Director/co-writer Sam Peckinpah's provocative, brilliant yet controversial breakthrough Western was shocking for its graphic and elevated portrayal of violence and savagely-explicit, orgiastic carnage, yet hailed for its truly realistic and reinterpreted vision of the dying West in the early 20th century (at a time when mass-produced murder was possible with the Gatling gun). The film opened with innocent village children intrigued by putting red fire ants and scorpions together and setting fire to the swarming pile.

The much-imitated, influential film was book-ended by two extraordinary sequences, both massacres. The gang of desperadoes were first assaulted in the film's opening ambush following a failed bank robbery in a Texas border town, and then brutally destroyed in the film's conclusion - as united comrades in a selfless, redemptive act - by a savage and vindictive Mexican warlord named Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) after a double-crossing arms deal. The two scenes included some of the bloodiest, most violent shoot-ups ever filmed. Peckinpah choreographed each of the film's two bloodbaths as a visually prolonged, beautiful ballet - a semi slow-motion, aesthetically breath-taking, non-gratuitous, lyrical, extreme celebration of bodies spurting blood and being torn apart by bullets. The slaughter of innocent bystanders (in a temperance parade), and the use of women as shields (in the all-male film) were served up as counterpoints to the media's honest display of violence during the late 60s, with the Vietnam War, assassinations, urban riots, and other events filling the airwaves.

Due to its violence, the film was originally threatened with an X-rating by the newly-created MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), but an R-rating was its final decision. A so-called 'director's cut' version of the film, threatened with an NC-17 rating when submitted to the MPAA ratings board in 1993 prior to a re-release in 1994, held up the film's re-release for many months.