Peckinpah’s classic tale of aging desperados determined, against all odds, to forge one last stand, gives new meaning to Hemingway’s dictum of “grace under pressure.” The Wild Bunch gained instant notoriety for its extended sequences of orgiastic violence, with less attention paid to the technical and artistic genius behind them—Peckinpah’s combination of distinct camera setups and the complex, lyrical montage and slow motion camerawork that extended the pioneering work of Kurosawa and Arthur Penn, two directors Peckinpah greatly admired. The film is riveting not only for its violence but also for its vision of a forgotten generation of obsolete warriors, not unlike the wandering ronin so prominent in the films of Kurosawa and Kobayashi. The extraordinary cast of weathered tough guys, helmed by William Holden and Robert Ryan, seem an almost Shakespearian embodiment of the studio system’s decline, a gang of vanquished matinee kings complete with the hoary Edmund O’Brien as their bellowing Fool.

In 1995, seventy minutes of black-and-white footage shot on the set of The Wild Bunch were discovered at Warner Brothers. That footage became the basis for  this insightful documentary about the film, directed by Paul Seydor, an editor and author of an early book-length studies on Peckinpah. Using previously unseen on-set footage, stills and interviews with surviving members of the film’s cast and crew, Seydor explores the making of The Wild Bunch, focusing on the construction of several of the film’s famous sequences.