
Action scenes are what a summer audience wants, but in Pat Garrett the shootouts become episodic and lack the ratcheting up of tension, followed by its release at the climactic killing, that moviegoers expect from a western’s violence. They also feel not only less exciting but merely a cold means to an end and, in one instance, tragically wasteful. It was and still is a major criticism of the film, this lack of excitement and forward momentum – as if it’s even showing bad cinematic form – but I don’t see it that way. I think Peckinpah aims for something more ambitious than a calculated rise in body count until the climactic snuffing out of a relentlessly pursued desperado.
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Last July (2024), the Criterion Collection released their edition of Sam Peckinpah’s last western, 1973’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The set comes in two separate formats: Blu-ray on two discs or 4K UHD on three, and both offer three versions of the film: the original theatrical release of 1973 (4K restoration); the 50th Anniversary Edition created by Paul Seydor (4K restoration); and Sam Peckinpah’s final preview cut (2K restoration).
Criterion’s inclusion of these three versions highlights the fact that, unbeknownst to us in the summer of 1973, we had all gone to theaters to watch a film of frustrated, unfulfilled intentions. Peckinpah, normally a meticulous, in-charge director who saw each of his films all the way through their final cut, had quite suddenly abandoned Pat Garrett after a screening of a second preview, the last version that he had signed off on. In the wake of Peckinpah’s disappearance, his editors rushed to complete a cut, but the resulting film was not the one the director had wanted to make.
Peckinpah never, to the end of his life, explained the reasons behind the abrupt departure. For commentators, theories seem to come down to three: his late-stage alcoholism had gotten the better of him; he had lost interest in the film and simply wanted to get on with the next project; he was tired and frustrated from the demand of the front office to trim the film down to the shorter length they wanted – or, actually, some combination of the three.
Back in ’73 I had anticipated the film, not only because it was Peckinpah’s (after all, I had seen The Wild Bunch from 1969), but because I was an inveterate fan of Bob Dylan, who not only had scored the film – how unlikely! – but had been assigned a supporting role in it – how even more unlikely!
Exiting the theater I had mixed feelings about Dylan’s contributions to the film (more on these later), but I wholeheartedly embraced Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as an auteur’s masterpiece, a youthful, dewy-eyed assessment that has subsequently needed recalibrating. Because the director walked out on what may have been one of his most ambitious projects, Pat Garrett, as it stands today, remains, as it always will, a work in progress. Peckinpah had aspirations for Pat Garrett, but these were never realized. Yet I have a fondness for films that may not manage a desirable, cohesive form or settled, satisfying completion but bristle with ideas and energy anyway.1
In 2006, Warner’s 50th Anniversary DVD edition of the film became a learning experience. The two-disc set contained a brand-new cut of Pat Garrett that inserted several scenes not included in the pared-down theatrical release, the editing of which we now knew Peckinpah had nothing to do with. An editor (and director), Paul Seydor, not associated with the original production, had, in the early 2000s, taken it upon himself to refashion the film into a state he felt more in keeping with Peckinpah’s concept of it before MGM studio head James Aubrey decreed a short edit of it that he judged better for release.
Unfortunately, the theatrical cut was not included in Warners’ edition, but the second disc contained the first preview cut of the film, called the 1988 Turner Preview Cut (released by Turner on laser disc in 1990). The second preview cut, the last of the previews and the last edit Peckinpah sanctioned, was not available to view until Criterion’s 2024 box set.
Seydor’s strictures for his new 2005 edition had been clear and simple. Guided by the second preview and Peckinpah’s extant notes, he inserted these scenes without any further edits to the existing theatrical version, which was finished solely by Peckinpah’s seasoned team of editors without the director’s oversight, and in record time for the film’s opening. In spite of what the director’s absence meant for the film, Seydor has high praise for the theatrical version.
Seydor’s involvement with the film didn’t stop there. In 2015, Northwestern University Press published his 394-page The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, an exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) book on the narrative roots, screenplay creation, and production/postproduction of Pat Garrett that also fleshed out details and reasons for his 2005 cut of the film. Regardless of one’s opinion of the wisdom of the new cut, the book contains an astonishing wealth of in-depth material, dealing not only with the making of the film and his own cut but with what it reveals about how mainstream films were made back in the 1970s.
I may have not grasped it back in ’73, but the film is actually about two fundamentally unpleasant people. Call them antiheroes if you like, but even antiheroes most often have redeeming qualities, whereas Pat and Billy, not so much. Peckinpah’s Billy (Kris Kristofferson) has a winning, good old boy manner and ready-made smile, but is actually little more than a layabout, often drunken, cattle rustler, owning a cunning manner with which to manipulate and control people and a cold ability to swiftly kill anyone in his path.
The film’s actual focus, Pat Garrett (James Coburn), portrayed here as once some manner of outlaw and friend to Billy, is now a newly appointed sheriff with a directive to capture or kill his old buddy. He lacks the Kid’s social graces and only smiles a couple of times in the picture, but parallel to Billy’s chill underlying temperament, he displays in his seemingly lackadaisical pursuit of Billy a cold pragmatism, an equal ability to force his way onto people, a similar willingness to kill without giving it too much thought, and a noticeable sadistic streak that he extends not only to outlaws but to women such as his wife and his go-to prostitute.
