.
Magnificent, moody, monumental
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (interesting that the characters were mentioned that way round) was probably, despite certain shortcomings, the best Billy the Kid movie we have had.
It does depend, though, on which version you see. The original theatrical release was savagely cut by Metro exec James Aubrey and his many editors, to the point where director Sam Peckinpah and many of his lead cast thought it had been ruined. But a full version survived and in 1988 the so-called ‘Turner’ edition came out, what we would call these days a director’s cut, or close to it, with many of the excisions restored. Later still, another ‘special edition’ was released, with different cuts. It’s all quite confusing. My own preference is for the Turner, even though it made the tragic omission of not using Knocking on Heaven’s Door for the death of Slim Pickens, apparently at the behest of Peckinpah. A good DVD purchase will give you a choice, along with extras.
The production of the movie was pretty nightmarish all through. Peckinpah was a severe alcoholic who needed a tumbler of vodka in the mornings just to stop the shakes, continued drinking as the day went on (grenadine, would you believe) and by mid-afternoon was pretty well wasted. He was one of those aggressive drunks, too, and it nearly came to fisticuffs with some of the cast. There was extreme heat during the shooting, and an outbreak of influenza ripped through cast and crew. There were major problems with a faulty camera that meant that many of the shot scenes were unusable. And most of all there were continual arguments with the studio over budget overruns, delays, and ‘unnecessary’ scenes, with both sides losing their cool quite comprehensively. According to producer Gordon Carroll, the movie’s set was “a battleground”. The film finished twenty-one days behind schedule and $1.6 million over budget. Classic Peckinpah, you may say.
And yet. If you do manage to view a decent version you will see a melancholy, atmospheric, even magnificent work.
James Coburn topped the bill as Garrett. At 44 he was longer in the tooth than the real Garrett had been but that didn’t matter. Movie Garretts were traditionally older, providing an almost father-figure to the young outlaw. And this version stresses Garrett’s fear of aging without proper means of support. It’s why he sells out. Coburn was in any case possibly the best Garrett there has ever been. From memorable small parts in Western features at the end of the 1950s, to his superb silent knifeman Britt for John Sturges in The Magnificent Seven in 1960, probably the best actor on the set for Peckinpah as the one-armed scout Samuel Potts in Major Dundee in 1965, a couple of unfortunate Italian westerns we shall gloss over, and then he was a real SOB in the rodeo comedy The Honkers in ’72: he was, by the time of PG&BTK, more than ready to bring tough-guy/elder statesman authority and steely purpose to the role of the New Mexico county sheriff.
Kris Kristofferson was cast as Billy. It was in many ways a strange choice. A former US Army captain and helicopter pilot, he had resigned his commission to pursue songwriting and was certainly not known at the time as a leading actor. He was 36 at filming, and quite stocky, not an obvious choice for a ‘kid’ part. All sorts of other actors were considered for the role. Al Pacino told an interviewer in 2014 that he was offered it, but it didn’t work out because he couldn’t ride a horse. At different moments there was talk of Jon Voight, Robert Redford, Bo Hopkins, Sam Shepard, Jack Nicholson, and even Marlon Brando and John Denver playing the Kid. The mind boggles. (Actually, Peckinpah had been wanting to make this picture for a long time and the prototype was One-Eyed Jacks in 1961, a very vaguely Billy the Kid story which Brando was bad in). Kristofferson was actually a good actor, and overcame the obvious physical handicaps to portray a fatalistic Bonney.
Quite unusually, the film concentrates on the end of Bonney’s career and life, and doesn’t include the Lincoln County War at all, so no elderly mentor Tunstall, no murder of Sheriff Brady, no McSween house siege, none of that. It starts at Billy’s capture (as usual, at a cabin rather than a rock house) and deals with his escape from the Lincoln court house and eventual execution by Garrett at Fort Sumner.
It was written by Rudy Wurlitzer, with many additions/changes by Peckinpah himself. Wikipedia says that “Wurlitzer reportedly resented Peckinpah’s reworking of the narrative. Wurlitzer and Peckinpah had a strained relationship, and Wurlitzer would later write a book highly unfavorable to Peckinpah.” Wurlitzer had written the Monte Hellman picture Two-Lane Blacktop, though this was his only Western.
