Of the artists working in the period known as New Hollywood (roughly 1968 – 1980), none raged nor mourned as hard as Sam Peckinpah, and never more so than in 1973\u2019s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid<\/em>, his final Western (unless we count the following year\u2019s neo-western-noir, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia<\/em>), which he considered his definitive statement on the subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that film, which turns 50 years old this month, is more than just an artist\u2019s elegy for the genre with which he\u2019s most closely associated. Nor is it merely an elegy for the American West (in myth or truth). It is, ultimately, Peckinpah\u2019s elegy for himself. Death haunts every frame of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, <\/em>and it\u2019s no mere exercise in existentialism; we are watching Peckinpah deal with the reality of his own fast-encroaching mortality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By the mid-\u201970s, Peckinpah had already helped reshape the Western a couple of times over, first in 1962 with his sophomore feature, Ride the High Country<\/em>, often considered the last true \u201cclassic\u201d Western, and then more explosively with his 1969 opus The Wild Bunch<\/em>. That latter film remains one of the most controversial ever made, thanks to the sheer scale and intensity of its violence, the likes of which had never before been seen by audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The notoriety of The Wild Bunch<\/em>, combined with the personal notoriety that followed \u201cBloody\u201d Sam everywhere he went (thanks to his volatile temper and penchant for booze, coke, guns, and women), established him as one of the era\u2019s many posterboys for troubled genius, bringing with it the usual mix of celebration and trouble. The period between The Wild Bunch<\/em> and Pat Garrett<\/em> was one of hills and valleys for Peckinpah: his slowburn domestic thriller Straw Dogs<\/em> (1972) sparked off a fresh round of outrage and controversy, keeping him in the center of the cinematic zeitgeist, while his high-octane adaptation of Jim Thompson\u2019s <\/a>crime thriller The Getaway<\/em> (1972) scored him a much-needed commercial hit. However, the films he made before and between\u2014The Ballad of Cable Hogue<\/em> (1970) and Junior Bonner<\/em> (1972)\u2014both of which showed a quieter and indeed gentler side of his artistic temperament, failed at the box office, leading him to grouse that all anybody wanted from him was blood and guts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enter Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid<\/em>, originally penned by Rudolph Wurlitzer as a project for his Two-Lane Blacktop<\/em> director Monte Hellman, which would, in Peckinpah\u2019s hands, combine both facets of his work, the quiet and the violent, the gentle and the brutal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Filmed in Durango, Mexico, and set along the border towns of Old and New Mexico in the year 1881 (minus a bloody bookend framing device added by Peckinpah), the story picks up in media res, after the events of the famous Lincoln County War\u2014which turned 17-year-old cattle rustler and gunslinger William H. Bonney (n\u00e9e Henry McCarty) into the fugitive and folk hero known as Billy the Kid\u2014have already taken place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now 21, The Kid (Kris Kristofferson, aged 36 and looking it) is hanging out in La Cruces with what remains of his gang, trying to figure out his next move when his old friend and former posse member Pat Garrett (James Couburn) shows up as the new Sheriff of Lincoln County. He gives Billy a few days to clear out of the territory and escape to Mexico (knowing that he won\u2019t), before setting off on a manhunt for his old compadre. Along the way, both Garrett and Billy encounter several former allies who, like each of them, have switched sides\u2014Billy having once been a lawman and Garrett the outlaw\u2014leading to a number of showdowns which all sides are unhappily obliged to carry to their mortal limit. (Loyalty and betrayal is one of the defining themes of Peckinpah\u2019s Westerns, and here it finds its apotheosis.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mostly, this is a result of Peckinpah\u2019s mastery of tone. While its detractors\u2013of which there are a fair share\u2014charge the film as ponderous and languid, Pat Garrett <\/em>is by no means an unwieldy work. It is a slow-burn of a movie made up of mostly quiet scenes, although many erupt in bursts of action. It does not quite fall into the category of transcendental (or, alternatively, \u201cslow\u201d) cinema as originally defined by Paul Schrader (and subsequently adopted by future generations of critics and artists), but it does take on the rhythms of the European and Asian arthouse directors, such as Dryer, Antonioni, and Ozu, who served as the foundation for that school of cinema, even as it anticipates the style of Terrence Malick (whose own debut, Badlands<\/em>, which also tells the story of an infamous American manhunt, would debut a few months later) and his acolytes (amongst which number 21st century Westerns Meek\u2019s Cutoff <\/em>and particularly The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford<\/em><\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n All