But the actors have star power. On the first viewing of the film Kristofferson’s inherent charm and Coburn’s stolid yet magnetic presence can allow us to glide over all the violent death they both either directly inflict or end up causing. Coburn projects a sharp intellect allied with a dogged competence that wins our admiration, whereas Kristofferson – nowhere near the actor Coburn was – can’t help but win us over even after he brutally does what he has to do in order to survive. The singer/songwriter is just so likable. And Peckinpah knew how to use such a persona for this film’s purposes.
There have been many Billy the Kid movies. As listed in Wikipedia, they are a varied lot, both traditional and revisionist. Anybody from Robert Taylor and Audie Murphy to Michael J. Pollard and Emilio Estevez have played Billy – even Paul Newman took his turn. I’ve only seen Marlon Brando’s somewhat failed attempt, One Eyed-Jacks (1961), in which he not only took the lead but directed as well. (Wikipedia’s list also includes two 1911 silents, in which Billy is portrayed by a girl impersonating a boy!) In spite of my lack of experience with the subgenre, I’m betting Pat Garrett, whatever its flaws, is the best of them, a very good film that may still fall short of that ill-defined status “classic.”
Peckinpah’s rendering of the familiar story, perhaps the most famous of all those from the Old West, was his only foray into a historical past. The film follows, sometimes closely, events as they occur in Pat Garrett’s own dry retelling of the tale, partially co-authored and published as a slim volume in 1882. Much of Garrett’s narrative – the battle at Stinking Spring, the Kid’s escape from the Lincoln County jail, and Garrett’s killing of Billy – has the ring of truth but nonetheless became part and parcel of the less believable legend. But other than Garrett’s telling, documented history of the story is slender at best, and anyway the filmmakers must concoct what’s necessary for an entertaining, hopefully money-making, mainstream film.
An anecdote from the set’s commentary begins with Peckinpah wondering, early in the production, what kind of hat the Kid should wear. When one of his team says that since the historical Billy favored sombreros, perhaps a “legendary” look would be better? The director yells back, “Go with the legend!,” this sounding like a variant of the famous line “Print the legend!” from Ford’s Who Shot Liberty Valance? (1962).
Yet part of what the film captures so well is the historic Billy’s integration within the Hispanic community of the New Mexican Territory. He and his gang are shown sleeping with Hispanic or Mexicano women; lawmen, too, are shown to have mixed marriages. In the ruins of Fort Sumner, Billy’s home base, the only White man outside of the Kid and his gang is the mysterious Pete Maxwell. Mixed-race children overrun the fort. This look of historical accuracy truly evokes the era and plays well, but, still, it’s hard to imagine Kristofferson walking, riding, and killing in a sombrero. Ultimately wardrobe provides Kris with a flattering but fairly standard-issue black wide-brimmed hat.
Like the director of any narrative, historical film, Peckinpah, with his writer, Rudy Wurlitzer, create their own Billy and Pat. In the theatrical version, the first scene sets up the simple fulcrum of the plot. True to historical record, Garrett has been hired to track down, capture, and if necessary kill Billy, but what has no real basis in fact is the idea that the two men had “ridden together” outside of the law and that they had been anything more than acquaintances. Yet the legendary friendship is the dynamo for the film’s energy. Seydor relates that producer Gordon Carroll described the film succinctly as about “a man who doesn’t want to run, pursued by a man who doesn’t want to catch him.”
This concept was nothing new to the movies. An important forerunner was Brando’s film, which was based on a novel, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, by Charles Neider. Novel and film carry the same conceit, that because of their shared desperado past, the newly elected lawman is reluctant to kill the outlaw. Published in 1956, Neider’s book considerably reworked the Billy/Pat story by, among other things, assigning them different names and moving the action to California’s Monterey Peninsula, and Brando’s film keeps the names and the locale. In his book, Paul Seydor devotes generous space to One-Eyed Jacks, especially as to how it adapts the novel, and how, early in his career, when Peckinpah was still only active as a scribe for movies and television, he submitted a screenplay for One-Eyed Jacks. As mentioned, Brando rejected it, but Seydor views this screenplay as the seed that grew, then blossomed nearly a decade later into the 1973 film.
Seydor also gives us sizable chunks of this screenplay to read, and these glimpses are revelatory, especially those of Peckinpah’s minute descriptions of setting and even intimate mise-en-scéne, so detailed and evocative that they seem more suited to the pages of a novel than those of a screenplay.
But it’s this same attention to the specifics of setting given to Pat Garrett – whether it’s the creation of outdoor sets or the dressing of indoor ones – that lends the film such period, lived-in richness, and one must believe Peckinpah had much to do with it. As an imagining of a world in which its characters must eat, drink, and kill each other, it still feels exactly right fifty years on. Decades of revisionist westerns have beguiled us with visions of the “real” Old West, but Peckinpah’s sets and art direction are not just authentic-looking backdrops and settings, they are expressive of the lives, fates, and even backstories of the characters.
Who knows what Fort Sumner looked like in 1881, but the film conjures a bedraggled, windswept ruin worthy both of Billy’s empty, cattle thief existence and his tawdry death. The production, located in Durango, Mexico, was victimized by persistent bouts of windblown dust. According to Seydor, this fine, airborne silicon dust – detrimental to everyone’s health, especially Peckinpah’s – was ubiquitous throughout the filming. Its abiding presence at Fort Sumner lends the setting a doomed atmosphere, like we’re witnessing its imminent obliteration, as well as Billy’s.
