Titus & John Marini discuss the most impressive of Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, The Wild Bunch. We talk about Peckinpah's ambivalent view of Progress, his Rousseauan attempt to ground human happiness in an innocent state of nature that recalls Eden, & his thoughts on nobility--what does it mean to have integrity, to be a man of one's word, & to stick together with other men. Peckinpah made the Western into a tragedy & raised the spectacle of freedom to the pitch of agony & is for this reason the worthy counterpart to John Ford's epic grandeur.
