By now you might think that familiarity has bred indifference, but you'd be wrong.
Deception pops up everywhere.
The robbers disguise themselves as soldiers, but the bounty hunters on their trail substitute metal washers for the money. In Mexico, the dictator Mapache has the wild bunch steal guns for him, but the diversion of some of the armaments to rebel forces by Angel, the bunch's youngest member, leads to their destruction. Peckinpah's view of women is, of course, indefensible, but then so is his view of humanity. The director was one of the very few filmmakers who could create a world that, however nastier or more brutish than the one we live in, never felt smaller or less complex. That, not the restored scenes mostly dealing with the past between Holden' Pike Bishop and Robert Ryan's Thornton, remains the revelation of this remarkable movie.