I say it starts with Billy’s capture. It doesn’t, really, because there is (in some versions) a prologue during the titles of the death of Garrett in 1908. We see him in a buggy, murdered by an unnamed rifleman, and this is intercut with a very unpleasant scene of Billy and his friends at Fort Sumner in 1881 shooting the heads off half-buried chickens for sport. Blood and cruelty is everywhere, is the message, I suppose.
It’s established early that Pat and Billy were old friends long before Pat started wearing the sheriff’s star. “We did have some times, didn’t we?” says Billy. There is in fact little or no evidence for this former friendship, and as Billy was only 21 at his death, just when were these ‘old times’? But many Billy stories found it dramatically useful. That’s OK.
Equally early the elegiac tone is set. “Times change, Bill,” says Garrett. “Times, maybe. Not me,” Bonney replies. This was of course a favorite theme of Peckinpah, and indeed the 1960s/70s Western as a whole, the ‘end of the West’, the passing of a heroic time, the encroaching of pesky ‘civilization’, law and order. Pat (very like Robert Ryan’s character in The Wild Bunch) abandons his free lifestyle in favor of modern corporate interests; Billy does not; but it doesn’t make any difference. The West is dying either way. Wire figures prominently, both in the dialogue and photographically, and this is a symbol of the end of the old ways. Many of the scenes are shot at twilight.
The posse arrives at the shack and blasts it to bits. Charley Bowdre is hit and is ready to go out and get as many as he can before dying. He’s played by the geeky-looking Charles Martin Smith, probably best known for being Terry in American Graffiti but to Westernistas memorable for The Spikes Gang and The Culpepper Cattle Co. The sole survivor (there’s no Dave Rudabaugh), Billy surrenders, adopting an arms-out Christ-like crucifixion pose (symbolic, man).
The Lincoln court house scene is beautifully photographed, an almost Rembrandt-like interior, with Bob Ollinger sitting alone on a wooden chair, cradling his shotgun. This is RG Armstrong, a wonderful Western character actor in my view, much used by Peckinpah, and this could be his very best performance. He is almost deranged in his religious thirst for retribution, and he is a thuggish bully.
The photography is one of the strongest points of the film. The picture was shot using Durango, Mexico locations, in Panavision and Metrocolor, by John Coquillon, who also filmed Straw Dogs and Cross of Iron for Peckinpah.
I liked Deputy James Bell too, as played by Matt Clark, Qualen the year before in Jeremiah Johnson and Kelly in 1976 in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Both deputies meet their inevitable fates, Bell shot on the stairs (in this version Billy finds a secreted pistol in the outhouse) and Ollinger cut down with his own shotgun loaded with dimes. “Keep the change, Bob,” Billy callously tells his corpse.
It’s at this time we get our first view of Bob Dylan. It is said that Peckinpah first wanted Roger Miller, of King of the Road fame, for the songs but at Kristofferson’s suggestion was eventually taken by Dylan, whom he hadn’t heard of at the time (I wonder which planet he had been living on). Not everyone liked Dylan’s music for the picture. Roger Ebert called it “simply awful” and Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote that “The music is so oppressive that when it stops we feel giddy with relief, as if a tooth had suddenly stopped aching.” Nevertheless, the album has become one of Dylan’s biggest sellers and the songs, especially Knocking on Heaven’s Door, among his most covered. It is hard not to be moved at seeing the wonderful Katy Jurado weeping at her husband Slim Pickens’s death as that song swells – if you have the right version in the DVD player.
As an actor, though, Mr Dylan makes a great singer. Variety said, “His acting is limited to an embarrassing assortment of tics, smirks, shrugs, winks and smiles.” His character, Alias, is some kind of hanger-on, perhaps slightly retarded, a character that seems to have been developed from Hurd Hatfield’s in The Left Handed Gun. He is given opaque dialogue. Alias what? someone asks. Alias anything you like, Dylan replies. Another asks, Who are you? Comes the reply, That’s a good question. It is actually all rather tiresome.
Pat runs into bearded Alamosa Bill and, oh joy, it’s Jack Elam, and he casually makes him a deputy. Bill accepts just as casually, you get the impression almost out of politeness, but it will have tragic consequences. The formal duel between Billy and Alamosa, before a red-headed family that reminds you of Once Upon a Time in the West, whose paterfamilias is Gene Evans, is curious, almost extraneous to the plot, yet oddly powerful and memorable.