In a scene Seydor has inserted into his 2005 cut, we see Garrett approach his house in Lincoln, then walk into its kitchen, which is cluttered with 19th-century housewares and utilities – most glaringly an ironing board that he must push aside so that he can enter. The set dressing not only seems right on point historically but also, as he grows increasingly irritated and even abusive toward his wife, provides the setting for Garrett’s conflict with the strictures of married life in the new, “tamed” West, the one he’s told Billy he wants to grow old in.
The film’s created environment, its modulated ambience, reflects who and what the characters are, and even appears to foretell trouble in two scenes where corralled horses rear in agitation moments before a sudden eruption of violence. The crumbling shack at Stinking Spring in which Billy can barely rouse himself to get up and go rustle cattle – the half-awake Kid mumbles, “Aw, let Chisum wait” – lies exposed in an arroyo, a perfect site, after Billy’s jail break, for Garrett’s plan of attack.
Why would the Kid pick this location as a hideout? The shack offers no possibility of defense and furthers our impression of the outlaws’ squalid, ill-fated existence. Billy, the only survivor of the shootout, has either been arrogant in choosing it (they’ll never catch me anyway) or in a too degraded state to know what’s good for him and his crew. Surrendering to Garrett, he flashes that characteristic smile and cracks a joke. He doesn’t seem very shaken by the deaths of his friends, for which he’s effectively responsible.
Peckinpah was no stranger to the lyrical and the elegiac, often in the context of the passing of the Old West as it yields to law and order, population growth, white Protestant ideals of decency, and better sidewalks. Garrett is an agent of this progressive change and seems to have no qualms at betraying Billy at Stinking Spring – he nearly kills him in the shootout. Once captured, he knows his old partner will hang in a matter of days. To him, this outcome seems no big deal.
But after the Kid’s escape from the Lincoln County jail, which results in his killing two deputies, the film changes tone, and Garrett’s long search for the Kid becomes more personally fraught for Garrett. The drawn-out pace allows Garrett and other characters swatches of introspection, even a brooding interiority. These brief glimpses feel like the conscience of the film, inserted as they are within spasms of violent death.
Action scenes are what a summer audience wants, but in Pat Garrett the shootouts become episodic and lack the ratcheting up of tension, followed by its release at the climactic killing, that moviegoers expect from a western’s violence. They also feel not only less exciting but merely a cold means to an end and, in one instance, tragically wasteful. It was and still is a major criticism of the film, this lack of excitement and forward momentum – as if it’s even showing bad cinematic form – but I don’t see it that way. I think Peckinpah aims for something more ambitious than a calculated rise in body count until the climactic snuffing out of a relentlessly pursued desperado.
Garrett’s chasing Billy is anything but relentless. The reason behind the sheriff’s pace is unclear – does it derive from his reluctance to take out Billy himself, which is a much more intimate experience than seeing him hanged, or is it rather a strategy to allow the Kid enough space to let down his guard and make mistakes, a possibility raised by Seydor. Or is it simply a way to give the Kid a chance to finally make his escape to Old Mexico.
In any case, the mood of the chase becomes mournful, not anticipatory. The audience knows how Billy will meet his end in the same way it would know, when watching a film about Abraham Lincoln, how his presidency will end.
For Pat Garrett to provide a summer film’s requisite excitement, it must seek other means, and as it was left, it doesn’t bother with any – a deliberate decision, I would say, by Peckinpah, not sloppy filmmaking. And the middle of the film doesn’t hang in stasis. Two sequences, playing in tandem at the beginning of the search, point to a drama of a different, more sophisticated sort.
These scenes haunt the film until its final closure at Billy’s death. In the first, Garrett goes to enlist the help of the semi-retired Sheriff Colin Baker (Slim Pickens) to find out where the outlaw might be hiding. Baker, along with his gun-toting wife (Katy Jurado), leads Garrett to the headquarters of some of Billy’s associates, and a gun battle ensues, with multiple outlaw deaths, but also a fatal wound to Baker.
While Pat struggles to finally kill the uncooperative Black Harris, the wounded Baker shuffles off to the bank of a river where he sits and stares into the dwindling late afternoon light. Seeing this his wife drops her rifle (with which she’s just laid a couple bad guys to waste) and joins him, but at a certain distance that seems to imply a mute respect for her husband’s solo need, in his last minutes, to contemplate his mortality. But then they cover that distance with their eyes, which convey their love for each other and with it a shared wordless sorrow. These moments last only as long as Dylan can sing just one verse and chorus of his song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
Back at the outlaw’s shack in the wake of the shootout, there’s a cutaway shot of Garrett standing rigid watching the two of them at the river, his face showing that, rather uncharacteristically, he understands and feels the tragic weight of what he’s caused. All three actors wrap their abilities around this brief scene, which instantly takes the film to another level. On my first viewing, I’d never seen anything quite like it, especially in a western, trad or revisionist, but maybe only in a European art film. Similarly, the next scene has a decidedly lyrical feel that some may feel is gratuitous or out of sync with the rest of the film.
Here Garrett is shown to take a breather as he is likely about to retire for the night, on a hill overlooking a river – perhaps the same river that provided the plaintive setting for Baker’s leave-taking. There in the twilight it’s very quiet, and Garrett appears genuinely relaxed and . . . ruminative. Thinking about Baker and his wife? Regrets about all of it, or, where’s that Billy gotten to? But then a raft appears on the river, taken slowly by the current. On it a man, with his small family watching, takes potshots at a floating bottle. When he misses, a bemused Garrett pulls out his Colt, shoots at the bottle, and also misses.
