpah’s film is considered a classic, no offense to chairwomen and fathers-of-virtue.
It was shot in the dust of Mexico, soaked in blood, steeped in the flames of hell, and staged just as American GIs razed the village of My Lai, Vietnam, leaving behind 500 corpses… The stage manager of the film had planned 4,000 blank cartridges, as for a normal western. The stock ran out on the second day. In total, “the Wild Horde” consumed… 90,000 cartridges!
The sequel after the ad
Hence the sword in Oscar’s hands…
The shooting was daunting: the stuntmen were fighting every night, the Rio Nazas (which represents the Rio Grande in the film) was in flood, the producers demanded cuts, the slow motions were very difficult to control… An anecdote: Emilio Fernández , the actor who plays General Mapache, showed up on the set with a harem of young girls – he was in his sixties – and loaded guns in his belt. It was he who once served as a nude model for Cedric Gibbons, the designer of the Oscar statuette. When Fernández saw Dolores del Río, Gibbons’ sublime wife, pass, he had an erection, obviously noticed. Hence the sword in Oscar’s hands…
In 1979, I met Peckinpah, in Tokyo. He was lean, wore a bandana on his head and had a seductive little mustache. Most striking were his eyes. They were faded, colorless, absent. Alcohol, amphetates, drugs had withered his soul. Of the genius of the “Savage Horde”, only a ghost remained, lost in the corridors of a grand hotel at the end of the world.
Saturday May 6 at 11:55 p.m. on TCM Cinéma. Sam Peckinpah’s American Western (1969). With Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden, Ernest Borgnine. 2h15. (Multicast and On Demand).
