GFT / Sun 3 Mar (10.30)
Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac, blood-soaked western remains one of the finest films of its era, offering startling parallels with the Vietnam War. In 1913, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads his ageing gang of outlaws on a high stakes mission to hijack a munitions shipment. Pursued by bounty hunters and stalked by a former partner, they are confronted by their own mortality and a swiftly changing America, marked by betrayal, greed and senseless slaughter. A film that deliberately fights a Hollywood glamourisation of violence by making it graphic, ugly and deeply felt.