Vitals

Ben Johnson as Tector Gorch, tough outlaw

Texas to Mexico, Spring 1913

Film: The Wild Bunch
Release Date: June 18, 1969
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Costume Designer: James R. Silke

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Today is the 30th anniversary since the death of one of my favorite actors: Oklahoma-born cowboy, rancher, and Oscar winner Ben Johnson. The son of a rodeo champion who later won a world championship himself, Johnson’s screen cowboy credentials were bona fide. He caught the eye of director John Ford while working as a stuntman in the 1940s, swiftly translating his presence into acting.

Due to his horsemanship and manner, Johnson typically appeared in war films and westerns like 3 Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Shane (1953)—the latter being his last film during his brief hiatus to compete in the Rodeo Cowboys Association and be named Team Roping World Champion, which he later described as the greatest honor in his life. He was soon back on screen, eventually diversifying his roles including the sagacious “Sam the Lion” in Peter Bogdanovich’s coming-of-age drama The Last Picture Show (1971), for which he won the Academy Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe among a host of other accolades.

Amidst this, Johnson also joined the grizzled cast of the revisionist western The Wild Bunch (1969), which starkly reimagined the romance of classic westerns through director Sam Peckinpah’s characteristically violent lens.

Four years before they would star on opposite sides of the law in Dillinger (1973), Johnson and Warren Oates portrayed the Gorch brothers—pimps and outlaws loyal to each other before all else, and thus resentful of newcomers to the gang. Johnson’s Tector is slightly more levelheaded, at least when compared to Oates’ more wild and impulsive Lyle… though this is a low bar, as Tector demonstrates his rebellious streak through actions like tossing a lit pack of dynamite at Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) during the poor old man’s afternoon constitutional.

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What’d He Wear?

After discarding the U.S. Army corporal’s uniform that he wore when the gang disguised themselves to rob the south Texas bank during the opening sequence, Tector Gorch changes into a dusty striped suit, open-necked shirt, and weathered cowboy hat, which he’d wear through the duration of The Wild Bunch.

Tector’s cowboy hat is crafted from a light sandy silverbelly felt with a tall, straight-sided crown in the classic telescope shape but with a subtle cattleman-style crease. The hat features a plain black grosgrain band and a self-edged brim that dramatically curls around the sides.

Tector’s soft wool sack suit appears to be a black twill with muted rust stripes. Appropriately for his character and the context, the suit more functional than fashionable. The single-breasted jacket follows the characteristic relaxed cut of contemporary American sack suits with soft shoulders, ventless back, and a straight-hanging, boxy fit not shaped by darts. Reinforced with narrow welts stitched along the edges, the lapels have wide notches and taper to a full three-button front that Tector always wears open. The jacket also has a welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, and spaced two-button cuffs.

Tector’s flat-front trousers match his suit jacket with the subtle striping against the black twill ground. They have a full, straight fit through the legs down to plain-hemmed bottoms that he wears over his boot shafts. The style reflects the era, from the button fly to the belt loops that were increasingly popular on men’s trousers. He holds them up with a hefty brown roughout leather belt that closes through a wide rectangular brass-toned single-prong buckle.

For the second half of The Wild Bunch as the gang spends more time south of the border, Tector swaps out his suit jacket for a vest—which actually appears to be a chore jacket with the sleeves torn off. The black cotton fabric has flat-felled seams like denim. Many of the front buttons are missing, evidently replaced with cruder brown toggles. The collar is faced in a black wide-wale corduroy, matching the fraying single-button flaps over the two box-pleated chest pockets.

The vest also introduces Tector’s habit of wearing additional brown leather bandoliers with rifle rounds, presumably for the Winchester Model 1892 Saddle Ring Carbine that he carries into the final gunfight. (Though the cartridges look considerably longer than any of the handgun-length rounds chambered by the Model 1892.) He almost always wears a bandolier looped over his right shoulder, sometimes supplemented with a second one around his waist like a makeshift Sam Browne belt.

These are always in addition to his usual gun-belt, a swath of wide brown leather with cartridge loops around the sides and back and a ranger-style strap across the front that closes through a silver-toned single-prong buckle. He carries his Single Action Army revolver in a darker brown leather retention-strap holster looped around the belt’s right side, supported by a tie laced around his right thigh, and he keeps a fixed-blade knife holstered in a scabbard on his left side.

Further differentiating his look from the others, Tector is also the only member of the bunch to regularly wear chaps. His tanned rawhide chaps are fringed along the sides of each leg. These screen-worn chaps are currently on display at the Ben Johnson Cowboy Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

Through it all, Tector wears a fraying pale-stone cotton shirt, cut with a voluminous fit that likely eases movement and air flow without looking excessively baggy under his suit jacket or self-made vest. The shirt has a soft spread collar, beige four-hole buttons up the plain front, and two-button squared cuffs. Like his vest, the shirt shows signs that Tector has mended it himself with one of the two buttons on the right cuff replaced with a black button; while Tector cares enough to fix his clothes, he focuses more on maintaining the function. He ties a black silk kerchief under the shirt’s open neck to catch sweat.

Tector wears a set of weathered and perpetually dust-covered brown leather cowboy boots, naturally rigged with spurs.

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The Guns

Tector Gorch’s weaponry differentiates him from the rest of the gang, favoring more classically “western” firearms like a single-action revolver and lever-action rifle as opposed to the semi-automatic pistols and pump-action shotguns carried by his brothers-in-arms… and his literal brother.

