Crossing another river: border and transgression in the films of Sam Peckinpah

“Unchanged men in a changing land. Out of step, out of place and desperately out of time.”—so it says on the movie poster for Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch from 1969. The tagline is all the more poignant since it can and should be read on more than one level: It is not just the movie’s (anti-) heroes that have outlived their time but also the whole genre of the western, which may have become anachronistic in the late sixties. And finally, the movie’s very setting itself is—both geographically and temporally—on the edge