Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973): 2005 Version

***^½
Country: US
Director: Sam Peckinpah

After many acrimonious disputes between the notoriously difficult Sam Peckinpah and his producers both during and after production, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was taken out of the director's hands by MGM, edited without his participation, and finally released in 1973. Savaged by critics as a botched failure and disowned by Peckinpah, it was, predictably, a flop at the box office. A preview version edited by Peckinpah, about 20 minutes longer than MGM's theatrical version, was released on home video in 1988 (Peckinpah died in 1984), followed in 2005 by a "Special Edition" prepared by film editor Paul Seydor. This last was the version I watched, although I did refer to Peckinpah's 1988 cut for comparison. (More about this later.)

The crux of the film is the relationship between the two title characters. The two begin as friendly acquaintances meeting up again at Ft. Sumner in the New Mexico territory in the 1880s. But in the interval their relationship has changed, for the amiable Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), with his history of robbery and gunfighting, now finds himself on the opposite side of the law from his old friend Pat Garrett (James Coburn), who has been elected sheriff of Lincoln County by the cattle baron John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) and other powerful economic interests. The two are now adversaries, and Garrett arrests Billy for a robbery committed a year before. After Billy escapes from Garrett's jail, the sheriff is summoned to Santa Fe and instructed by the territorial governor (Jason Robards), at the behest of a couple of political wheeler-dealers, to recapture Billy. A full pursuit is now on, and the rest of the film is the episodic account of how Garrett goes about hunting down his onetime friend.

If Garrett feels conflict between his personal feelings and his professional duty, he doesn't show it, and the conflict in the film remains externalized, the opposition of the hunter and the hunted. Garrett, who is older than Billy, seems weary of his former way of life and yearns for the stability of a more settled existence. Beyond that, he is motivated not by any personal animosity towards Billy or any adherence to a moral code, but strictly by the fact that he has been hired to do a job and intends to see it through. His tenacity is that of the professional who puts aside personal feelings to get the job done, not unlike the narrow dedication to purpose of the hard-boiled detective of film noir.

Billy, however, seems to take the situation differently. He doesn't see himself as a dangerous outlaw, but as someone who does what he needs to in order to survive comfortably in a harsh environment that offers little opportunity to a man of his willfulness and independence and lack of means. He's not the romanticized noble outlaw of Western fiction, but neither is he particularly a menace to the safety of ordinary men and women. He is actually a bit of an overgrown boy trying to avoid the boredom and staleness of conventional middle-class life and have a good time without putting too much effort into it, an attitude Garrett seems to have outgrown as he approaches middle age. If for Garrett the chase is a serious matter of duty, for Billy it seems more like a game, and the deadly consequences of losing that game don't really bother him much. At one point Garrett explains that this is precisely why he believes Billy won't manage to escape: "There's too much play in him."

Peckinpah places the personal conflict between Garrett and Billy in the context of a larger historical and political-economic conflict—the populist one between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. The territorial governor and his cronies represent the interests of those who desire to control land, resources, and human lives, openly acknowledging that they press for Billy's capture because they view his actions as a threat to political stability and commercial investment in the territory. Peckinpah shows these establishment figures as the corrupt, arrogant forces of control and conformity, while Billy represents the relative purity of personal freedom and individuality. Caught between these two opposing sides is Pat Garrett, allowing himself to be used as a cat's paw while repressing any natural sympathy he might once have felt for Billy and his way of life. It's clear which side Peckinpah stands on in this clash of values and equally clear that he allows this side little chance of prevailing against the juggernaut of power and influence and of changing times.

The film has much going for it in addition to its potent themes and focused examination of characters in conflict. Photographed by John Coquillon, this is a beautiful movie. The iconic landscapes of the American West have always been inseparable from the Western film genre, and here the clear, warm colors, limpid quality of light and air, and uncluttered widescreen compositions have the feeling of openness and space one associates with the Old West. The music score by Bob Dylan, largely spare arrangements based on simple guitar-and-harmonica harmonies typical of vintage Dylan, adds a lot to the film without sounding overbearing or dated like so many film scores of the time and includes his great song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." Then there is that wonderful cast. James Coburn has never been better. Kristofferson is cheerful and likable although perhaps a bit too mature and on the bland side to be ideal for the role. I couldn't help wondering if a younger, more dynamic actor like the young Jeff Bridges might have brought a greater sense of impulsiveness to the part. (This might also have suggested more of a father-son transference between Garrett and Billy, who was actually in his early twenties.) The supporting cast is like a gallery of familiar character faces: R. G. Armstrong, Chill Wills, Jack Elam, Gene Evans, Harry Dean Stanton, an apparently bewigged Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, and for me best of all, Slim Pickens. And Bob Dylan gets his first fictional film role. It's a pretty limited one, requiring him mostly to pose for reaction shots in close-up, but with his benign expressions and almost angelic features, he is quite effective.

