Sam Peckinpah’s final western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is yet another show dogged by production problems, this time not all the writer-director’s fault. Peckinpah alienated his producers and blamed others for his own problems. His talent was so great that he bounced back after being banished from studio work, with the masterpiece The Wild Bunch. But he squandered his second chance at a flourishing career. His output became that of a dissipated man who lost his grip on his profession — The Killer Elite, Convoy, The Osterman Weekend. The talented Peckinpah was too self-destructive to qualify as a Hollywood martyr.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid could have been another ‘chance to do it right’ like The Wild Bunch. But it came together at MGM, when the fading studio was ruled by production chief James Aubrey, a former TV exec known as ‘The Smiling Cobra.’ A malign joy killer, Aubrey routinely took pictures away from big directors for re-cutting, sometimes just to prove who was in charge. Writer-director Blake Edwards’ The Carey Treatment was a major victim of Aubrey’s creative sabotage. Sam Peckinpah may have thought he’d seen the worst of studio politics on his Major Dundee, but Aubrey editorially raped Pat Garrett, hacking it down to 106 minutes. Savant remembers seeing it on opening day in Westwood with screenwriter Steve Sharon, and being very disappointed.
What would Peckinpah’s cut have been like? For television showings several ‘R’- rated sequences were replaced with new material we hadn’t seen in the theater, such as a brief appearance of Barry Sullivan as John Chisum. Years later, Jerry Harvey’s ‘Z’ Cable channel aired a version of Peckinpah’s film called the ‘1988 Preview/Turner Cut.’ It was apparently a workprint copy smuggled out of the cutting room. Warner Home Video’s 2006 special edition DVD boxed set of Peckinpah films included that Final Preview Cut, plus a new cut by editor / Peckinpah biographer Paul Seydor, who combined some of its scenes with the Original Theatrical Cut.
The proliferation of versions likely contributed to the film’s delayed appearance on Blu-ray. But interest in the show has always been strong. In an interview back in March of 2022, director Alex Cox only had to mention that Criterion was working on a special edition, to start the Peckinpah fans buzzing.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a revisionist account of the taming of the New Mexico territory, as its wilder elements are pushed out by big-money landowners. It’s very unlike the John Wayne / Andrew V. McLaglen Chisum (1970), which tells part of the same story from the viewpoint of a prominent cattle rancher.
1909. Bushwhackers hired by a land-grabbing group known as ‘The Santa Fe Ring’ ambush and gun down New Mexico rancher Pat Garrett (James Coburn) on his own land. 1881. Pat is still a friend to his fellow former outlaw colleague William Bonney (Kris Kristofferson), but is now the sheriff of Lincoln County. Seeing middle age on the horizon, Garrett sells out to the ‘business’ cohorts of governor Lew Wallace (Jason Robards Jr.). They demand that he hunt down and kill Bonney – better known as Billy the Kid.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is yet another elegiac and lyrical Peckinpah vision of the death of the West, seen through the soul-weary eyes of an outlaw turned lawman. Looking for a way ‘to grow old and gray in peace,’ Pat feels he has no choice but to cooperate with the fat cats of The Santa Fe Ring. At its center is New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace, a pious hypocrite who would eventually gain fame as the author of Ben-Hur. Pat’s first task as part of The Ring’s territorial image enhancement campaign is to eliminate the notorious William Bonney.
Peckinpah’s most easily recognized filmic pattern to provide character conflict is the use of a ‘binary hero.’ Every critic from Jim Kitses forward has ruminated on the polar tensions between Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, Amos Dundee and Ben Tyreen, Pike Bishop and Deke Thornton. In each case the bonds of loyalty go deep into the past, and the present conflict illuminates the pair’s weaknesses and strengths.
Without any malice toward Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, its character conflict lacks impetus. James Coburn’s Garrett broods with regret and self-loathing in the very first scene, telling Billy that he’d better light out for Mexico and stay there. The rest of the movie just repeats the same static situation. Despite a lot of comings and goings, there is nothing resembling a constructed plot, just disconnected episodes. Most every scene dotes on images of our two heroes staring meaningfully, caught up in existential angst.
It’s not plot-driven, but many fans like that.
For better or for worse, Pat Garrett is a structurally loose collection of compartmentalized scenes. Their order often feels arbitrary, and too many feel redundant. Coburn’s Garrett, Kristofferson’s Billy or John Beck’s character Poe comes across a new group of well-remembered western actors, and something violent happens. Billy visits a family man played by Gene Evans, and discovers Alamosa Bill (Jack Elam). Everybody watches Billy gun Bill down, and then Billy simply rides off. Similar shootouts occur at least once every ten minutes or so, upping the body count but not really advancing the story.
