As a counterpoint to the heroic horde of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN the ageing gunmen of Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece break the very laws of honour which bind them in this bloody & meditative tale of the American West widely considered to be the self-conscious nail in the coffin of the genre William Holden Robert Ryan & Ernest Borgnine star as the leaders of a grizzled crew of Texan bandits who ride to Mexico where one by one they are unceremoniously slaughtered by a Mexican revolutionary The western a genre steeped in legend & the concept of loyalty was a dying breed when Sam Peckinpah unleashed this amoral & violent opus Along with BONNIE & CLYDE it ushered in a new breed of Hollywood film depicting a harsh reality where lines between right & wrong became blurred Peckinpah brilliantly used ageing Western stars such as Ryan & Holden to convey this passing of the cinematic torch The film brought issues of violence & morality in movies to the forefront of American film criticism Instead of appreciating the film as a critique of brutal violence many critics responded by rejecting what they saw as a superfluous spectacle of dead bodies