Single Action Army

While Lyle matches the rest of the bunch with one of the Army-authorized M1911 pistols (actually a Star Model B) in his gun-belt, Tector sticks with the older Single Action Army as his primary sidearm. One of the most iconic firearms of all time, Colt began producing the Single Action Army in 1873. At the time, the “Peacemaker” was most typically configured in .45 Long Colt with a 7½” Cavalry barrel, though the lineup expanded to more than 30 calibers and a variety of standard barrel lengths that also include the 4¾” Civilian and 5½” Artillery models. All three standard barrel lengths appear in The Wild Bunch, though both Tector and Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) use the 7½”-barreled Cavalry models.

Winchester Model 1892 Saddle Ring Carbine

Seemingly the Wild Bunch’s designated rifleman, Tector is also the only one to opt for a rifle instead of a shotgun for the famous finale gunfight. He strides into Agua Verde with a Winchester Model 1892 Saddle Ring Carbine. Firearms designer John M. Browning developed a functioning prototype for the Model ’92 in two weeks when challenged by Winchester to develop an improvement to their existing lever-action lineup to compete against Marlin.

Browning designed the Model 1892 as a scaled-down version of the larger-framed Model 1886 with its vertically sliding dual-block locking system but equipped to fire handgun-caliber rounds like the famous toggle-locked Model 1873 “Gun That Won the West”. Upon its introduction in 1892, this new model was chambered for .32-20, .38-40, and .44-40 Winchester centerfire (WCF) rounds, followed by the new .25-20 WCF in 1895, though .44-40 WCF remained the most popular during the Model 1892’s original half-century run, during which more than one million rifles were produced.

Even before the Model 1892 was introduced, Colt responded to the .44-40 WCF’s popularity by introducing a SAA variant marketed as the Colt Frontier Six-Shooter, chambered in .44-40 WCF so that users only needed to carry one type of ammunition compatible for both their revolver and rifle. (Based on the different shape of the rounds in his bandolier and gun-belt, Tector does not appear to have taken advantage of this, likely fielding both a .45-caliber SAA and a .44-40 rifle.)

While the 24″-barreled Model 1892 rifle was already scaled down from the Model 1886, the Model 1892 Saddle Ring Carbine was designed to be even more portable with a round, banded barrel shortened to 20 inches, a carbine-style butt-plate instead of the rifle’s crescent butt-plate, and the titular “saddle ring” on the receiver.

Browning M1917A1 Machine Gun

After getting winged by one of Mapache’s soldiers (who is then shot by Lyle) during the shootout, Tector becomes the first of the bunch to man the tripod-mounted Browning M1917A1 machine gun that they had gifted to Mapache (Emilio Fernandez)… and he seems to revel in it!

The water-cooled M1917 heavy machine gun was introduced during the final months of World War I, though John M. Browning had been developing it since the turn of the 20th century. It would eventually be made to accommodate several different calibers favored by global armed forces, but the U.S. Army adopted it to fire the same .30-06 Springfield round chambered in its service rifles, fed from a 250-round fabric belt and fired at a cyclic rate of 450 rounds per minute.

Even with its more “modern” timeframe than most westerns, this machine gun is anachronistic in The Wild Bunch, which was likely set in spring 1913 but no later than the U.S. entry into World War I four years later. Despite its designation, manufacturing the M1917 was relatively slow during its first year of production with just over 4,000 produced by mid-1918. Due to these production delays and logistics issues, only 1,200 M1917 machine guns actually saw combat during the Great War—all delivered within the last three months before the Armistice. In fact, The Wild Bunch featured an M1917A1 variant with an improved bottom plate and faster cyclic rate of fire, which wasn’t designed and manufactured until two decades later!

However, there were certainly early machine guns in use with the U.S. Army during this time—like the M1895 Colt-Browning “potato digger”, the groundbreaking Maxim gun, and the French-designed Hotchkiss M1909 Benét-Mercié—so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the Wild Bunch could have stolen a machine gun from an Army shipment and delivered it to Mapache.

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How to Get the Look

A bona fide cowboy like Ben Johnson likely informed how his Tector Gorch would dress as an early 20th century bandit still guided by 19th century values. In addition to the requisite cowboy hat, boots, and bandoliers, Tector wears pieces like a hardy vest and cotton shirt that he clearly maintained and modified for his own needs against the rigors of outlaw life.

• Pale-stone cotton shirt with spread collar, plain button-up front, and two-button barrel cuffs
• Black silk neckerchief
• Black denim-like cotton chore vest with torn-away sleeves, wide-waled corduroy collar, and two box-pleated chest pockets with single-button corduroy flaps
• Black and muted rust-striped woolen twill flat-front suit trousers with belt loops and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Brown leather belt with brass-toned rectangular single-prong buckle
• Brown leather ranger-style gun-belt with cartridge loops, Single Action Army holster with retention strap and thigh tie, and knife scabbard
• Brown leather bandoliers with rifle cartridge loops
• Dark-brown leather cowboy boots with spurs
• Silverbelly felt tall-crowned cowboy hat with black grosgrain band and curled brim

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

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The Quote

Now you listen to me, Lyle. You get up off your ass and help once in a while, I wouldn’t have got caught near so easy.