“It’s ballet”: the scene Martin Scorsese called the most exhilarating sequence in cinema
Cinema can create virtually every emotional reaction on the human spectrum, and Martin Scorsese has gone out of his way to try and experience as many as he possibly can.
A studious cinephile since his earliest years, the filmmaker has curated a knowledge of the medium that can’t be matched by many, so his opinion on the scenes that stand the test of time and rank among the finest ever committed to celluloid carries plenty of weight when it comes out of his mouth.
Scorsese has become a one-man encyclopaedia of cinema history, and he seems to remember every detail about every movie he’s ever seen, which is a lot. For context, most people would name a handful of films they’d call their guilty pleasures, but Marty went for broke and rattled off well over 100 of them.
His career has seen him effortlessly weave between genres and time periods to craft dramas, romances, gangster flicks, crime epics, character studies, exercises in spiritualism, and many more. However, the straightforward western clearly isn’t something the icon is too interested in, considering he’s never gone out of his way to make one.
Then again, one of the finest films to ever unfold in the dusty confines of the American West made a monumental impression on Scorsese, to the point he celebrated its single most formidable scene as an exhilarating burst of adrenaline the moving image has rarely bettered.
It came with plenty of controversy attached because audiences had never been exposed to such levels of violence captured in such stylish and innovative fashion, but the climactic showdown in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch eventually took its rightful place as one of the single most influential scenes ever shot.
Scorsese even used it as a jumping-off point when he was concocting the gun-toting finale for a masterpiece of his own, with Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle channelling the spirit of ‘Bloody Sam’ as the filmmaker sought to ensure viewers would be awash with a sense of exhilaration.
“You can’t stop people from getting an exhilaration from the violence in The Wild Bunch,” he told Rolling Stone. “But the exhilaration of the violence at the end of The Wild Bunch and in Taxi Driver – and I know how it’s shot because I shot it and designed it – is also in the creation of that scene in the editing, in the camera moves, in the use of music and the use of sound effects and in the movement within the frame of the characters.”
There are many components required to create a jaw-dropping action beat, and few have ever done it better than The Wild Bunch, with Scorsese calling the grand finale not only “one of the great exhilarating sequences in all of movies” but “one of the great dance sequences in the movies.” In short, “It’s ballet.”
Balletic violence has been a staple of the action genre for a long time, but it was The Wild Bunch that helped popularise it in American cinema once the initial shock had subsided, with Peckinpah laying down a blueprint that countless auteurs – including Scorsese – would follow in the years to come.