A number of episodes turn into excellent set pieces, little one-act wonders. But too many could be dropped without affecting story continuity. The original Theatrical Cut dropped an episode with John Chisum, an old-time land baron being squeezed by The Ring. Chisum is played by Barry Sullivan, in stark contrast to John Wayne’s heroic version.
A couple of key moments appear to be restaged from older Billy the Kid movies, such as Arthur Penn’s The Left-Handed Gun. Billy’s jailbreak is a carbon copy of a classic scene from Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks. Peckinpah did write an early draft of Jacks, before Stanley Kubrick came in and changed everything. Did Sam consider the scene his to re-use? We don’t complain because this staging improves on Marlon Brando’s: the ferocity of R.G. Armstrong’s shotgun-wielding deputy easily bests that of Slim Pickens.
Most of the shootouts are well-done, yet a sense of pointlessness crops up. Billy’s big decision to not go to Mexico is fumbled in yet another gundown of Chisum cowboys. We’re supposed to experience Billy’s loss of Paco, a cherished buddy from South of the Border (Emilio Fernández). Billy tenderly says his goodbye, but the focus on the scene is topless nudity from Paco’s raped daughter. Billy just rides away, leaving her to deal with the body and her ransacked wagon on her own.
Scenes like that rob the vitality from other, much better conceived and directed vignettes. One little moment in which Pat and a guy on a raft exchange impromptu, murderous gunfire plays as if it were a short story by Ambrose Bierce. Minus any really meaningful irony, though. The West is a place of random aggressive murder? Hmm, maybe Peckinpah has a point there after all.
A great movie for observing ne’er-do-wells and loiterers.
As if aware that he’s selling a character rumination, not a story, Peckinpah populates Pat Garrett with scores of familiar sagebrush faces — it’s like a quiz show. Western fans love the parade of unshaved saddle bums – just about every character actor associated with horses and capable of picking up a gun is represented. Tiny roles are filled by interesting casting choices. Hanging around in the background when Pat and Billy first talk are Jorge Russek (The Wild Bunch, Hour of the Gun), Harry Dean Stanton (Two Lane Blacktop) and Charlie Martin Smith ( American Graffiti).
Billy’s bunch hangs out in groups in corrals and barrooms. Gang members and Pat are shown bedding down with prostitutes. That material will either seem realistic, or offensively sexist: at this point in his career few of Peckinpah’s women do much more than decorate scenes and show their bodies.
↑ Bob Dylan’s acting turn is a genuine casting coup. After being introduced with some elliptical dialogue, the function of Dylan’s ‘Alias’ is to be a fly on the wall. He throws his knife in one scene, but otherwise appears in cutaways, ‘observing’ Pat and Billy in disconnected close-ups. As a culture legend who normally shunned film appearances, Dylan must have been an enthusiastic fan of Peckinpah. That he enlisted to do the film’s music is a benefit that should have had MGM and James Aubrey doing cartwheels.
Peckinpah’s westerners trade believable obscene gab, some of it eyebrow-raisingly foul. We wonder if Chill Wills improvised some of his dirty-mouth asides. More potentially offensive to the animal-loving demographic is the opening scene in which Billy and his boys use live chickens for target practice. Viewers that won’t abide films with faked harm to an animal, are likely to walk out before the movie even gets started.
The show does have a handful of priceless moments to appreciate. The stand-alone episode with Katy Jurado, Slim Pickens and Dylan’s Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door is audio-visual poetry. The couple’s elegiac farewell by the river is in itself worth the price of admission, so good that we don’t care that it’s a reprise of the finale of Ride the High Country. We wish that Peckinpah had dropped a cookie cutter bang-bang scene or two, and instead expanded the ‘Sheriff & Mrs. Baker’ story thread.
The Final Preview Cut begins and ends with a nifty framing flash-forward rendered in a sepia-like monochrome, showing Pat Garrett’s murder by the Santa Fe Ring three decades later. Peckinpah’s clever cutting games work well here — the 1909 ambush is intercut with the chicken-shooting scene, so that Pat is first hit by a bullet fired 28 years earlier. It’s editorially brilliant.
Pat Pretense and Billy the Symbol?