With the names I’ve already mentioned you can see another really strong point of this movie, and that’s the excellent cast of Western character actors employed. Almost every scene has a familiar face, and you will spot Emilio Fernández as Paco the sheepherder, LQ Jones as Blackie, who tells Pat that old timers like them ought not to be shooting at each other, Harry Dean Stanton as Luke, whose girl Billy steals, Elisha Cook Jr as Cody, Dub Taylor as Josh, Bruce Dern as a deputy, Chill Wills as the fairly disgusting saloonkeeper Lemuel, and many more.
It’s a wonderful line-up. By the mid-70s many of these actors were no longer in their first flush of youth and that makes them even more suited, somehow, to such a picture. Slim Pickens, by the way, is a part-time lawman but he has the name Cullen Baker, a well-known Texas desperado and killer.
Jason Robards (who had ‘Billy’ form; he had been Joe Grant in the 1955 Gore Vidal TV play) has an entertaining (and brilliantly acted) cameo as Governor Lew Wallace, whom Pat visits while he is dining with two scurrilous politicians from the Santa Fe Ring (Jack Dodson and John Chandler). I love the way when Wallace introduces them that he hesitates before the word gentlemen. They try to bribe Garrett and he tells them where they can put their $500 and what to do with it then, a suggestion that the governor finds “a commendable notion” and a line which Coburn would get to repeat in another Billy the Kid movie in the following decade, when he was playing Chisum.
In this one Chisum is a real bad guy, one of those ruthless and exploitative ranchers who oppress decent folk, and whose hands murder them. Chisum is played by Barry Sullivan, another ‘reference’ because Sullivan was of course Garrett in The Tall Man on TV.
Deputy JW Poe (John Beck) isn’t much better. Garrett despises him. It is suggested that he is a hired man of the Santa Fe Ring.
Then there is the scene in which Garrett watches a family descending the river slowly on a barge and the father shoots bottles thrown into the water. Garrett and the father aim their rifles at each other, more out of a marksmanship challenge than out of homicidal intent, then both decide to lower their long guns. It’s another curious interlude. You can see why the studio bigwigs might want it cut; it does not advance the plot at all. Yet it is strangely moving, and pleasing that it survived.
As we near the end of the tale, Garrett recruits an unwilling Sheriff McKinney to go with him after Billy, and it’s Richard Jaeckel, third-billed in fact, yet another ‘throwback’, for he had been former Billy ally Jess Evans in Chisum in 1970. This recycling of actors is rather amusing, I find.
So Garrett, Poe and McKinney come to Fort Sumner for the dénouement. Pete Maxwell is played as a dotard by the great Paul Fix. Billy beds another Mexican girl – there are more 1970s bare breasts. Garrett’s inability to forge relations with women (the scene with his wife was cut out of the Turner version but it was essential) contrasts with Billy’s instinctive success. Billy drinks alcohol, I noted (which the real Billy didn’t). Garrett talks to the coffin maker and it’s Peckinpah himself. Pat then waits on a porch swing for Billy to finish making love before he kills him. Then we finally come to Quien es? and the end.
In the last scene Pat pins his badge back on, a deliberate reversal of the High Noon bit, and rides out, with a small boy throwing clods of dirt at his back.
And we return to an epilogue of Garrett’s own death down near Las Cruces twenty-seven years later. These intro and outro framing scenes of Garrett’s death were cut by Metro on the theatrical release, along with much else.
The film is melancholy yet unsentimental, elegiac yet not nostalgic, and it is slow and gentle without being plodding. These are not easy tricks to pull off. The body count mounts and mounts (even after several viewings it’s not always clear why people are shot) and the film is violent. There’s blood. Many die in slo-mo. But it was a Peckinpah movie after all; what did you expect? This and The Wild Bunch were Peckinpah’s greatest achievements. Pat Garrett was his last Western (unless you count Alfredo Garcia). It’s a magnificent, moody, monumental piece – I think.
Reviews at the time mostly didn’t see it that way. Roger Ebert said, “It’s a movie that exists almost entirely on one note–a low, melancholy one–and achieves what I thought would have been impossible for Peckinpah: he’s boring.” Pauline Kael in The New Yorker described the film as “peculiarly unrealized” and mused that “probably nobody involved was very happy about the results”. Gene Siskel in The Chicago Tribune wrote that the film “appears to have been shot in emotional slow motion, and the self-inflating lethargy and mugging of all concerned reduces the enterprise to an exercise in pretension.” Variety declared, “Whereas Peckinpah’s nostalgia for a frontier world where might makes right and women were for the taking has previously been communicated via forceful acting and striking visuals, here there are few graces to camouflage the narrative banality.” The Monthly Film Bulletin called it “a paralyzed epic, an impenetrable mood piece.” And so on.
MGM earned only $2.7 million in theatrical rentals, against its budget of more than $4.6 million, so they weren’t too happy. But they should have released a director’s cut. People were far more interested in a new Peckinpah film than in yet another Billy the Kid tale.
And the critics in ‘73 probably saw that original theatrical cut. Other assessments, based perhaps on different versions, have been generally more positive. The Los Angeles Times called it “a remarkable film that is perhaps Peckinpah’s best, most mature work to date.” Brian Garfield called it “a rambling, brutal shambles of a movie, very self-conscious and self-indulgent, but sometimes fascinating and always pictorially beautiful.” The BFI Companion to the Western praises its “powerfully elegiac tone”. Dennis Schwartz says it is “right up there with all the better Westerns”. The French loved it, of course. “De tous les cinéastes qui s’attaquèrent à la mythologie de l’Ouest, Sam Peckinpah fut sans doute celui qui en livra la vision la plus subversive, la plus violente mais aussi la plus poétique. ” (J-B Thoret)
You will doubtless have your own opinion. Tell me it.
35 Responses
I would love this film, despite or in part because of its flaws, were it not for the chickens scene at the beginning. This isn’t just a comment about cruelty, it’s actual cruelty by the filmmakers. Peckinpah had already done this with ‘lower’ animals at the start of The Wild Bunch and Cable Hogue but in this case it’s particularly spectacularly unpleasant. The rest of the movie is wonderfully melancholic and graceful.
I agree that the scene is hard to stomach.
I’ve been reading your brilliant site for 2 or 3 years now, thoroughly enjoying comparing my reactions to films to yours. But been too shy to comment myself until now, Watching PG&BTK this week prompted me to do so, for some reason. If only it didn’t start with that scene it would be in my Top 10.
Glad you’ve overcome your shyness!
PG&BTK has its weaknesses but it’s pretty close to great, I reckon.
I know you don’t like Italian westerns (I’m neither a fan nor a foe, some I like and many not) but one I’d recommend you check out- and I will be interested in your take – is Keoma- from 1976 so very late but in my view a very creditable attempt to synthesise spaghetti with more classical Western. Includes a prominent role by Woody Strode.
I don’t know that one. Might give it a try.
There were late (1970s) spaghettis which merged with other sub-genres, for example TAKE A HARD RIDE (1975), which blended spag with blaxploitation (bizarrely) – https://jeffarnoldswest.com/2018/02/take-hard-ride-fox-1975/
I agree with this opinion. One of the best ever. Haunting, elegiac, and raw. It stands as a monument to immortality for all involved Peckinpah most of all. The river scenes haunt one forever.
I have been lucky enough to visit most of the sites related to Billy the Kid, including La Mesilla, Fort Sumter and Lincoln Jeff was very fond of too as you can read it by searching the index.
Hi Jeff, over the past week I’ve purchased and watched The 2024 Criterion Version of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973). It’s one of the best Westerns ever, and it’s clinched #24 on my all-time favorite movie list (covering all genres). It’s haunting, poetic, brutal, and downright bleak. The two “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” scenes are the best scenes, but there are powerful moments throughout the movie. There’s a lot more I’m saying about the film in texts/emails to family and friends. I’ve found your blog for the first time, and I’m enjoying it.
At five minutes to closing on the last day of the summer 50% discount on Criterion titles, I went into my local Barnes & Noble and bought the Criterion blu-ray of this film.
I have not seen it. I will probably forward through the scene mentioned by RR (I cannot abide cruelty to animals). But I’m giving it a go based on the opinions expressed above!
I admired much in the picture, but essentially it was just way too heavy handed for my tastes. Garrett is portrayed pretty much exclusively as a one dimensional purely evil man. In a silent film he would be twirling his mustache. He is a superficial bully and a sadist who beats up women and humiliates harmless old men simply because he can. Billy on the other hand, as played by Kristofferson, is just an aimless, personality challenged whole lot of nothing. Mostly we see him moping around from scene to scene, aimlessly wandering from one place to another with no plan and seemingly no wits to even execute a plan. At times he seems mentally challenged with no direction at all and no way to communicate anything of any substance. The one portrayed as being even more lost is Bob Dylan who basically stares into space most of the time like a stoned Sphinx. The script is pretty terrible with long stretches of characters moving from point A to point B and back to A with little rhyme or reason, learning basically nothing from mostly paper thin experiences and encounters. The one saving grace and the only substance comes from the veritable who’s who of character actors, most of whom are allowed a moment to shine and essay roles that even in a scant few minutes of screen time tell their own little stories with more energy and depth than any of the leading players. Perhaps it’s heresy to say, but I honestly enjoyed the frenetic mess that is YOUNG GUNS II to this slog of a movie by one of my favorite filmmakers.