Peckinpah's cut has adamant supporters who insist it is superior to Seydor's slightly shorter 2005 version. Coming to the film fresh, I didn't have any particular allegiance to either. Inclined to watch a movie more for its major points than for its minor details, I perceived few differences between the two versions—a few seconds, a line or two here and there, a brief scene shifted to a different place, but nothing that for me derailed the thrust of the film's themes or characterizations or altered the overall mood. To my mind, though, Seydor's Special Edition has two major differences that clearly improve the film.

For one thing, the opening and closing of Seydor's version are better. The opening of both versions consists of sepia-tinted scenes of Pat Garrett nearly thirty years after the main action of the movie, now retired and a rancher, being ambushed and killed, intercut with color scenes of Garrett and Billy's reunion at Ft. Sumner much earlier. But in Peckinpah's cut, this opening proceeds in fits and starts, awkwardly interrupted by freeze frames and shifts of the color shots to sepia to accommodate the credits that, unless a film opened with a "teaser" sequence, were obligatory at the beginning of a movie at the time this one was made. Seydor's version opens with no interruptions for credits, the longer sepia shots intercut with shorter color shots that gradually take over as the past bleeds into the present, sustaining a level of dramatic continuity the 1988 version doesn't have. And rather than returning at the end to this intercutting of the sepia present and color past as the 1988 version does, Seydor's cut simply has Garrett riding away towards the future we already know awaits him, for me a more concise and melancholy finale than that of the 1988 version.

More importantly, Seydor's version has a crucial sequence, entirely missing from the Peckinpah edit, in which Garrett goes home for dinner before setting off on his initial pursuit of Billy. The sequence, beautifully shot and edited, ends with Garrett's Latina wife tearing into him for what he is about to do, telling him, "You are dead inside. I wish you'd never put on that badge." The brief sequence not only further defines Garrett's character, but also broadens the scope of the film with its domestic details and its glimpse of a strong-willed female character in what is an otherwise male-dominated movie. The 1988 version does have one sequence, though, that I wish had been left in the later version. This involves Garrett's chief deputy Poe (John Beck) brutally extracting the fact that Billy is at Ft. Sumner from a group of old cowboys that includes Dub Taylor and Elisha Cook, Jr. What a wonderful addition they make to those other familiar character actors, and the scene does explain how Garrett learns where to find Billy for the final showdown.

The 1970s were not a notable decade for the Western film. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid—with its deft balance of kinetic action sequences and quieter, more reflective episodes—is one of only a handful of really good ones from that decade that I've seen. If it doesn't quite attain the stature of Peckinpah's earlier Westerns Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, it still comes close, resembling those masterful films in several important ways: its highly watchable pictorial values, its continued exposition of Peckinpah's recurrent theme of loyalty and betrayal in which onetime friends become adversaries, and especially its lamentation of the changes in the West as older ideals give way to harsher political-economic realities and to a more rigid social structure that leaves little room for individualism.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 4

An Elegy for the Western

The fifth American masterpiece of 1962 is another Western, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (which I wrote about in Part 3 of this series), this is a movie that emphasizes theme more strongly than the traditional Western, and that theme is strikingly revealed in its very first scenes. The movie opens with Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) ambling down what seems to be the typical street of a town in a typical Western movie. But Judd, gazing intently all around him, is clearly puzzled, for something is wrong here. The street is deserted; there is no traffic on it, no horses, wagons, or people. The sidewalks, though, are crowded with people expectantly watching the street, and the buildings are festooned with flags and bunting. It almost looks as though the whole town has turned out to welcome Judd.

Suddenly a uniformed policeman hurries up to Judd, shouting, "Get out of the way, old man. Can't you see you're in the way?" And a few moments later a camel bearing a cowboy comes thundering down the street, followed by several more cowboys on horses. The circus—or in this case, the Wild West show—is in town and Judd has just witnessed the end of a race between a camel rider from the show and a group of local cowboys. When Judd is then nearly run down by a primitive automobile, the point of the movie becomes clear: This is not a movie glorifying the Old West, but a lament for its passing; what for Judd is a way of life has become for everyone else a sideshow. Ride the High Country is not just another Western, but an elegy for a movie genre that has lost its relevance.

Judd, a retired U. S. Marshall, has come to town to do a job. He has been hired by the local bank to travel to Coarsegold, a mining camp in the Sierras and bring back $250,000 worth of gold bullion from the miners there. But he needs help to do that, and he finds it in an unexpected place. While visiting the Wild West show, he encounters an old friend, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who is performing as a sort of imitation-Buffalo Bill Cody sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid. Westrum volunteers himself and his young friend and fellow performer (he was the camel rider) Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to accompany Judd on his mission to the Gold Country.

When we next see Westrum, he looks completely different. Gone are the long hair and beard he wore in the show. Has he gotten a haircut and shaved? Or, which seems more likely, has he simply shed a long-haired wig and false beard along with the elaborate buckskin costume and stage make-up he was obviously wearing when we first saw him? Either way Westrum's whole Wild West persona was plainly just a disguise used while performing as part of a nostalgic Wild West fantasy. This pretense seems an appropriate touch, for it is quickly revealed that Westrum and Longtree plan to rob Judd on the way back and take the gold for themselves.