Garrett seems merely joining in on some friendly sharpshooting – target practice, alone or in competition, occurs as a kind of motif in the film – but the old man sees a threat in Garrett’s sense of fun and takes a shot at him that narrowly misses. This Garrett sees as consequential, and grabbing his rifle takes a studied aim at the old man, who, realizing what’s likely to happen, lowers his gun. Garrett is rational, level-headed, and even kind enough to lower his own and defuse the situation. It’s what he essentially wanted when he confronts Billy at the beginning of the film. In asking Billy to clear out of the territory, he likewise wanted to defuse a situation before any killing commenced. Minutes earlier, in the opening of the theatrical cut, Garrett had surprised Billy with an impromptu and accurate rifle shot at one of the buried chickens the Kid and his gang are using for target practice. It’s just some fun with guns – except for Garrett they’re all like overgrown children – and Pat seems a better shot than Billy.
Camping out on another night, Garrett’s joined by a self-satisfied, ambitious young deputy, John W. Poe (John Beck), assigned to the sheriff by the powers that be, that hazy Santa Fe Ring. Once on the range together, Poe begins chatting, comparing an admirable Chisum to a despicable Kid, at which point Garrett shuts him up, telling him to never again talk shit about Billy. Billy, he continues, may be right in his path, who knows, he’s not judging. Here is a reveal of his old bond with the Kid, which may be a reason for his apparent pokey search, but the half-defense of Billy appears a bit disingenuous coming from a newly elected sheriff. It’s like he’s about to suggest a pardon for the outlaw.
As already established by the film, Billy is a thief and a killer, not a folk hero as yet (except, perhaps, to the local, impoverished Hispanic community). The politicians, mega-landowners, and the Santa Fe Ring understandably want him gone, along with all the chaotic Wild West nonsense with which he and his like infest the territory. Law and order must come, just like the railroads, not to mention statehood, and Garrett wants to grow old in that world. As he berates Poe, Garrett seems at odds with this. Is this the former outlaw talking?
As part of his Billy the Kid ballad, Bob Dylan sings, “Billy, they don’t want you to be so free.” Here, Dylan sources the homegrown, American predilection to turn outlaws and gangsters into heroes who buck and fight the system in order to rise above it . . . to live “free.” Yet the political-economic system in the film doesn’t seek, out of some kind of elite resentment, to eliminate Billy’s free way of life, it only wants to eliminate his freedom to rob, killm and create chaos. And Garrett hasn’t taken on the job of terminating the Kid merely to help the system gentrify New Mexico; he’s doing it for himself and his own future, too – but at a severe personal cost. To satisfy his retirement goals, he will need to kill the Kid himself, giving Garrett a severe case of self-loathing that Coburn carries on his face all the way to the act itself.
The final confrontation at Fort Sumner must take place at night; it’s the best time to catch Billy unawares, but it’s also an additional opportunity to soak the film with melancholic foreboding. As Garrett and Poe lurk about the ruins, the lighting design takes on a noirish feel – a bit like what Welles achieved in Touch of Evil – with Garrett’s long shadows stretching along the adobe and doorways hiding not only the threat of violent death but possibly the Kid himself. But the Kid isn’t really hiding; earlier he’d told Alias that Pat might even meet him for a drink. As Garrett comes ever nearer, Billy, accompanied by his new flame, Maria (Rita Coolidge), enters Pete Maxwell’s house to ask if they can bunk in his spare room.
Peckinpah superbly handles Garrett’s stealthy tour of the house as we glimpse Billy having great sex with Maria. When he and the Kid finally meet in Pete Maxwell’s darkened bedroom, Billy recognizes his erstwhile friend and throws him one more smile-– how about that drink, Pat? – and Garrett guns him down.
Garrett then turns to fire his pistol at his reflection in the mirror, creating a shattered hole in the reflected area of his heart. In 1973, I immediately found this a tired sort of trope – didn’t Peckinpah himself use it in another film?2 – but it works well enough as a final visual symbol of that aforementioned self-loathing.
When the shirtless Billy hits the floor dead, it’s hard not to notice that his bare chest shows no sign of what should be a spectacular bullet wound, coming as it did from a gun fired at close range. Peckinpah has never shown an aversion to blood, as it usually spurts liberally each time a bullet’s victim goes down in slow motion. But here the Kid lies pristine, like the cleansed, martyred body of a saint – St. Sebastian minus the arrows? – about to be received by heaven. Has Billy begun his ascent into legend?
The next morning arrives sunny and clear, with no sign of that pesky dust. Garrett has spent the night sitting outside on Pete Maxwell’s veranda, just a few feet removed from Billy’s corpse lying inside. A small crowd has gathered, including children and members of Billy’s gang. Closest to the sheriff is Alias, and Bob Dylan has one of his better scenes here, as Alias silently observes Garrett getting ready to leave the scene and simply disappear into the landscape, the film’s final image.
Beaming the songwriter’s innate intelligence, Dylan’s restless eyes put across something subtle. Alias seems to be assessing the incident, perhaps seeing Garrett for what he is – a tool of the rich and powerful – and while we assume quietly mourning Billy’s death, also realizing the power of the Kid’s story as it’s entwined with Garrett’s. Behind him the feckless Luke (Harry Dean Stanton) sucks brainlessly at a whiskey bottle, but Alias – a former newspaper man (if only at a lowly station like a printer’s assistant) and likely literate – is a cool observer at this point. Could he be a fomenter of that future, snowballing legend, maybe writing one of those dime novels about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid?
But in the rest of the film, Dylan, who was and remains nobody’s idea of an actor, often struggles with what seems an extreme case of self-consciousness. Casting him, after placing Kristofferson in the lead, may have been part of a strategy (by the front office?) of further sprinkling the film with pop and folk stars to make it appeal to young moviegoers, but who knows. Rita Coolidge, a folk/jazz musician married to Kristofferson at the time of production, has a brief, nonspeaking appearance as Maria in which she merely has to look beautiful and gaze adoringly at Billy. Rita achieves both with grace and poignancy, but putting Bob in the film was a mistake.
The role of Alias turns out to be an important one and demands that Bob be more than a silent, hip accoutrement. Alias becomes a close sidekick, even a confidant, for Billy, and possibly a replacement for the boyish trainee, Bowdre (Charles Martin Smith), killed at Stinking Spring. At thirty-one, Dylan is playing a character perhaps ten years younger. Absconding from his day job, Alias insinuates himself into the gang as an wannabe outlaw. Some physical business Dylan is assigned comes off well, such as deadly knife-throwing or swiftly knocking a man unconscious with the butt of a rifle.
After ordering this latter action in the same sequence, Garrett commands Alias to remove himself over to a wall stacked with sealed cans of foodstuffs – called “air-tights” in the picture – at which he’s told to read the cans’ labeled contents out loud, for example, “Beans” or “Tomatoes.” Dylan’s precise, unique syllabic pronunciation – “toe-may-toes” – almost turns his readings into a kind of nonsense song or beat poem that, if backed by The Band, would fit nicely into the world of the Basement Tapes.
But the Dylan of 1972-73, who’d already seen a decade of intense, mutating creativity, obsessive and oppressive fan attention, and drug-fueled touring, had retired, after a near-fatal motorcycle accident, to bucolic Woodstock, New York, where he basically lived as a recluse before taking up a sheltered residence in New York City. Suddenly injected into a major studio film, he simply doesn’t have it in him, or the chops as an actor, to project a younger man’s hero worship. And he proves hopelessly inept with dialogue.
Seydor reports that the role of Alias was only roughly sketched out when photography began, so that the character’s utterances are scarce and usually brief. Dylan first speaks in the early barbershop/bar sequence when Garrett turns and spots Alias drinking at a table. “Who are you?,” says the sheriff, to which Alias replies, “That’s a good question.” This was a funny, meta moment back in ’73 as it sourced Dylan’s increasing ability to shape-shift into different personae. We reacted the same way to the moniker Alias; nobody knew who Bob really was as an actual person, and we still don’t.
Later, at Fort Sumner, there’s a brief, comic, almost vaudevillian back-and-forth when a gang member inquires of the stranger, “What’s your name, boy?,” and Dylan responds, “Alias.” The outlaw wants more: “Alias what?” And Dylan comes back with “Alias Anything You Please” – a perfect Dylanesque rejoinder that again points to Bob’s mercurial identity. Yet as much as these insider Bob Dylan riffs remain clever and bring a smile to an old fan’s face, they were never enough to justify the songwriter’s presence. Alias seems to be conceived as a Puck-like, quicksilver entity flitting here and there, but Dylan merely appears opaque and vaguely uncomfortable.
Dylan’s worst moment comes when later in the film he sidles up to a thoughtful Billy, who, leaning against an adobe wall, is trying to figure whether or not he should escape to Mexico for a couple of months. In a short stretch of dialogue in which Alias attempts to engage with the Kid’s quandary, Bob painfully tries to project Alias’s youthful ardor as Billy’s disciple, both by assuming an eager fan-boy pose and then looking up and awkwardly gushing his speech into Kristofferson’s face. Contrarily, the real-life Kristofferson had probably always hero-worshipped Dylan. In this scene the two of them just seem like strangers.
Dylan’s Alias is a drag on more than one scene, but this deficit is more than compensated for by the other supporting roles – each with notably less screen time than the songwriter’s. These are western veterans like Slim Pickens, Jack Elam, R. G. Armstrong, and a slew more. All of them are superb actors who slip inside their respective characters effortlessly, as if they’re merely putting on their favorite old clothes. And they are aided immeasurably by the dialogue in Wurlitzer’s script, which places them securely in the late-19th-century American West. They even appear furnished with backstories, though these are never articulated. As Sheriff Baker, Slim Pickens shows up as the most fully formed of them. When Garrett meets with him, he’s busy constructing a boat in his backyard that he tells the sheriff will eventually float him out of the town he now despises. With no expository dialogue, Baker’s whole life seems to open up behind and in front of him, especially as he’s shown tightly teamed with his wife, a tough mama played nearly wordlessly by the remarkable Katy Jurado some twenty years after she’d told Lloyd Bridges in High Noon (1952) that it took more than big shoulders to be a man. As brief as their time may be on the screen, she and Pickens may be the soul of the film.
Alamosa Bill is played by a densely bearded Jack Elam, who, when picked out by Garrett in a bar, assumes a hunched, morose, please-don’t-notice-me posture that bespeaks a lifetime of small-time criminality. Garrett proceeds to deputize him, a cynical move that ends up sealing Bill’s fate. R. G. Armstrong nearly beats the film senseless, along with Billy, as the sadistic, bible-thumping deputy Bob Olinger, a historical figure who met his death pretty much as the film portrays it, from a shotgun-wielding Billy during his Lincoln County jailbreak. Chill Wills is the porcine proprietor of a frontier trading post, his bare gut spilling out of his shirt. When Garrett arrives at the post for some liquid refreshment, he additionally offers the sheriff a prostitute, drawling, “You want a wo-man?” It’s a performance lasting minutes but a substantial one, part of the film’s widely spaced, lived-in amoral landscape. These actors are not there as has-beens given self-congratulatory cameos that might prompt an audience member to whisper “isn’t that so-and-so from . . . what was that movie?” (They’ll whisper anyway.) Slim Pickens’s performance here may be the finest of his career, and that career was far from over in 1973.