Marvelous review by Jeff. It saddens me I didn’t discover this blog when he was still alive. We would have had much to discuss.
As to the film, it’s unquestionably one of the best Westerns I’ve seen. I revere James Coburn, so that’s part of it, but the film’s meandering and picturesque dilations upon violence, death, loyalty, duty, friendship and freedom are even more important. And as Jeff notes, the whole is permeated with a sort of delicious melancholy. Can it be pleasurable to feel a bit sad? For some of us, I think it can, and PGBK reaches us in that way.
As to the vile scene of chickens being slaughtered, the juxtaposition to Pat being set up and assassinated is meant not only to show the ubiquity of cruelty–just like the scorpion/ants scene in The Wild Bunch–but to demonstrate that creatures, whether fowl or human, are helpless before their fate. And our ends, alas, are often miserable and pathetic.
Now although I’ve never been a fan of Bob Dylan’s music–and I’m ambivalent about him as a man–I actually enjoyed his acting in this film. Sure, it’s eccentric, but that’s what one would expect from Dylan. And, given his paucity of lines, for him to make any sort of impression, he had to rely on visual gestures. At any rate, Jeff is right that Peckinpah was mad not to feature “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” prominently. It’s a gorgeous song whose dolorous mood perfectly matches the film’s.
I’ve seen PGBK several times–I prefer the Turner edition–and it never fails to stick with me, even after the repeated viewings. When Pat rides off into the distance with the boy throwing rocks at him–Turning the Shane mythos on its head–there’s not much left to do but take another sip of whisky and ponder the inscrutible meaning of it all.
Hi Eckwood, you’re very welcome to this site! Jeff, much missed by all his long time readers, would have much enjoyed your thoughtful comments on his reviews and the films in question.
Regarding PGBK, while agreeing with your overall assessment that’s it’s a great, profoundly melancholy movie – regarding the chickens scene (and the scorpions/ants one in Wild Bunch), yes I understand what Peckinpah is doing here – a metaphor. I don’t have a problem with that in narrative terms, my problem is that he and the crew are not just maiming these animals within the story and the world of the film, they’re doing it in real life, on the set, to get those shots. Cruelty or unnecessary killing of animals for… a metaphor… is just not for me.
Hopefully you have seen our ongoing series marking Peckinpah’s centenary, we’re still a few films away from PGBK but no doubt many readers will have more things to say on this remarkable film then.
Thanks for the welcome, RR. In my very short time here, I’ve really enjoyed the site. Jeff’s reviews, even when I disagree with them–which is fairly often–are good to excellent, and the comments are of a similar caliber. I hope to stick around a while.
Regarding the animal cruelty, I couldn’t agree more. And that is why one viewing of The Wild Bunch was enough for me. The scene in question turns my stomach. With regards to the chicken scene in PGBK, the only slightly saving grace may be that the poor chickens at least might have served as a feast for the crew or the local natives. I somehow think the practice of burying and shooting chickens was a real thing in the Old West, and a banquet then ensued. I’m afraid the Old West was mighty hard on animals. Even harder than on people.
There is always a touch of “delicious melancholy” in every Peckinpah’s westerns in my opinion.
That’s sure the case with Ride the High Country.
Old Man Alamosa Bill is supposed to count to 10. He stops at 8. The ploy doesn’t work. Billy the Kid (Kristofferson) shoots him down, and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” plays.
“That wasn’t 10, Hoss,” Billy says to his fallen opponent.
“I never could count,” dying Alamosa Bill says.
Bob Dylan’s mournful moaning continues as Billy gets on his horse. The red-haired family watches as The Kid rides off.
I’ve been watching movies for 10 years now, and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” is my #24 movie of all time, across all genres. While a lot of films evaporate soon after I’ve seen them, I keep returning to this one.
The 2024 Criterion Version is my favorite–and the 2005 Special Edition is close to the Criterion. Right now I’m watching the 1973 Original Theatrical Release, which I think is still fine–the power of the film isn’t lost at all.
