The Wild Bunch

As with the majority of Peckinpah's work, the studios and producers mutilated the film to suit their needs (to cut its length, to eliminate controversy, to prove their power over the ever-difficult Peckinpah) and distributed a movie vastly different from the one the director had originally envisioned. The cutting occurred while Peckinpah was vacationing in Hawaii, after his film had been shown uncut to reviewers on the East Coast. (New York Times critic Vincent Canby expressed dismay when he went to see the film again and discovered scenes missing.) Certainly it was not adverse preview reaction that spurred Feldman to make the cuts (the trimmed scenes contained important motivational information vital to the portrayals of the main characters--none of the deletions was a particularly violent scene). These revisions were simply made to bring the film's running time down to two hours, to enable theater owners to turn more of a profit from the feature. With the director's uncut version now readily available on video and laserdisc, there is no reason for anyone to subject themselves to the butchered version.