Word: peckinpah
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...story that has been told many times over: how Pat Garrett shot down Billy the Kid, who was his friend. It has never been told so strangely, however, with such a stern sense of beauty and of fate, as it is here by Sam Peckinpah. He is one of the most prodigious of all American film makers, and perhaps also one of the most prodigal...
...Peckinpah and Scenarist Rudolph Wurlitzer (Two Lane Blacktop) transform Garrett and the Kid into the kind of uneasy antagonists who test and challenge each other with every inflection. Garrett and the Kid have become estranged by ungovernable coincidence, made enemies by the intervention of impersonal circumstances...
...gives Billy as much time and distance as he can, but keeps closing on him all the same. Billy rides for Mexico, but then inexplicably turns around. It is never quite clear why Billy goes back. When he does, though, the movie wobbles and goes lame. Peckinpah and Wurlitzer are on much surer ground dealing with the dubious morality of Garrett's decision to hunt Billy. Garrett, unlike Peckinpah's other protagonists in High Country and The Wild Bunch, is no hero. As played-superbly -by Coburn, he is a dead-eyed cynic, a man who can slither...
There is a severe irony in all of this, because Pat Garrett was killed, some 20 years later, by the same Santa Fe cattle interests that hired him to hunt Billy. This irony frames the film-or at least it framed Peckinpah's original version, which has been altered, shortened and generally abused by MGM. Garrett's killing of the Kid was only a moment on the way to his own death. This dimension is almost entirely lost because MGM decided to remove the scene of Garrett's death, which originally began the film. There have been...
...studio are mostly stupid but not disastrous. Even in the maimed state in which it has been released, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the richest, most exciting American film so far this year. There are moments and whole sequences here that stand among the best Peckinpah has ever achieved: a raft moving down a muddy river, a ragged family huddled on board; the final meeting of Gar rett and Billy back at Old Fort Sumner at night, with men moving like apparitions and dust blowing like a rasping fog. The whole film has a parched, eerie splendor that...