The story of a man who is not a hero, and whose survival depended on sheer chance and the mercy of the enemies. Only a real survivor of WWII (Polanski & Szpillman) would tell such a story, without binary good/evil, and with such restraint.
Peckinpah utilizes the relaxed censorship to establish a new vision of the Western, questioning and abandoning many of the idealistic virtues it had previously subscribed to; portrayal of gun violence, disparate sound effects, slow motion parallel editing; 144 min director's cut