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As much as I give Dylan’s performance a hard time, he certainly doesn’t ruin the movie. With such a roster of other supporting performers, the near perfection of the two leads, Wurlitzer’s trenchant script, brilliant art direction, and Peckinpah’s outsized skills as a director on full display, there seems little reason to compile decades-long complaints about an unnecessary scene here or a certain roughness in continuity there. The criticism of the slow pace and lack of drama of the search – this I disregard, but I can also understand the basis of its argument.
Then there’s the objection that the film is too episodic in structure. Seydor makes a good point when he says there are in fact many episodic films, but that to make such a film work “it’s going to take more time in the editing room to find the right combination of lyricism and flow, of vertical and horizontal motion, of figuring out how long to let a big scene play and when to move it along.”
Seydor reveals that this kind of fine-tuning never took place, except within the impossibly rushed time – twelve days – the editors, without Peckinpah’s ultimate say-sos, needed to deliver the final cut, from which several sequences important to the director were necessarily removed to meet Aubrey’s dictate. There’s no doubt that his editors managed to put together a good film, but, alas, it’s not an actualized Peckinpah film any more than Deryck Cooke’s performing edition of Gustav Mahler’s unfinished 10th is a realized Mahler symphony.
Mahler (1860-1911) abandoned his symphony because he died in the midst of nearly finishing it. Cooke never intended to complete the piece as Mahler would have but to take what had been left by the composer to a state where this could be performed. The symphony remains unfinished, but we can hear and enjoy it. Like Cooke, Seydor acknowledges the innate impossibility – whether by the editors in ’73 or by himself decades later – of realizing Peckinpah’s vision for the film. Like Cooke’s performing edition of the 10th, both the theatrical cut and the 2005 version of Pat Garrett “play” very well indeed, and although neither completes the film as the director would’ve intended, we can see and enjoy what both Peckinpah’s editors and Paul Seydor have achieved.3
As Seydor tells us, postproduction was rife with back-and-forth between Peckinpah and his editors (and between editors) about keeping, removing, or how to place certain sequences. Before he left the film, Peckinpah’s intentions for these sequences seem to have been in a state of mutability.
An example is a scene in which Garrett dallies, yet purposefully, with the prostitute Ruthie Lee, which itself has two versions. What we see in the theatrical cut and Seydor’s 2005 version is Garrett alone with Ruthie Lee, who after a vicious slap from the sheriff tells him that the Kid is holed up at Fort Sumner; later, John Poe shows up and looks in on a postcoital Garrett in bed with Ruthie Lee. The alternative is a gratuitous montage of five half-naked prostitutes partying with Garrett, which leaves out the slap and the reveal. Peckinpah opted for the latter in the final preview. The theatrical and Seydor’s version include the former and the first preview neither.
The sequence of Garrett returning to his home and having it out with his wife Peckinpah cut from the first preview but put it back in the second; then his editors removed it for the theatrical release. But the 2005 version restores it. There are others from the previews that Seydor reunited with the theatrical: one tagged as the Tuckerman Hotel scene and another in which Garrett and Poe meet with mega-rancher Chisum (Barry Sullivan).
But one of the most consequential changes is Seydor’s reinstatement of the prologue, in which an aged Garrett gets assassinated in the year 1909 (the event was actually in 1908). In the final preview Peckinpah’s editors added virtually the same footage as an epilogue, creating a frame around the story’s 1881 timeline, as if the entire film is a memory Garrett reviews while dying. But Seydor leaves the epilogue out along with an ill-advised historical note Peckinpah had added to the closing credits. Both previews include the prologue as it’s crosscut with the chicken-shooting scene, but in the second the prologue’s back-and-forth cutting is further complicated by wedging the film’s opening credits in there as well.
In the previews and in the 2005 version, the film’s first image, in sepia-toned black and white, is a wide long shot of a deserted road on which Garrett rides in a buckboard driven by another man. Alongside is someone on horseback. As they pass a flock of sheep, a brief stretch of dialogue begins. The retired sheriff complains to the man on horseback that he wants no sheep grazing “on my land,” which the horseman has rented from Garrett. After a couple viewings of the 2005 edit, you might come to recognize this man as John Poe, the self-involved deputy from 1881 who was thrust upon Garrett by the Ring to somehow oversee the sheriff and his search.
In 1881, Garrett has nothing but contempt for Poe and even manages a stratagem to get him out of his hair for a time. After Garrett kills Billy, Poe goes to cut off the Kid’s trigger finger as a valuable souvenir, whereupon Garrett yells in protest and pistol-whips him. Yet in 1909 he allows him to rent a portion of his land.
Here the rattled Garrett declares he’s going to cancel the lease, but Poe counters that the law would likely not agree to that. “What law,” says Garrett, “the ‘Santa Fe Ring law’? Shit!” Poe reminds him that the Ring hired him to kill the Kid, and Garrett calls him a son of a bitch. Then, with a change in POV, a rifleman emerges from some distant bushes to fire a couple of rounds at Garrett, who falls to the ground. Firing his pistol at close range, John Poe delivers the death blow. The spasms of Garrett’s body as he’s shot multiple times from two perspectives are crosscut with the buried chickens being obliterated by Billy and his gang in 1881.