of Peckinpah\u2019s movies are big on killing, but Pat Garrett<\/em> is truly death-haunted. Death, Peckinpah seems to be saying in his definitive statement on America\u2019s Wild West, is that epoch\u2019s defining feature. Everything in the film reminds of death\u2014a half finished boat and a kitchen door are both stand ins for coffins, while Peckinpah himself shows up in a cameo towards the end as a weary coffin maker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The people who populate this land, meanwhile, are as inured to death as can be. Children are seen playing on a hangman\u2019s scaffold (giant American flag flying proud behind them) and watch blank-eyed as two men who just shared a meal at the family dinner table step outside and turn their guns on one another. Most of the individuals who meet their end over the course of the story\u2014including Charles A. Smith\u2019s young bandit, R. G. Armstrong\u2019s brutal Jesus-freak jailer, Peckinpah regular L.Q. Jones\u2019s seasoned outlaw, character actor great Jack Elam\u2019s newly-minted deputy, and(in the film\u2019s most moving and famous scene, a lakeside goodbye set to Bob Dylan\u2019s instantly iconic \u201cKnocking on Heaven\u2019s Door\u201d) genre staple Slim Picken\u2019s gutshot sheriff\u2014do so with a somber stoicism that conveys exhaustion more than acceptance, while still affording them dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The title characters, meanwhile, take opposite tacks as they head towards their appointments with death. Peckinpah\u2019s movie comes laden with religious symbolism, and it\u2019s clear from early on that we\u2019re watching an Americanized version of the story of Jesus and Judas. Billy the Kid is the Christ figure (in case this wasn\u2019t already obvious, Kristofferson strikes a crucifix pose at one point), attempting to deny his fate before ultimately returning from his wanderings in the desert to accept it, while Garrett is the former apostle betraying his friend for his thirty pieces of silver (\u201cThis country\u2019s getting old,\u201d he says at one point, \u201cand I aim to get old with it\u201d). Like Judas did when he fingered Jesus to the Romans, Garrett\u2019s actions are not merely murderous, but ultimately suicidal. Immediately upon bushwacking Billy in the dark, Garrett fires a bullet into his own reflection in a nearby mirror, and, as seen in the aforementioned framing device, we watch as Garrett himself is eventually assassinated by the same cabal that hired him to kill Billy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heady stuff, even for the \u201870s, so it should come as no surprise that\u2014as with pretty much every movie he would make subsequently\u2014Peckinpah found himself fighting MGM over final cut (Kristofferson tells a story of watching studio-edited dailies alongside co-star Dylan, when Peckinpah suddenly stood up, pulled out his pecker, and started pissing on the screen). Ultimately, the studio won out, releasing a truncated version that was met with bafflement by the critics and ignored by audiences (even as Dylan\u2019s beautiful motion picture soundtrack went on to become a hit record). <\/p>\n\n\n\n This truly marked the beginning of the end for Peckinpah. While Pat Garrett<\/em> was neither his last personal film nor his last masterpiece\u2014Alfredo Garcia<\/em> came out the very next year, while the similarly trouble-plagued WWII epic Cross of Iron<\/em> was released three years after that\u2014the handful of other films he made, for however interesting they are, betray a marked decline in his skills as an artist. His drinking got worse, and his health continued to abate, until finally he passed away from complications of heart failure at the age of 59, only 11 years after making Garrett<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not long after his passing, a new cut of the film much closer to his preview version, dubbed The Turner Cut, was produced for television airings. Like several other notable examples<\/a>, it got play on the infamous Z-Channel, which helped restore its reputation as a lost masterwork. In 2005, a new edition combining both the theatrical and the Turner Cut was released on home video and today stands as the definitive version of the film (it\u2019s also the one you can find on streaming). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fitting that Peckinpah\u2019s bloody Christ allegory should end with an act of resurrection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” is available for digital rental or purchase.<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/pat2-1024x609.jpg\")
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Peckinpah has zero interest in explicating his characters\u2019 history through exposition, expecting his audience to already be familiar with the broader story of Garrett and Billy, or else trusting them to catch up and follow along without them. This gives his film a real lived-in quality (one greatly bolstered by the sparse but impeccable set design), as well as a sense of weariness that distinguishes it from other similar deconstructions of our national myths. By the end of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid<\/em>, the viewer feels like they\u2019ve wandered into an epic at the start of its third act, yet rather than subtract from the story\u2019s power, this feeling enhances it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n