The Wild Bunch and violence in cinema

The late 60s were a turning point for everything, especially movies. In early movies, violence had been shown, but not to an excessive or even realistic degree. In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde came out, giving movie goers the first realistically violent action-drama. As I said, violence had been somewhat taboo in all movies before this one, but no where was it more taboo than in westerns. John Wayne spent many a movie gunning down Indians without giving viewers a drop of blood. This all changed in The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah's controversial choice to include a splash of blood with each shot transformed the movie, and made it something that no one had ever seen before. The gunfights were now realistic, the blood gave each character a realism that was unseen in westerns. Each death became strikingly real, and rather that a triuph, death would now be viewed as a tragedy.