I never liked "Pat Garret and Billy the Kid" very much. In fact, there are few 1970s Westerns that I like. I still find ironic that, in the decade of the feminist movement, the heroine's role became expendable, reduced to a sexual object to be used and discarded by the hero (i.e. Pat Garrett in the bathtub with the prostitutes). This said, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" contains one of the most beautiful love scenes ever made. And yes, I am conscious that this is a Sam Peckinpah film. Yet he has always been capable of tenderness (the flash-forward in "The Getaway", with McGraw and MacQueen jumping into a river, immediately comes to mind).
Veterans Katy Jurado and Slim Pickens play a husband-and wife team of guns for hire, brought out of retirement for a last job. Katy Jurado had been a beauty in her earlier films (see her in "High Noon"). Here, her looks had faded, but she retained her serene demeanour. Slim Pickens had never been handsome. He usually played a crook with a mischievous smile, here substituted for a venerable old man expression. While Garret (James Coburn) deals with the last villain standing, Katy realises Slim has been shot. She runs to the river where he agonises, his stomach pierced by a bullet. She kneels opposite him, looking at him with the saddest eyes in the world, trying to absorb every second they have left. He looks back, as if saying sorry for dying. There is no dialogue. They have gone through so much together that words are unnecessary. Then, the sun sets in the background, while "Knockin' on heaven doors" plays.
This is not only the death of a character. This is the death of the classic western. Jurado and Pickens had been stock figures of the genre in countless productions during the 1950s. By the late sixties, the formula had worn out. Pure heroes and heroines had no place in the cynical Vietnam era, which advocated shades of grey. Heroes (like Pat Garret) could be morally reprehensible, while it was possible to feel for the villains (like Billy the Kid).
Like Jurado and Pickens, the classic western was not youthful or pretty any more, but certainly died with lots of dignity.
Veterans Katy Jurado and Slim Pickens play a husband-and wife team of guns for hire, brought out of retirement for a last job. Katy Jurado had been a beauty in her earlier films (see her in "High Noon"). Here, her looks had faded, but she retained her serene demeanour. Slim Pickens had never been handsome. He usually played a crook with a mischievous smile, here substituted for a venerable old man expression. While Garret (James Coburn) deals with the last villain standing, Katy realises Slim has been shot. She runs to the river where he agonises, his stomach pierced by a bullet. She kneels opposite him, looking at him with the saddest eyes in the world, trying to absorb every second they have left. He looks back, as if saying sorry for dying. There is no dialogue. They have gone through so much together that words are unnecessary. Then, the sun sets in the background, while "Knockin' on heaven doors" plays.
This is not only the death of a character. This is the death of the classic western. Jurado and Pickens had been stock figures of the genre in countless productions during the 1950s. By the late sixties, the formula had worn out. Pure heroes and heroines had no place in the cynical Vietnam era, which advocated shades of grey. Heroes (like Pat Garret) could be morally reprehensible, while it was possible to feel for the villains (like Billy the Kid).
Like Jurado and Pickens, the classic western was not youthful or pretty any more, but certainly died with lots of dignity.