In plain-spoken words and eloquent pictures, Seydor gives us Peckinpah as a demanding and attentive actor's director, ripping the clothes off O'Brien's back and providing him with a single "dead man's" suit to wear; and as a master planner, whether making 350 Mexican soldiers look like 6,000 for the climactic massacre (which the crew called "The Battle of Bloody Porch") or preparing to blow up a bridge while a string of wary stunt horsemen stretches across it. Best of all, Peckinpah registers as an improviser of genius. We see how his cryptic decision "to do a walk thing" fortifies the Wild Bunch's final confrontation with a Mexican overlord and makes this most intricate of all westerns pay off. Although the documentary stays focused on Peckinpah, it shows how even a visionary artist depends on his power to energize his forces. That "walk thing" is solely the director's idea. But assistant director Cliff Coleman helps him layer in the background of Mexican troops and peasants groggily awakening to a red-hot morning. And the actors are so deep into their roles that with little apparent guidance they adopt beautiful, telling postures: Ben Johnson and Ernest Borgnine cradle their rifles in their arms on either side of the quartet; Warren Oates carries his as casually as a walking stick; William Holden, ever erect, holds his barrel down like a sidearm.

The film is replete with offhand wisdom and unstressed feeling; it's the rare movieland documentary blessed with generous spirits. Green, for example, articulates unusual appreciation for the director's handling of his script, even when he recollects quarreling with Peckinpah's decision to change a cable crossing of a river into a race across a dynamite-laden bridge. "Christ, you're not going to blow up another bridge," he griped. "It's not just blowing up a bridge," responded Peckinpah, "it's the way you blow up a bridge."

From the opening minutes, when Seydor puts the audience in the elating position of filmmakers heading into uncharted realms of Mexico on a go-for-broke adventure, he allows us to experience film production as an odd communal organism with a bittersweet brief time span. He folds in the "back story" of Peckinpah's volatile past as cunningly as Peckinpah folded in the back story of the Wild Bunch; you keep rooting for Peckinpah to do things right and redeem years of unemployability. When the grips disassemble the light and camera rigs, and the stars and extras disperse, you're stung by loss. You believe it when Peckinpah says, "The end of a picture is always the end of a life."

Seydor was lucky that the three days covered in the 16mm footage included such high drama as the "walk thing," the beginning of "The Battle of Bloody Porch" and the preparation for detonating the bridge. But the translucent, parchmentlike quality of the black and white has an alchemy that goes beyond spectacle. The historical content of "The Wild Bunch" mingles with the history of the making of the film, so that when you see Mexican and American soldiers on horseback, or an outlaw killing time with a lasso, you don't know where one continuum ends and the other begins. The sense of the past is engulfing and immediate.

When Seydor intercuts glorious color scenes from the completed movie, they cinch Peckinpah's place in posterity. They affect adult movie lovers the way Oz breaking into color affects kids: Your heart surges to see Peckinpah's hopes realized. Seydor suffuses his film with fierce affection for the frontiers of the Old West and of new Hollywood (circa 1968-69). "The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage" is a piercing elegy to a born director and to a vanished strain of unbridled creativity in American movies.

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