Peckinpah’s masterful final word on the Western, this elegiac piece, about a reluctant lawman hired to kill an outlaw who is a longtime friend, is a cat-and-mouse chase of an existential order, drawn out expertly as a cinema of delay and detour, as inertia begets inertia.
Review #3,049
Dir. Sam Peckinpah
1973 | USA | Drama, Western | 106min | 2.35:1 | English
M18 (passed clean) for western violence and sexuality/nudity
Cast: James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, Chill Wills
Plot: Pat Garrett is hired as a lawman on behalf of a group of wealthy New Mexico cattle barons to bring down his old friend Billy the Kid.
Awards: Nom. for 2 BAFTAs – Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film roles & Film Music
Distributor: MGM
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Friends & Enemies; Passing of Time; Cat-and-Mouse
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: Criterion Blu-ray
Spoilers: No
Most will remember Sam Peckinpah for his bloody Western, The Wild Bunch (1969), and the controversial Straw Dogs (1971), but if you haven’t yet seen Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, you are missing out on one of the finest Westerns about the end of an era.
The director’s final word on the genre and its associated mythmaking of ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’, done in a way that is unlike, say, Leone’s more operatic and grandeur Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Pat Garrett is elegiac filmmaking at its best, yet still packing the kind of visceral punch that Peckinpah is no stranger to.
The older Pat is played by a gruffy James Coburn, and the younger Billy by singer-musician Kris Kristofferson (in a major breakthrough performance).
Add the legendary Bob Dylan in his first feature film role as a mysterious man, and you get a fascinating work about gunslingers at wits’ end, pushed to the edge by shifting operationalisations of law.
“Won’t some of you people get him up off the ground and into it?”
Both Pat and Billy are longtime friends, but when Pat is hired as a lawman by rich cattle barons (the lure of exploitative capitalism already planting its diseased seed) to kill Billy, it becomes a cat-and-mouse chase of an existential order, drawn out expertly by Peckinpah as a cinema of delay and detour.
Pat, now on the side of the law, is as reluctant a soul as any in fulfilling his ‘heroic’ task; Billy, on the other hand, seems to have little urgency being on the run after killing someone. This clash of inertia begetting inertia is what makes Peckinpah’s work so beautiful in its tragic inevitability.
Naturally, with Dylan on board, one would expect that his score and songs would dominate—and indeed so, particularly the famous ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’, which was written for the film and used in one of its most emotional scenes.
A film about troubled men having a date with destiny, Pat Garrett was notoriously butchered by the studio for its theatrical release, but thanks to the Criterion Blu-ray edition, we get to see three different cuts, with the new 50th anniversary cut reviewed here.
Grade: A
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan