The 50 Greatest Westerns by Stone Barry;

Author:Stone, Barry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

24. PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (1973)

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was meant to be another classic western from Sam Peckinpah, creator of The Wild Bunch, but instead it became more famous for being edited to the point of extinction and for the infighting between Peckinpah and MGM. It almost became the greatest western you never saw, with the final release a truncated, messy re-cut with over fifteen minutes of crucial footage missing thanks to the intervention of MGM president and bean counter James T. Aubrey, nicknamed ‘The Smiling Cobra’, who was too busy trying to steer MGM away from films and into the hotel trade to worry about delivering great movies. As a result the film failed to garner any real critical interest, and it wouldn’t be until 1988 that Peckinpah’s intended version was finally released on video. Only then was his story about the pursuit and eventual killing of the famous outlaw William H. Bonney (aka Billy the Kid) able to be properly evaluated. Needless to say, it was worth the wait.

Pat Garrett (James Coburn) was elected Sheriff of Lincoln County in the New Mexico Territory on 2 November 1880. Though his term wouldn’t start until 1 January 1881, he was given an interim appointment as deputy sheriff and received a US Marshal’s commission, which allowed him to pursue the Kid across county lines. It was one old friend chasing another, perhaps the greatest chase in the history of the west. A very ‘hip’ Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) and his gang have echoes of Woodstock all over them in an inspired brace of ‘flower power’ casting including Kristofferson’s wife Rita Coolidge as Maria, and sixties singing icon Bob Dylan in the small role of the frontier drifter and vagabond Alias, a part written specially for him after he begged screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer to include him in the production because of his life-long fascination with the myth of the ‘Kid’.

The proper thing to do now would be to avoid discussing all of the behind-the-scenes mayhem that occurred on the set and concentrate on a review of the finished product. But when there’s mayhem on a scale like this, well, like a horror movie, you just can’t help but look. What happened is that bean counter Aubrey decided to slash the movie’s budget (and therefore its shooting schedule) at the last hurdle, which led to, among other things, a Panavision technician not being employed, which resulted in the entire first week’s dailies being out of focus. Peckinpah was so incensed he urinated over the screen. There was an excessive amount of drugs available on the set, excessive even for a Peckinpah film, not to mention the drinking and the occasional knife throwing and all of the usual Peckinpah dramas. Finally, at the end of it all, when the cast and crew returned to Los Angeles, Aubrey fired Peckinpah and arranged for the entire film to be re-edited – with something resembling a cleaver. James Coburn was incensed, calling the MGM version ‘f**king terrible’.

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