Sam Peckinpah is an American director who came out of television in the fifties. He directed some memorable episodes of The Rifleman before embarking on a series of features which included some of the best westerns of all time: Guns in the Afternoon, Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch.There have been so many bloodthirsty adventure films made in the last 20 years that one tends to forget what a shock wave The Wild Bunch made when it came out in 1969. It was both condemned as violent pornography and lauded and at least one journalist - Alexander Cockburn - was so incensed that he got into a fist-fight in the cinema. In retrospect, The Wild Bunch - with its random cruelty, its senseless massacres, high-tech killing and gangsters dressed as US soldiers taking hostages and murdering old ladies - seems to be an early feature about Vietnam.