Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

This movie, like the characters that live in its frame, has got sand. 

Grit. Guts. 

This movie seduces your spouse and then winks at you and you find you can’t hold a grudge. 

Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is one of the grizzly director’s great masterpieces but only became so long after it was released. The studio cut all the life out of it but it was eventually restored to be closer to Peckinpah’s intentions. 

I’ve only ever seen the restored version. I’m writing about it today because I bought the Criterion edition. 

It looks great.  

Moving on. 

The movie’s scenes feel like dream sequences but the dialogue is full of dry wit and danger. 

It’s also a hang out movie. Billy, Garrett and the gang are always telling stories about old times. From the way they talk you would think these were good times. But it’s funny because all those stories seem to end with some poor bastard getting killed.

Here’s a great scene in a movie that has nothing but great scenes:

Pat Garrett rides into town after finding that Billy the Kid, who he had moved heaven and earth to capture has escaped and killed two of his deputies. 

When he gets there he finds the townsfolk, who had stood by while Billy escaped, are having a something close to a fiesta around the dead deputy.  

“Won’t some of you people get him up off the ground and into it?” Garrett snarls. 

Perfect. 

Also, the way James Coburn says “people” strongly suggests that he does not believe they deserve the designation. 

The movie is full of moments like that, everyone Garrett encounters is pissed at him for betraying Billy and siding with the Santa Fe ring, the corrupt government and the law. 

Notice how every conversation Garrett has is laced with bitterness. Didn’t they all ride into town together as outlaws all those years ago? 

No one dares pull a gun on Garrett, he’s too damn dangerous. But their mouths stay loaded and everybody he meets calls him a son of bitch, whether they use those exact words are not. 

Everyone, that is except Billy. 

He recognizes that Garrett is giving him time to leave. He even knows that he should. But he just can’t do it. 

Here’s their first conversation in the movie. 

Billy: Ol’ Pat… Sheriff Pat Garrett. Sold out to the Santa Fe ring. How does it feel?

Garrett: It feels like… times have changed.

Billy: Times, maybe. Not me.

Not long after Garrett and his gang kill a bunch of people and arrest Billy. And the conversation they have there, backed by Bon Dylan’s acoustic guitar songs is one of the most beautiful moments in guy cinema. 

Billy: You’re in poor company, Pat.

Garrett: Yeah, but I’m alive.

Billy: So am I…

Kris Kristofferson was far too old to play somebody nicknamed The Kid and who historically died at 21. Doesn’t matter one lick. He’s charming and diabolical. 

The movie version doesn’t let him be the full psychopath he was in real life but there are several moments where his cunning shines through. 

Watch how he cheats during a standoff. Or when he toys with a group of bounty hunters who don’t know they’re outmatched. 

And, most significantly, when he waits to kill Bob with the deputy’s own gun. The deputy made sure Billy knew just what that gun, loaded with a mess of dines, would do to a man.

He just never thought Billy would be the one pulling the trigger.

Some of this movie is just part of the real history of Billy the Kid. The jailbreak in particular almost always shows up in these flicks. But a pair of Billy The Kid westerns I loved as a kid (Young Guns and Young Guns 2) clearly borrowed from Peckinpah. 

That’s ok, there’s no doubt that Peckinpah was taking liberally from Leone and all the other Spaghetti Western directors. If this had been dubbed I would believe it came out of Italy or Spain in the 1960s. 

Every scene in this movie reinforces its theme but one in particular stands out. 

Garrett is resting by a river when a family on a boat float by. A boy is throwing a bottle in the river and the dad is shooting at it. Wanting to join the fun, Garrett fires at the bottle too. 

But the dad, alarmed, starts shooting toward Garrett. Garrett barely gets to cover and then he grabs a rifle and prepares to return fire. 

And then the two men see each other, both ready to kill, and they somehow understand that all of this was a mistake.

The family floats by unharmed. Garrett goes on his way. 

The guns were loaded, but both men realized the whole thing was pointless.