Cinema: Outlaw Blues

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PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

Directed by SAM PECKINPAH Screenplay by RUDOLPH WURLITZER

It is a story that has been told many times over: how Pat Garrett shot down Billy the Kid, who was his friend. It has never been told so strangely, however, with such a stern sense of beauty and of fate, as it is here by Sam Peckinpah. He is one of the most prodigious of all American film makers, and perhaps also one of the most prodigal.

Peckinpah and Scenarist Rudolph Wurlitzer (Two Lane Blacktop) transform Garrett and the Kid into the kind of uneasy antagonists who test and challenge each other with every inflection. Garrett and the Kid have become estranged by ungovernable coincidence, made enemies by the intervention of impersonal circumstances.

Billy (easily and exceptionally well acted by Kris Kristofferson) has his chance at settling down, building a respectable life working for the cattle interests. Instead, he chooses to run free with his friends (one of whom is played by an appropriately enigmatic Bob Dylan, who also provides some good music). Garrett (James Coburn), older, feeling threatened by age, takes a lawman's job. The marshal's badge makes him answerable to the ranchers and the politicians in Santa Fe. It is their star, their job, and they want Billy out of the way. Garrett rides down to Old Fort Sumner to give him a warning and a few days' head start. Billy makes an ironic toast: "Sheriff Pat Garrett—sold out to the Santa Fe ring. How's it feel?" "It feels," Garrett tells him with unmistakable finality, "like times have changed."

For the next couple of months, Garrett tracks the Kid. He gives Billy as much time and distance as he can, but keeps closing on him all the same. Billy rides for Mexico, but then inexplicably turns around. It is never quite clear why Billy goes back. When he does, though, the movie wobbles and goes lame. Peckinpah and Wurlitzer are on much surer ground dealing with the dubious morality of Garrett's decision to hunt Billy. Garrett, unlike Peckinpah's other protagonists in High Country and The Wild Bunch, is no hero. As played—superbly —by Coburn, he is a dead-eyed cynic, a man who can slither neatly from one moral position to another. "It's just a way of staying alive," he says at one point. "Don't matter what side you're on. You're always right."

There is a severe irony in all of this, because Pat Garrett was killed, some 20 years later, by the same Santa Fe cattle interests that hired him to hunt Billy. This irony frames the film—or at least it framed Peckinpah's original version, which has been altered, shortened and generally abused by MGM. Garrett's killing of the Kid was only a moment on the way to his own death. This dimension is almost entirely lost because MGM decided to remove the scene of Garrett's death, which originally began the film. There have been other cuts—in all, 16 minutes' worth. Peckinpah calls it "my worst experience since Major Dundee," from which approximately one-quarter of the running time was removed.