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#482 - Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Sam Peckinpah, 1973
Based on the true story of the eponymous characters who start off as friends but soon end up on different sides of the law.
Despite the fact that The Wild Bunch has been a long-time Top 100 favourite for me, I generally find the films of Sam Peckinpah to be rather challenging propositions, and not always in the best way. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid marks another revisionist Western, but it is a far different type of deconstruction to that of Peckinpah's most well-renowned film. It (or at least the 2005 special edition DVD that I watched) begins with the shooting death of aged lawman Pat Garrett (James Coburn) before flashing back a few decades to the days when he wasn't a lawman and was actually friends with notorious outlaw Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson). However, events transpire that lead to Garrett becoming a sheriff and thus declaring his intentions to bring in Billy by any means necessary. What follows ends up being a lengthy and bloody game of cat-and-mouse as Garrett pursues Billy across the frontier, with a vindictive cattle baron being thrown into the mix as an obstacle for both men.
Much like Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett... once again sees Peckinpah attempting to deliver a new perspective on the Western by examining themes such as loyalty, honour, and morality. The previous movies touched upon the idea of friends on both sides of the law (Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in the former, William Holden and Robert Ryan in the latter), but here such a story is front and centre. The film spends its whole running time in a moral grey area; Garrett may be a lawman but he has no qualms about meting out his own draconian brand of justice or slapping a woman around for information, while Billy is a charming renegade who generally has no problem killing those who cause him trouble (though he isn't a complete monster and many of the people he kills are far more vicious than he is). However, there's a reason why this sort of story ended up amounting to a sub-plot in both the earlier films instead of providing the crux of the narrative; because it's too thin. As a result, the film has to be padded with a bunch of vignettes that are only connected in any way because they feature one of the film's leads. When a film becomes dependent on individual scenes more so than the strength of its overarching plot, that's quite the gamble where results can vary quite wildly.
Granted, there are some good vignettes here, most of which involve Billy (the sole exception might just be the entire sequence of scenes featuring Slim Pickens as an old sheriff who is recruited by Garrett). The characterisation is rough and it's more or less up to the actors themselves to sell whoever they're playing, which of course has a debatable effect. There is some impressive widescreen cinematography in a lot of scenes, and the fact that the film is scored entirely by Bob Dylan songs in an unusual touch that is generally solid (the most famous song off the soundtrack, "Knocking On Heaven's Door", is put to phenomenal use), though the same can't really be said for Dylan's on-screen appearance as one of Billy's accomplices. Even so, the rather disjointed and anti-climatic nature of the film serves to work against it. How much of that is due to the film's troubled production or on its most recent restoration is up for debate, but I wouldn't put it past Peckinpah to simply be difficult. I can definitely understand why people would treat this as a lost classic - enough so that I can see myself giving this another chance in the future, at least - but after two viewing I definitely feel like it's too uneven to quite make it there.
Sam Peckinpah, 1973
Based on the true story of the eponymous characters who start off as friends but soon end up on different sides of the law.
Despite the fact that The Wild Bunch has been a long-time Top 100 favourite for me, I generally find the films of Sam Peckinpah to be rather challenging propositions, and not always in the best way. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid marks another revisionist Western, but it is a far different type of deconstruction to that of Peckinpah's most well-renowned film. It (or at least the 2005 special edition DVD that I watched) begins with the shooting death of aged lawman Pat Garrett (James Coburn) before flashing back a few decades to the days when he wasn't a lawman and was actually friends with notorious outlaw Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson). However, events transpire that lead to Garrett becoming a sheriff and thus declaring his intentions to bring in Billy by any means necessary. What follows ends up being a lengthy and bloody game of cat-and-mouse as Garrett pursues Billy across the frontier, with a vindictive cattle baron being thrown into the mix as an obstacle for both men.
Much like Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett... once again sees Peckinpah attempting to deliver a new perspective on the Western by examining themes such as loyalty, honour, and morality. The previous movies touched upon the idea of friends on both sides of the law (Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in the former, William Holden and Robert Ryan in the latter), but here such a story is front and centre. The film spends its whole running time in a moral grey area; Garrett may be a lawman but he has no qualms about meting out his own draconian brand of justice or slapping a woman around for information, while Billy is a charming renegade who generally has no problem killing those who cause him trouble (though he isn't a complete monster and many of the people he kills are far more vicious than he is). However, there's a reason why this sort of story ended up amounting to a sub-plot in both the earlier films instead of providing the crux of the narrative; because it's too thin. As a result, the film has to be padded with a bunch of vignettes that are only connected in any way because they feature one of the film's leads. When a film becomes dependent on individual scenes more so than the strength of its overarching plot, that's quite the gamble where results can vary quite wildly.
Granted, there are some good vignettes here, most of which involve Billy (the sole exception might just be the entire sequence of scenes featuring Slim Pickens as an old sheriff who is recruited by Garrett). The characterisation is rough and it's more or less up to the actors themselves to sell whoever they're playing, which of course has a debatable effect. There is some impressive widescreen cinematography in a lot of scenes, and the fact that the film is scored entirely by Bob Dylan songs in an unusual touch that is generally solid (the most famous song off the soundtrack, "Knocking On Heaven's Door", is put to phenomenal use), though the same can't really be said for Dylan's on-screen appearance as one of Billy's accomplices. Even so, the rather disjointed and anti-climatic nature of the film serves to work against it. How much of that is due to the film's troubled production or on its most recent restoration is up for debate, but I wouldn't put it past Peckinpah to simply be difficult. I can definitely understand why people would treat this as a lost classic - enough so that I can see myself giving this another chance in the future, at least - but after two viewing I definitely feel like it's too uneven to quite make it there.