This is a French poster for Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, one of the all-time great elegiac Westerns.

The Wild Bunch is best known for its slow-motion “bullet ballets”, as featured in both the extended opening sequence and the climax, as various protagonists get ripped to shreds by gunfire. It became part of the debate about movie violence back in the 70s. 

But there is more to The Wild Bunch than that. The tone of the movie is well summed up in the tag-line that appeared on the English posters: “Nine men who came too late and stayed too long.”  William Holden and his bunch know they are dinosaurs and that they are all going to die in a shootout, but they don’t unduly care, and head towards certain death with macho determination.

This great poster is available to buy here.