Few will complain that Sam Peckinpah's best film is on the receiving end of a big screen revival, and in its fully restored state. One of the key entries in the Western canon, it retains a bizarre reputation for its violence, matched only by the same director's more violent, much more problematic Cornish Western Straw Dogs made only two years later.

South Texas, 1914. Pike (William Holden) and his gang - among them Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), Lyle (the unimpeachable Warren Oates) and Angel (Lamies Sanchez) - attempt a robbery on a railroad office only to end up shooting their way out, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. They are pursued by a posse lead by Pike's erstwhile accomplice Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), now in the railroad's pay.

The gang flee to Mexico where, to extricate themselves with vicious general Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), they agree to rob a US army munitions train. But Angel's antagonism toward the general (who trashed his home village) eventually leads his friends into a final, shocking bloodbath.

The reputation for violence now seems ill deserved. Certainly the film is brutal - the opening robbery; that final, celebrated shootout - but it's as much in Peckinpah's direction and Louis Lombardo's razor-sharp editing as any perceived gore. By repute the director was shooting on up to half a dozen cameras at once, running at different speeds. The effect is to disorient the viewer, to render his violence at once repulsive and fascinating. His renowned use of slo-mo was never better; the astonishingly overrated John Woo could learn much.

For all it's about blood and honour, the film is as much concerned with ends of things. The Old West in all its death throes. (Contrast the man who falls from his horse with a foot caught in the stirrup at the start with Mapache dragging the battered Angel behind his new car.) In its way, the gang's final sacrifice is the sacrifice of the West, and, by extension, the Western itself. With notable exceptions - The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven (but most definitely not Dances With Wolves) - the genre had been as good as dead for the past quarter century.

Peckinpah's final bloodbath on the cusp of greater, more savage atrocities in Europe (he nods toward WWI by having an immaculate white suited German adviser travel with the Mexican) is both heroic and pathetic. The men here - with the exception of Angel - are all old, all talking about the one last job and getting out. A natural cycle is drawing to its end. The ultimate symbol of the new age is Mapache's machine-gun, which itself runs out of control in the bullet-riddled hands of Pike's men. The six gun will never rule again. The Western certainly never recovered.

Although ostensibly bound to traditional sensibilities, The Wild Bunch is in its way as revisionist as, say, Eastwood's Unforgiven; owing less to the old, melodramatic Wayne-school as the often nihilistic political Italian Westerns of about the same time, like A Bullet For The General or The Big Silence. How often the machine-gun dramatically flourished in those.

Bad receipts backfired on what many considered even then as the director's masterpiece. Without Peckinpah's knowledge, the producer ordered cuts of expositionary material (establishing the relationship between Pike and Thornton especially) and the superb battle between Mapache's troops and Pancho Villa. The butchered version went on to form the backbone of the film's reputation for some 25 years, until lobbying by Martin Scorsese and others pushed Warners to reinstate the director's integral version.

Exciting in itself, maybe, but the 6 extra minutes (6 scenes in all) are not necessarily new and this is pushed as a Director's Cut. Channel 4 and ITV have touted prints for years which include all this material. Chances are therefore (and excepting the always excised throat-slash at the climax) anyone who has seen the film on British TV has already seen this restored print, albeit with the usual advert/pan and scan provisos. Still, if all this then marks is a simple revival, no one should shout too loudly. The Wild Bunch is a remarkable picture by any standards: exciting, vicious, sadistic certainly, but also the elegiac and profoundly moving work of a master filmmaker.