Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #30: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is one of the few movies on my list which I watched for the first time. Directed by Sam Peckinpah in the New Hollywood era of the 70s, I was very interested to see what it would be like. Peckinpah directed the famous Wild Bunch, a big deconstruction of the western. However his follow-up, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, has not fared so well in memory. It did rather poorly on its initial release and was panned critically to boot. The main cause was MGM’s president James Aubrey, who first interfered with time and budget constraints and then, more infamously, forced cuts that undermined the story and themes of the movie.

The theatrical cut removed almost 20 minutes of the movie. Since then Warner Brothers and the Criterion Channel have attempted to release the definitive cut. Apparently I should have watched Criterion’s 50^th anniversary version, but I opted for the Final Preview Cut which is the longest at 124 minutes. Strangely it was a mix of high blu-ray quality and grainy film. I won’t get too much more into the movie’s troubled production, but if you’re into reading about behind-the-scenes chaos this movie is a goldmine.

On to the history, Billy the Kid is one of the more romanticized outlaws of American history. This can be attributed to the very young age where he started his outlaw career and some of the sympathetic circumstances that propelled him to notoriety. As William Bonney he had committed various crimes in his teenage years and had been one of the more dangerous shooters of the Lincoln County War in New Mexico. Even though he was hardly the only one to kill in the war, Bonney was still labeled an outlaw. He gave key testimony in a murder trial in exchange for amnesty from Governor Lew Wallace (Jason Robards plays him for one scene), but did not get what he asked for. From there he became a more hardened outlaw, leading to the events depicted in Peckinpah’s film.

I had forgotten a lot of the information I learned so I had to quickly look up some of the names and events in Mark Gardner’s book To Hell on a Fast Horse and was pleased to learn that many of the cast of characters is historical, at least in the fact that they existed. Peckinpah, however, is not too focused on the history itself, but the memory of the Old West (more on this in a couple paragraphs). My previous experience with Billy the Kid in film was Geoffrey Deuel in Chisum. That was a John Wayne movie about the Lincoln County War, which meant it was very black-and-white in terms of morality. Billy the Kid is more of a well-meaning young man who’s driven to violence by the death of his friend and the snobbery of some of the villains.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a Sam Peckinpah movie, though, so of course things are not so morally clear in this one. Lawmen and criminals alike have their sympathetic traits and motives, but are more often than not downright dirty in their behavior. Ironically, despite seeking to present the dark death of the Western as a genre, Peckinpah engages in one of the largest myths of the Billy the Kid story, the supposed friendship between the outlaw and Pat Garrett. The two had crossed paths before, but were never criminal associates or big pals. Garrett had invented the friendship in his memoirs because he thought it would make his story sell better. Peckinpah leans into the fictional friendship, having Garrett (James Coburn) wracked by turmoil as he helps usher in the death of the West that he loves.

Indeed, one of the sins of the theatrical cut was that it failed to see that while Billy the Kid is more well-known in myth and memory, Garrett is the main protagonist. The movie jumps ahead to his murder in 1908 and return there at the end, showing that he not only grew up to be an angry man after his killing of Billy, but that he didn’t even usher in a truly civilized era. Indeed, he was killed in a land and livestock dispute with neighbor William Brazel, much like all the people who died in the Lincoln County War 30 years earlier. And this time, instead of individualistic and rugged lawmen and outlaws, it's big ranchers, politicians, and other bigwigs directing the killings.

The real Pat Garrett seems to have been a fairly upstanding man. He engaged in legitimate practices such as buffalo hunting and ranching, of course served as a sheriff, and after his one murder actually turned himself in (the authorities decided not to bother prosecuting him). Coburn’s Garrett on the other hand seems to indulge in behavior more suited to an outlaw, perhaps sensing that the West is about to end. He almost starts a random shootout with a stranger on a barge, makes some of targets do silly things at gunpoint, and has fun with an entire bordello’s worth of prostitutes.

Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) prepares to make his famous courthouse escape.

Let’s not of course forget Billy the Kid. Strangely, Peckinpah decided to have 39-year-old musician-actor Kris Kristofferson play 21-year old Billy. Kristofferson is clean-shaven and given jet-black hair, but this can’t disguise the fact that he looks rather old for a criminal called the Kid (though to be fair Coburn himself looks too old for a 30-year-old Garrett). Perhaps it’s because Kristofferson wears a smile for most of his screentime, but this Billy the Kid looks a little too gleeful about his killing, making one wonder why Garrett is so torn up about bringing him to justice. Oddly, Peckinpah replaces Billy the Kid’s real-life final girlfriend, Paulita Maxwell, with a random Mexican girl named Maria. She’s played by singer Rita Coolidge, who actually fell in love with Kristofferson as they filmed their love scenes. Strangely, the singer doesn’t have any dialogue, and also strangely one of the real Maxwells, Pete Maxwell (Paul Mix), shows up at the house where Billy was killed.

This movie has loads of characters and quick, violent scenes. If one doesn’t think about what Peckinpah is trying to say, it seems like he’s just rambling, unsure how to string together a coherent plotline. When one considers the abundance of veteran western character actors, however, it makes much more sense. Throughout the movie Slim Pickens, Paul Fix, R.G. Armstrong, Jack Elam, and notable faces for Western fans pop up to be killed off or left as very old men. The Western is indeed dying in this movie.

Billy the Kid and Deputy Kermit (Jack Elam) both get ready to cheat in a ten paces duel.

Slim Pickens in particular drew attention and not a few tears for his few minutes as a fictional sheriff who aids Garrett. After he gets mortally wounded in a gunfight, he trudges down to a river to sit down and die, while Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” plays. Dylan himself is a big part of this movie. He brought his folk-tune music as composer, creating a few songs in the process. He appears in the movie as the mysterious Alias. As with much else in this film, I had to think about why he was included. He doesn’t have any major impact on the plot and often just watches what’s happening. What I figure is that as the folk-singer providing music for this tale, he’s literally entered the movie to get a closer look.

Bob Dylan watches the other characters

Two scenes of violence in the movie possess historical interest. First is Billy the Kid’s escape from two deputies in the Lincoln County Courthouse while in leg irons. The movie’s presentation is largely accurate, showing him shooting James Bell in the back as he descends the stairs, then grabbing a shotgun from the armory and blasting Bob Olinger from the second story. These were actually his last killings, though it happens so early in the movie that Peckinpah adds more murders for him throughout the movie.

As in real life, Garrett waits in the dark at the Maxwell house for Billy the Kid to show up. In real life the outlaw couldn’t see who he was exactly and asked who was there before Garrett shot him. Peckinpah has Billy see who it is and grin at his old friend before his death. It’s played like an extrajudicial murder which leaves Garrett in disgust with himself. A final quick thing to mention is that cattle rancher John Chisum, who was a total good guy in the John Wayne movie, looks the other way as his cattlemen commit murder and rape. This just further underscores how bleak Peckinpah slants everything.

John Poe (John Beck) is vilified as a representative of
governor Wallace and the not-much-better new era

I really appreciate Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for what it’s aspiring to be, but while many others think it’s secretly one of the best westerns ever made, I don’t think it lands quite as well as it could. I’m okay with the historical liberties, but Kristofferson as Billy the Kid feels off, and that’s a big problem when he’s one of the lead characters. Also, the rambling nature does get a bit too much at a couple points, and the final text crawl, while thematically relevant, is almost comical in how long it goes, as it has to explain the entire background and fallout of Garrett’s murder in 1908. I’d say this is a flawed gem.

Rating: 7/10