The Wild Bunch.

There is a famous scene near the end of The Wild Bunch when the Bunch, determined and desperate, make a sudden stand against the grinning, grotesque General Mapache and his army of cut-throats and mercenaries. Returning to reclaim the Mexican companion who they had betrayed to the rebels, they arrive to find Mapache's knife at his neck, and Pike, tired of being so tired, summons up all the strength he had saved for the remainder of his life to demand "We want Angel". It is one of those pivotal, fateful lines, tiny as the absolute tip of a mountain where the slope breaks like a straw and plummets sharply downwards, and we cringe even as it is said, knowing already with what malicious glee the General will grant them their wish, giving them their angel by slashing it free from the neck of his captive. It is one of the singlemost sickening scenes in modern cinema, this tawdry denial of identity and existence and meaning, this debasement of the symbolism of our lives to the status of a bad pun by a leering conman. And yet, by freeing the angel of the only member of the Bunch who had one, by giving the gang not the body but the soul of their companion, Mapache also gives them the opportunity to reclaim their own. Even though the crisp choreography of the walk of the Wild Bunch on their way to their fate has something of the stage-managed, demonstrative demises of our Clarissas and our Cleopatras, the bloody massacre in which they die is far from romantic; but they themselves succeed in becoming mythmakers of their own in deaths which do not mould themselves to our consciousness, but force our consciousness to mould itself to them.

Thomas Clark