Seydor does a fine job in his own edit of all the fast crosscutting and removes the messy insertions of the credits. But I still wonder if the sequence really helps the film. First of all, what the dense expository dialog is driving at is barely grasped, at least at a first viewing. The detailed argument goes by quickly: sheep, the law, the Santa Fe Ring, and then we get the business of shooting an old man, all mixed in with buried chickens being blown apart. If I’d seen this opening in 1973, I would’ve thought the crosscutting very cool but at the same time confused with what I had just, well, almost learned. (Wait, so, why was he killed again?) Once the film had proceeded and introduced John Poe, would I have remembered that he was that final assassin, only older and with a full beard?
In his book, Seydor clearly demonstrates that the prologue, along with its crosscutting, was important to Peckinpah, so I can’t fault his decision to restore it to the theatrical, to make it closer to the film the director wanted. Apparently Peckinpah planned the film, from its opening scenes, to hit us with two ironies: one, a cruel, sordid death for the proud, tightly controlling Garrett, underwritten by the people he had once worked for; and, second, an equally ignoble death for the freewheeling Billy, engineered and personally executed by his former friend. Because of the overwhelming familiarity of the story of Billy the Kid, the latter dramatic irony is already in the consciousness of the audience, but the former, that of Garrett’s death, needs to be set up, hence the prologue. In addition, the prologue points to the film’s emphasis on Garrett.
Peckinpah wanted the Santa Fe Ring to be the overarching, centralized political-economic power that must determine not only the fate of the territory but that of its individuals as well – especially those of Billy and Pat.
It’s a compelling idea for the film, and the theatrical edit manages to anchor it in a couple of scenes. In the early sequence when Garrett meets with Billy and tells him he must exit the territory, the Kid understands what Garrett means when he declares that “the electorate wants you gone.” Raising his glass, Billy says, “To Pat Garrett, who sold out to the Santa Fe Ring!”
In the later scene in which Garrett meets with Governor Lew Wallace (Jason Robards), Wallace introduces the sheriff to two members of the Ring. Garrett shows nothing but disdain toward both of them, and when one of them offers reward money in advance of the Kid’s capture or death, he throws it right back at them. But he knows full well that he’s working for them and will follow orders.
To have the Ring blithely assassinate its former underling decades later, as the prologue reveals, is the kind of cynical, even witty irony – layered with bitterness – that Peckinpah might’ve favored. But could he have pulled it off? It feels that this dramatic irony needed to be integrated within the film more tangibly and coherently than the prologue was able to accomplish. As shot, the sequence has a staged, overly deliberate air about it, and as the characters spit out the dialog, it rushes to explain too much in too short a time.
Seydor reports that producer Daniel Melnick, in November 1973 – after Pat Garrett was gone from the theaters and Aubrey was gone from MGM – offered Peckinpah the time and money to finally realize the film he had wanted to make. Initially, Peckinpah seemed eager to take him up on it, and the two of them met in April of ’74. Out of this came a letter from Peckinpah to Melnick detailing important changes to the film needing immediate attention. Basically, these involved putting several scenes back – the very ones Seydor did restore – but interestingly, Peckinpah’s letter does not mention the prologue/epilogue sequences. This proposed director’s cut never happened anyway; Peckinpah simply never showed up to do the work.
I applaud Criterion’s inclusion of the theatrical version, also restored, which was always able to stand on its own as an effective film. No intervention could turn it into the film Peckinpah had wanted to make, and Seydor knows this better than anyone. In his words, the 2005 version is not “the version Peckinpah ‘would’ or even ‘might’ have done, but . . . a way to take the only version that was ever properly finished [i.e., the theatrical] and, in a sense, complete it the way his editors who prepared it would have completed it for him had they not been forced to do otherwise.”
The prologue, with its intricate crosscutting, works as far as it’s able, but the most successfully restored scene is the aforementioned one of Garrett and his wife, Ida. Here, Garrett’s behavior toward his wife reveals what’s festering inside of him: an angry disgust at who he is, who and what surrounds him, and what he must do. The scene in which Garrett and Poe meet with cattle baron John Chisum underscores the sheriff’s employee status beneath the rancher and, yes, that shadowy Santa Fe Ring.
One scene I question is the so-called Tuckerman’s Hotel sequence, in which John Poe, on his own solitary search for the Kid, beats up a couple of miners to find out where Billy might be. Set in a depressing flophouse, the scene features two more celebrated character actors, Dub Taylor and Elisha Cook Jr., playing the miners, but like the prologue the scene is awkwardly staged – it comes off more like a rehearsal – and unnecessary. If we next see Poe meet up with Garrett, and Garrett has already discovered the Kid’s location at Fort Sumner (via Ruthie Lee), why would Poe need to know?
This, however, is nit-picking. Criterion’s 4K restoration of Seydor’s version is a gift for those of us who have never forgotten the film or its impact on us. (In his 2010 book, Seydor had lamented the lack of such a restoration in the Warners release.) Criterion’s release is particularly valuable for improving the color and resolution in both the 2005 version and the theatrical, which also received a 4K restoration. Seydor also was given a new opportunity to revisit his earlier cut for Warner Home Video, and to makea few changes: one, for example, was eliminating the whore-party montage from the second preview that appeared in the Warners set – a good move, I think.
