This movie is one of my personal favorites. Where do I begin? There's the beautiful Bob Dylan score (especially "Knocking on Heaven's Door"), great performances by Kris Kristofferson and James Coburn, a supporting cast of western veterans, a literate script, and the direction of Sam Peckinpah in his last great film. Though not the masterpiece "The Wild Bunch" is, it's still a beautiful film; aside from "El Topo," it's the best of the revisionist westerns of the 1970s, a time when old myths and values were being questioned. Peckinpah, at heart a romantic conservative, somehow caught the Zeitgeist of the era. "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" gives us a grainier, more realistic view of the Old West than we're used to seeing; it predated Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven" by twenty years in its unflinching portrait of frontier violence. There are no good guys or bad guys, rather two morally ambiguous men, friends in an earlier life, who find themselves on the opposite side of what's basically a political argument. James Coburn is appropriately gruff as Sheriff Pat Garrett, a man who just wants to settle down and who knows the time for guns is over; Kristofferson makes a charismatic Billy, the embodiment of lawless individualism. The excellent supporting cast includes such old pros as Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Richard Jaekel and (in some prints) Elisha Cook Jr.; but the best performance comes from the late Jason Robards Jr. as the tragically muddle-headed Governor Lew Wallace (best known for writing "Ben Hur.") For those wanting a different perspective on some of the same characters I recommend the 1970 John Wayne vehicle "Chisum," with Glenn Corbett as Pat Garrett and Geoffrey Deuel (Peter Deuel's younger brother) as a young William Bonney.
Review of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
