The Wild Bunch (1969) was the definitive film, and only true epic, by one of Hollywood's greatest directors, Sam Peckinpah; and when it came to movie violence, it set the bar higher than it had ever been set before. Earlier Westerns had good guys and bad guys as clearly demarcated as the sides in World War II, but The Wild Bunch came out during the Vietnam War, and it better reflected that war in both its complexity and carnage. Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which ended with its two protagonists being riddled by bullets, was the first major Hollywood film to show graphic violence—to suggest that shooting someone had consequences, that it was messy and painful—but nothing could have prepared 1960s audiences for the hundreds of deaths, the wave after wave of unrelenting carnage—shown in slow motion and freeze-frame...