Wild Bunch - The Prequel

Just really watched this for the first time and about halfway through it hit me - this MUST be a Peckinpah movie and it is almost like "The Wild Bunch".

Some of the dialogue was almost eerily the same.

Of course, Warren Oates was in both movies and the old Joel McCrea here looks (and acts) a lot like William Holden in TWB. Randolph Scott here was a mix of the Ernest Borgnine "best buddy" AND the now on the bad side Robert Ryan character in TWB.

There was even the subplot of the younger gang member and his romantic travails.

Of course "The Wild Bunch" was more complicated and more polished. Peckinpah had really honed his craft in the intervening seven years.

I just checked and J.B. Stone Jr. was the writer for this movie but died before TWB. Peckinpah helped write the screenplay for TWB and I wonder if he consciously or subconsciously used some of the same dialogue?