Supplements include a new video program, Passion & Poetry: Peckinpah’s Last Western; an audio commentary featuring Paul Seydor, editor Roger Spottiswoode (for the 1973 theatrical cut), and film critic Michael Sragow; a vintage TV interview with James Coburn; and Dylan in Durango, an interview with Dylan specialist Clinton Heylin about the songwriter’s score.
However, the best supplement for this release is missing: Paul Seydor’s book, The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which is still in print. It’s not an easy read; Seydor provides an ocean of detail that demands disciplined attention from the reader, and his prose doesn’t always run smooth. Seydor seems as prone to run-on sentences as I am. But his scholarly monograph is invaluable, one of the best books on a single film that I’ve ever read.
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And finally, what can we make of Dylan’s score?
Dylan’s outsized songwriting ability would never have led him to become a great, or even a very good, composer of film music, but I believe that here, in his first and only assignment of this kind, he rose to the occasion. Initially, Peckinpah had offered the job of scoring Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to Jerry Fielding, a seasoned film composer who had supplied the music for The Wild Bunch. But early on, when suggested by someone on the team, Dylan was pulled in, and in a surprisingly intimate manner auditioned for the director. According to Roger Spottiswoode, when Bob arrived, Peckinpah had been drinking heavily at a dinner party and was taking a bath. So Dylan simply walked in and sang his Billy the Kid ballad for him. James Coburn reported that Dylan’s performance left the director in tears. “Sign him!” Peckinpah shouted from the tub.
A resentful Fielding stayed on to help Dylan with the task, but the two couldn’t see eye to eye musically. Peckinpah himself seems to have been somewhat ambivalent about Dylan’s score. Seydor reveals surviving notes that show he thought the music was too “thin” in places and needed “sweetening,” which I take to mean orchestral underlays or outright additions. He waffled about retaining Dylan’s vocal of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” as it accompanied Sheriff Baker’s death scene. Since it adds immeasurably to the poignancy of that sequence, we can be glad that Peckinpah’s editors kept it in the theatrical. Seydor reports that Fielding hated the song’s lyrics and left the film soon after hearing them.
“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” proved to have legs for Dylan; it was issued as a single in ’73, became a hit, and has been sung live by him many times since. In the film, even as a fragment, it’s a moving elegy for the dying Baker. As evidenced by the lyrics, Dylan was inspired by his viewing of the sequence itself: in the first verse he sings, “it’s getting dark, too dark to see”; and in the second, “that long black cloud is coming down.” These are images gleaned from the scene’s darkling landscape – its sense of day’s end – that the songwriter turns to express Baker’s experience of his own impending death. Yes, Dylan was and is capable of poetry.
In his interview, James Coburn remembers that, before Dylan’s involvement, Peckinpah, when asked to suggest someone to write and sing a song to front the picture, alarmingly mentioned “King of the Road” songster, Roger Miller! Garnered from different takes, Dylan’s own attempt at a cowboy ballad pops up several times in the film. On the soundtrack album these takes are tagged only as Billy 1, 4, and 7.
Billy – whether 1, 4, or 7 – has not survived as a beloved Bob Dylan song, but the heavy-hearted ballad serves the film well. The song has no chorus, only verses that close with lines such as, “Billy, don’t you turn your back on me,” this one in particular speaking like a Greek chorus to our sight of the Kid, his back to us, riding out of town, across a barren landscape, or out of a scene of recent violent death. One recurring line is “Billy, you’re so far away from home.” Dylan’s voice is especially plaintive on the word “home,” and I’d like to think that this line may have been the one that drew tears from a plastered Peckinpah. It so underscores the Kid’s empty, scattershot existence, shadowed at every turn by an early death.
The rest of the score is instrumental, utilizing a small group consisting of added guitars, a bass, and in the final Fort Sumner sequence, quite effectively, a flute or recorder. Well-known musicians Roger McQuinn and Booker T. Jones were also part of this group. A wordless choral effect accompanies “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and other quiet moments, as when Billy escorts Maria to Pete Maxwell’s spare bedroom. A fiddle is added for a bluegrass stomp that underwrites Billy and Alias’s turkey chase.
I’ve read that back in the day Jon Landau reviewed the soundtrack album for Rolling Stone, giving it a tongue-lashing, but all I can remember is that review’s title, something on the order of “Bob Dylan Redefines Himself: Simply Awful,” as if the release had been intended as the latest game-changing Dylan Album instead of what it was, a modest soundtrack album.
I likely played it just a few times; as in most soundtrack albums, the instrumental passages were lackluster and devoid of much expressive content away from the film’s images and movement. Dylan had obeyed a cardinal rule for all incidental music, he’d kept it incidental. Only a top tier of film composers – Rózsa, Herrmann, and Waxman come to mind – could break that rule and get away with it. Bob didn’t need to fret about it anyway; in his scoring he had tread softly, like Alias, and somehow made his music an indispensable part of the uneven fabric of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
- Others include Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, Lang’s Metropolis, and Griffith’s Intolerance. [↩]
- Yes, in The Wild Bunch, as Glenn Erickson reminds me in his review of Criterion’s Pat Garrett. [↩]
- This, of course, is an inexact comparison. Making films is a collaborative effort; even if Peckinpah hadn’t disappeared, his editors would have completed the final product, but with the director’s vision in mind and with his final approval. As a composer Mahler was on his own, a true auteur. [↩]