The movie has a patchwork feel to it–whichever the version–but it has a PHENOMENAL BEAUTY ! ! ! !
“Can it be pleasurable to feel a bit sad?” Eckwood Spivey asks.
I say YES ! ! ! ! YES ! ! ! YES ! ! ! YES ! ! ! !
Sorry to rain on y’all’s parade, but it’s amazing to me that many consider this to be some sort of classic (!?). To me, it’s the least of all of Peckinpah’s Westerns (with the possible exception of The Deadly Companions). I’ve seen 3 different versions and no matter which way you slice it (pun intended) they’re all basically rambling, shoddy messes – with some good things (cinematography, Katy Jurado, Barry Sullivan as Chisum) thrown in. Some scenes make no sense (even Jeff says that about some of the killings). I’m not surprised that Peckinpah was in his cups while working because much of the film has scenes that have the air of being shot after an all-nighter. I usually don’t agree much with Roger Ebert but he’s right about Bob Dylan’s score – it’s bad (with the exception of Kock, Knock, Knocking on Heaven’s Door) and his acting is worse. Poor direction, poor editing (probably not Peckinpah’s fault) and some weird performances (what was up with Chill Wills?) In my book (Western wise) Sam made 1 classic (Wild Bunch), one near classic (High Country), 1 very good (Cable Hogue) 2 good (Junior Bonner, Alfredo Garcia) 1 pretty good (Dundee) 1 mediocre (Deadly Companions). This one is just poor.
Interesting…! Maybe it might help to read one day the long promised last review by RR and Bud to close the tribute to Sam Peckinpah centenary…!?
We’ll have to agree to disagree. It is a favorite. I have loved it since I first saw it. A special film to me I would never part with it. The shaggy nature appeals to me. Chill Wills is hilariously awesome in this, a favorite part. This film makes me feel a certain way every time I see it. I love it as a true work of art. It is a story of and itself Americana.
This is a great film, no matter how you cut it. It is the most complex and political of any Western film ever made.
Bud and RR have done a great write-up, if you haven’t read it already. Like Chris Evans, I think it’s a special film, unforgettable ! ! ! !
And I don’t feel drenched by Thomas Leary’s torrent of comments, LOL. A lot people, including Roger Ebert and other critics, don’t like it.
I have plenty more to say, with enough notes and comments written in my notebooks for a review of my own. I’ll probably post it on Amazon. My #7 Western, and across all genres, my #24 movie of all time.
For all the turmoil that surrounded the making of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973), it wasn’t made in vain. 100% WORTH IT ! ! !
Yeah. Sometimes I can get torrential. Sorry. But the bottom line is we’re all here because we’re all passionate about horse operas – and Jeff (may he rest in peace).
I think it’s a beautiful and haunting film with a great cast. I can only access the truncated version. Any idea where to stream the 88?
Of course a 36-year old actor has no business playing a Kid. But I notice in the Kristofferson photo a definite facial resemblance to the only known photo of Wm. Bonney. Had Peckinpaugh hired Festus Haggen to dress his Kid he would have had a leg up on reality.
Jeff Arnold takes occasional potshots at Ken Curtis’ drawling, slow-witted stock characters. But his Festus character was absolutely a breakthrough in how Westerns looked. Every decade of Westerns heretofore had dressed their pioneers in duds and haircuts proclaiming past times but pandering to present.
Peckinpaugh’s “Pat&Billy” cast ‘70s-attractive actors and dressed them up ‘70s fashion friendly. Then he engaged them in violence more disturbing than cinematic. Having spent a decade mourning the passing of the West, was Peckinpaugh marking the end of the Western?
The historical gunslingers in Westerns are necessarily romanticized. My favorite Western historian James D. Horan summarized: “The truth is they were mostly illiterates, sometimes morons. Some … were products of a violent Civil War … others because of a depression. … All of them spent their money… There is no evidence that any…gave a cent to a weeping widow…despite the memoirs of senile old men, some of which have been accepted by historians.”
An eyewitness to a Billy the Kid killing spree said, “The thing about Billy. He would shoot and laugh. Kill and laugh. Done laughing, he’d leave.” He’s describing a psychotic episode. This is Tommy Udo, Richard Widmark’s sadistic killer, giggling, and Frank Gorshin as TV “Batman”’s Riddler.
Bat Masterson? Doc Holliday? Illiterate morons?
Nowadays, we are as prone to exaggerate the sordidness of the historical Old West as old Hollywood was to minimize it. The truth was, most of those gunslingers were in cultural background typical farm boys of the mid 19th-century United States, no more and no less. (A few, like Holliday, devolved from more genteel backgrounds.). They generally belonged to a class of men who weren’t willing or able to settle down to the business of homesteading, but spent their time hanging out in saloons, gambling, and taking whatever odd jobs they could scrounge up (including lawmen–law enforcement was not entirely professionalized as it is today). The nineteenth century would have called them “sporting gentlemen”. They didn’t live up to present-day standards of cleanliness–but who could have in those days?–and they may have tended to spell phonetically, but they weren’t necessarily filthy morons. Even John Wesley Hardin, the biggest sociopath of them all, had a career as a lawyer.
I don’t know that lawyer contradicts sociopath. But you’re right. Broad-brush invites bristles. I still think this film might have been Peckinpaugh’s rejection of the genre.
Westerns sanitized everything in the service of entertainment, not propaganda. But Peckinpaugh challenges our addiction to romance. Attractive characters in familiar situations are portrayed as brutal and scantly motivated. One shred of romance remains in that the film is beautifully shot. But Western vistas have never been controversial.
Peckinpaugh didn’t own the Westerns, and it wasn’t his place to cancel them. In any event, the genre was about to bounce back from the nadir that Mr. Arnold rues from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The revival started with “The Long Riders” and culminated in the magnificent “Tombstone”, a sagebrush “Casablanca”.
Billy was more a sociopath than a psychopath in my opinion. But both pathologies have a lot in common, modern medecine has categorized them under a single formal known as Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).
Hard to imagine Ken Curtis, who was the Tommy Dorsey orchestra singer after Frank Sinatra, then for The Sons of the Pioneers and mostly John Ford’s son in law, portaying Billy…
To me Kristofferson was a pretty good one in spite of his age. It was not the first time that a film did not care about historical inaccuracies.
Thinking of who could have been a great silvet screen Billy, no doubt that younger Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp or Leonardo Di Caprio could have easily picked up the baton (in spite of or because of their star aura and charism)
Peckinpah’s violence looks real AND cinematic. That’s what some have blamed him for. But violence is far to be his only theme indeed.
If he revolutionized violence in movies, he also revolutionized the shooting AND the editing (Even if the studios thought they had better ideas).
Bloody Sam was not the first to dismantle the stereotypes, but he did not want to destroy the Genre, on the contrary.
In his youth, he had seen the old world slowly vanish. Coincidently, Ride the High Country, shot in the sale High Sierra where he used to hunt and ride, was released only 2 monts after Liberty Valance.
Romancing the West and elevating its most famous characters to the (anti)hero’s status was not new either.
It is not because you are a killer that you are illiterate. When in jail, Billy spent his nights reading dime novels. He was bilingual in English and Spanish and wrote sophisticated letters to Lew Wallace to negociate his pardon. Pat Garrett himself acknowledged the sharpness of Billy’s correspondence.
And he was not a clinical psychopath killing fir the pleasure of it. Those who knew him personally described an entirely different personality.
And finally (I could be more torrential myself…), I do not see why and how Tombstone could be qualified as a sagebrush Casablanca…!
I have a 78rpm of Ken Curtis (with Shep Fields & his New Music(!), likely predating the Dorsey gig) singing “This Is Worth Fighting For”. Nice tenor voice. Stronger than Sinatra.
Your takes on Peckinpaugh are as valid as mine and probably more accurate. Mine are rank speculation.
I won’t yield on Billy the Kid, though. A serial killer’s acquaintances that he never killed would have a false impression of him. Deluvina, the servant girl at the Maxwell place where Billy met his fate, swore by him. But strange women marry death row inmates all the time.
There was a serial killer in Cleveland in the ‘30s. He turned out to be from a prominent family. They were allowed to institutionalize him without publicity. (He wrote taunting letters to his pursuer Elliot Ness(!) until his death.) This killer had an accomplice, a laborer, for muscle. The police circumstantially connected the accomplice to several of the crimes (these were Ripper-style mutilations). But they cleared him very early in the investigation. The neighbors reported children and dogs loved him!
Billy claimed to have killed more men than his 21 years on earth “not counting Indians and Mexicans.” My man Horan allows 11. But the greater issue is that Billy thought to brag about it.
