Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) Review

rating: ****

the story: Pat Garrett hunts down his old friend Billy the Kid.

the review: I recently sat down making my way through three edits of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and basically, I loved it.  There's a lot of passion and history behind those edits, but what it boils down to is a film that's much more about Pat Garrett than Billy the Kid, and then, at that, less about his conflicted feelings and more about the sequence of events that led from the badge to the murder.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is nearly twenty years old at this point, and is unquestionably the greater cinematic achievement, but probably it would never have existed without Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  Neither film spends a lot of time explaining the bona fides of their infamous outlaws, but plenty of time exploring the journeys the men who kill them take.  For Pat Garrett, there's precious little time spent sharing a screen, without bullets, with Billy.  Instead it's Sam Peckinpah indulging himself one last time in the lush visual language of the old west, including Pat's snazzy black duds that when updated with modern technology pop off the screen just as if he were Darth Vader hunting down Han Solo.

Which, by the way, there's plenty of that to be found here, too.  Kris Kristofferson's Billy is a visual template for Han, and James Coburn's Pat is given another possible origin for Han's famous cantina showdown with Greedo (Harrison Ford himself had another in an episode of Gunsmoke).  

Another valuable screen hand in Jason Robards casually points Pat in Billy's direction, but the reason I really cared about any of this is the enigmatic character known as Alias, who happens to be played by Bob Dylan.  Peckinpah apparently felt Bob was an unwanted studio mandate, which is insane.  I mean, if you have the young Bob Dylan in a western, wouldn't your first thought, as director, be nothing but abject gratitude?  Maybe Sam wasn't much for music, although Bob certainly was.  He composed "Knocking on Heaven's Door" for Pat Garrett, and it ends up featured in the movie's best scene.  He also fiddled around with the song that would become "Wagon Wheel" in the recording sessions, by the way.  His acting isn't much, but there isn't much asked of it.  Mostly he's just the one guy smart enough to be faithful to Billy but also convincing factor into Pat's plans, the middle ground that's essential to discovering where these legends fit together when the film itself doesn't bother.

Coburn is effortlessly cool and so much more appealing than Kristofferson, who spends the movie basically preening, assured that the peasants around him are in awe of the legend, when they really should admire Pat as much as we do thanks to Coburn.  These are all sketches, which is probably why the film had such a hard time finding appreciation on original release, why the studio had no idea what Peckinpah was trying to accomplish, which was nothing less than an ode to a dying era, both historically and as a film genre.  He's not asking that you find either title character heroic, which is why he never frames either of their narratives.  We are simply asked to bear witness.

Like so with the film itself.  It's an essential part of film lore.