But Peckinpah pays a high penalty for pretentious details. Billy’s surrender while assuming a Christ position isn’t all that offensive, but having Pat shoot his own reflection in a mirror feels lazy. It worked the first time in The Wild Bunch because it was one detail in a flurry of action. The last straw is Peckinpah’s eye-rolling cameo as a coffin maker, encountered by Garrett on the way to keep his appointment with destiny. Sam utters the worst drivel spoken in all of the 1970s:
“So you finally figured it out, eh Pat?”
True, even The Wild Bunch skirts with trite ‘meaningful’ dialogue here and there, but this unexpected pomposity is the shape of things to come in Peckinpah. Even the best of his later films ( Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Cross of Iron) labor mightily under the weight of an ‘auteur’ straining for significance.
We say this knowing that we still admire much of Pat Garrett and look forward to seeing it again. Criterion’s essayist makes the case that this is Peckinpah’s best movie, which to us is quite a stretch — maybe we haven’t yet ‘finally figured it out.’ If Pat Garrett best expresses Sam’s personality and world view, the portrait painted is unflattering in the extreme.
The staging of Billy the Kid’s escape from the Lincoln County jail (in PG&BtK), and it’s similarities to other movies, might just be down to being one of the more dramatic moments from the actual outlaw’s life, or legend, established well before any cinematic depictions. Including by the historical Garrett himself, who had a ghost written biography of the outlaw written up. But if it is a copy directly from One-Eyed Jacks, it has another early 90’s facsimile in Young Guns 2, which not only copied the scene, but also cast Coburn as Chisum.
In fact, in this 50th Anniversary cut, the scene with Coburn meeting Barry Sullivan is a switch since Sullivan played Garrett in the television series, THE TALL MAN, and as you say, Coburn was Chisum in YOUNG GUNS II.
This was a great review, Glenn, thank you. In the case of The Wild Bunch, the domestic version was sans the flashbacks and some short-but-key scenes. Once reinserted the movie becomes more cohesive and certainly gives the whole story more depth. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, however, was much like the death of Julius Caesar; everyone had a hand in it. Poor Peckinpah, ill from the start, fighting the studios every step of the way was well and truly up against it. The Wurlitzer story, although fairly accurate boiled down into a slow-moving round of killing, whoring, boozing and looking grim-faced. There’s no-one that the audience can care too much about and by the time credits roll those not already dead are dying inside or just plain damned. I’m buying this Criterion set on the strength of your review, Glenn. (One time I jokingly mentioned to Paul Seydor that when I found the time I would cobble together his cut and the theatrical cut together and that it would contain everything that I liked). Slim Pickens’ final fling with Peckinpah gets him a check-out scene which was a little bit over-protracted, given that he only had 3 minutes of screentime prior to his death. There’s another scene where the Kid stops by and takes over Harry Dean Stanton’s woman. In the background there is playing a tune called Corrido de Santa Amalia. Yup, that song that accompanies the boys’ walk to get Angel. Corrido hadn’t been written until the early part of the 20th Century.
Nonetheless PG&BTK is still highly watchable. John Coquillon’s cinematography added so much to the movie to the extent that even if the scenes were a bit flat, they were filmed beautifully. BTW, I thoroughly endorse your notion that Warner Bros should let Criterion have a crack at The Wild Bunch. Cheers, Glenn.
Thanks Chris … much appreciated.
I admired much in the picture, but essentially it was just way too heavy handed for my tastes. Garrett is portrayed pretty much exclusively as a one dimensional purely evil man. In a silent film he would be twirling his mustache. He is a superficial bully and a sadist who beats up women and humiliates harmless old men simply because he can. Billy on the other hand, as played by Kristofferson, is just an aimless, personality challenged whole lot of nothing. Mostly we see him moping around from scene to scene, aimlessly wandering from one place to another with no plan and seemingly no wits to even execute a plan. At times he seems mentally challenged with no direction at all and no way to communicate anything of any substance. The one portrayed as being even more lost is Bob Dylan who basically stares into space most of the time like a stoned Sphinx. The script is pretty terrible with long stretches of characters moving from point A to point B and back to A with little rhyme or reason, learning basically nothing from mostly paper thin experiences and encounters. The one saving grace and the only substance comes from the veritable who’s who of character actors, most of whom are allowed a moment to shine and essay roles that even in a scant few minutes of screen time tell their own little stories with more energy and depth than any of the leading players. Perhaps it’s heresy to say, but I honestly enjoyed the frenetic mess that is YOUNG GUNS II to this slog of a movie by one of my favorite filmmakers.