Now “Tombstone” v. “Casablanca”: Every other line was quotable. They were delivered by actors with long resumes. But these were the roles of their lives (“Casablanca”) and mustaches (“Tombstone”). Both films open with riveting, fast edited sequences. “Casablanca” introduces us to the “usual suspects”. “Tombstone” introduces us to the red sash Cowboys in documentary style. It finishes with the gunman from the silent “Great Train Robbery” drawing down at the audience. And then the silence explodes in the SurroundSound cinema “BANG!” This is just a tremendous movie. I’ve read you thought the show dragged after the OK Corral. But maybe you weren’t as mad at the Clantons as I was, or don’t appreciate a gunfight on galloping horseflesh, or a Doc and Ringo showdown, or a Charlton Heston cameo as much as me. But that makes you wrong!
In Casablanca there is a constant tension and a long-lasting threat until the very end.
In Tombstone, the vendetta ride part is unfortunately traying or at least is not as consistent than the first part of the film, it is not as well built up and lacking of structure. It is more an addition of scenes, it doest not really flow smoothly even if most of these scenes are very well done individually.
In French, we say décousu (unstitched)…
The vendetta itself has a better treatment in Hour of the Gun in my opinion.
All right. The differences between “Casa” and “Tomb” are also grist.
The primary difference is that the OK Corral fight is completely familiar lore, whereas the “Casablanca” script was a mystery to its enactors. The script was under constant revision from a lousy play “Everyone Comes to Rick’s”. The actors couldn’t tip their hands, which had still to be dealt. They uttered their lines without foreshadowing, unlike every production ever in which the characters know how it ends.
O. Henry elevated the twist ending over the Greek idea of fated inevitability. Modern notions of realism prefer a doubtful ending. Fate can’t compete dramatically with the anguish of possibility. “Casablanca” delivered its twist uniquely well for being a uniquely troubled production.
THE END is the phoniest aspect of fiction. A story might reach a good stopping place, never THE END. As most Tombstone tellings let the gunfight cap the story, the “Tombstone” aftermath was fresh ground.
When the Army of Northern Virginia broke off its defense of Richmond after a yearlong siege, the Rebel soldiers were exhilarated to resume their identity as an invincible force of maneuver. Union armies hemmed them in, however, and blocked several of their thrusts at food depots. In fairly short order famine overcame adrenaline.
That adrenaline rush gets approximated when “Tombstone” busts from the claustrophobia of the town. Once Morgan Earp is laid out on the billiard table, the movie emerges into broad vistas and bright sunlight and episodes of action. That red sash twisting through the air to the dirt is just a perfect summation.
Then the movie keeps going. I was greatly annoyed by “The Lord of the Rings” spectacles which piled draggy conclusion on top of epilogue on top of denouement—but my butt was actually sore! I didn’t want “Tombstone” to end. I challenge you to choose one of the vendetta episodes to delete.
We have to see Doc die. Val Kilmer’s performance was untouchable. Compare a barrel-chested Victor Mature coughing into a handkerchief to Kilmer croaking out his lines with an eighth of his lung capacity. I’ve read that Kilmer’s deathbed, where he remarks “…Funny…” to see his bootless feet, was a blanket over blocks of ice.
One scene remains of Wyatt and Sadie in that snowglobe snowfall preparing a life together. And this is necessary, after Doc, as marking a beginning rather than END.
Well, Pard, keep writing as my informed disputant. And ah’m yo’ huckaberry.
“That adrenaline rush gets approximated when “Tombstone” busts from the claustrophobia of the town. Once Morgan Earp is laid out on the billiard table, the movie emerges into broad vistas and bright sunlight and episodes of action.”
Never thought of it that way, but you’re right about the emergence into sunlight as an abstract thing. It’s just that it could have been better done and truer to the historical record, even if Wyatt Earp ends up on a futile quest alien to the spirit of the late 80s-early 90s Hollywood action film. As it is, it’s just one damn shot cowboy after another. The Hooker episode wanted to be capped by the abortive confrontation with the Cowboys. And we don’t get Wyatt Earp’s farewell to Tombstone and Johnny Behan–“You have seen me once too often”–which could have made a great scene.
The big resemblance between Casablanca and Tombstone is that both are great screenplays superbly acted filmed by an otherwise indifferent director.
This is what happens when men turn themselves into a club.
It starts off as enthusiasm for something and turns into a competition who knows most about it.
Somewhere along the line that simple love for something gets buried under a ton of hot air.
Well said. Nice pressure valve.