MikePadgett.com

• Director: Sam Peckinpah
• United States, 1969
• 

Even from the earliest scenes in The Wild Bunch, it’s clear that Peckinpah’s West has already been won. As the eponymous collective conducts a bank robbery that significantly thins its numbers, what’s startling is the refinement of the town in the background. There are lawns, trees, ladies and children. So the carnage of their subsequent escape from this scene is both shocking and incongruous: we’re almost relieved when we cut to the kind of classic Western scenery with which we’re more familiar.

As the Old West fades away, the leading characters of the film are increasingly anachronistic symbols of the past and what makes the movie riveting is the simple fact that Peckinpah gives his characters that knowledge.

To be sure, some things don’t work well in The Wild Bunch. The ‘buddy’ scenes that follow the gang’s frequent fall outs aren’t always convincing and the womanising has too much of the cirque grotesque about it, but the movie wisely leaves the lyricism to Leone and leaves us instead with simpler impressions of glorious failure and an uncertain future.

• Director: Kim Ji Woon
• Korea, 2005
• 

When A Bittersweet Life was screened at Cannes, one journalist compared the film’s inscrutable lead Byung Hun Lee to the 70s Alain Delon.

As you watch the sartorially elegant Lee’s protagonist Sun Woo go about his business early doors in the movie, it’s hard to disagree. However, the chilled liquid of Sun Woo’s self-control starts to evaporate fast when the simple task of tailing the mafia boss’ latest squeeze gets out of hand and even running a classy mob hotel becomes a bloody affair. Fortunately, the dark red stuff just happens to set off nicely the black marble of the décor.

Here, Lee is anything but the charming soldier boy he played in JSA. He’s debonair, driven and when it comes to handling multiple stabbings and gunshot wounds, he’s tough as old boots. He just gets up and gets on with this very Korean ode to stylised violence.