Within fifteen minutes of the first scene, the men are on their way. From that point on, the movie follows a classic structure dating back to Greek mythology: the two-part, mirror-image division into a journey in and a journey back, like Orpheus descending to hell and returning. When the men spend their first night in the barn of a ranch, they unexpectedly pick up a traveling companion, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), the ranch owner's young daughter, who wants to escape her puritanical and overly protective father to join her fiancé, who lives near Coarsegold.

Arrival in Coarsegold reveals that nothing is what the travelers anticipated. It is clear that Elsa's fiancé and his brothers are a family of lascivious degenerates who plan to share Elsa and use her essentially as a sex slave. Coarsegold itself is a hellish place, a tent city run by the owner/madam of the local saloon/brothel, Kate, and her crony, the alcoholic Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan, who is terrific). And the expected $250,000 in gold turns out to be only $11,000 worth.

The "marriage" ceremony the drunken judge performs for Elsa is a surreal farce, taking place in the scarlet-walled saloon/brothel with Kate as Elsa's "bridesmaid" and the prostitutes as her "flower girls." Judd, Westrum, and young Longtree (who has developed a crush on Elsa) cannot allow the sham marriage to be consummated. Judd coerces the judge into invalidating the marriage, and the three men and Elsa leave Coarsegold, pursued by the angry bridegroom and his brothers, and begin their return journey, passing the same landmarks they had encountered previously.

When Westrum and Longtree make their move to seize the gold, Judd overpowers them and now has to contend not only with the vengeful pursuers but with two prisoners as well. After one shootout with the pursuers, they manage to make it back to Elsa's ranch, only to find that the surviving pursuers have reached it first, killed Elsa's father, and are waiting to ambush them. Westrum uses his sharpshooting skills to help Judd overcome the remaining pursuers and redeems himself by promising the dying Judd, who has been wounded in the shootout, to complete their mission and deliver the gold to the bank.

Ride the High Country was hardly the first anti-romantic Western. The demythologizing of the Old West in movies began at least as early as 1948 with John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (although admittedly that film is set in Mexico). This reappraisal of the genre continued with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns and the Budd Boeticcher-Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s. These were tough, cynical movies whose main characters were no longer unambiguously heroic, but had paradoxical and sometimes outright undesirable qualities and motivations. Happy endings in which unequivocally good people defeated unequivocally evil people were no longer a given of the genre. Desirable outcomes, if they occurred at all, came at a high price and were balanced by sacrifice and loss. And sometimes, even when bad people were overcome, the victory was a hollow one that left an unpleasant aftertaste.

In John Ford's Westerns most people are decent and peaceful. Ford doesn't deny the existence of villains like Liberty Valance who seek to victimize these decent people, but the villains are the exception and are subject to control by the collective resistance of ordinary people and the heroic actions of extraordinary people like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Mann and Boetticher Westerns begin to blur the distinction between hero and villain, with each of these opposing forces sharing some traits of the other. The villains have their own warped code of honor while the heroes are ruthlessly dedicated to achieving their aims at any cost, and ordinary people are often unfortunately caught in the middle of this conflict.

In Ride the High Country Peckinpah takes the concept of the Old West as idealized myth and gives it his own slant. He darkens the Western genre even further than Mann and Boetticher by superimposing on the traditional formulas of the John Ford-style Western his own unrelentingly bleak view of humanity, in which people are almost without exception driven by their most ignoble qualities. His characters are motivated by greed, revenge, the desire to exploit others, or just plain self-interest rather than conscience, a sense of right and wrong, or a belief in justice, as Ford's characters are. He doesn't seem to be denying altogether that idealistic people and selfless actions existed in the Old West, but rather that they were the rare exception. In Ride the High Country there are precious few morally neutral people. Judd and the innocent Elsa are the only unalloyed forces of honor and truth in the entire movie. Everyone else is, if not openly corrupt, then false and covertly corrupt. And Peckinpah seems to be saying that the force of their corruption makes them juggernauts able to smash nearly everything in their path.

Peckinpah also seems to be suggesting that in addition to the baser human motivations, time and change are destructive forces as well, a theme he further explored in 1969's The Wild Bunch. Judd is a man out of time, a noble but quixotic figure whose adherence to a code of honor makes him an anachronism. In his Westerns Peckinpah's brand of cynicism is expressed in the belief that any potential for good in the Old West was swept aside by the passage of time before it was able to be fulfilled. This strikes me as the cynicism not of the born nihilist, but of the disillusioned idealist. Perhaps that explains the one bit of hope he allows in this dismal view of humanity: the rare instance when someone like Westrum is inspired by the example and self-sacrifice of someone like Judd to undergo a transformation for the better and, at least temporarily, master his most unethical instincts and impulses.

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Next week I'll be concluding my series on the year 1962 in American films.

Ride the High Country

“Ride the High Country” (1962) is one of the greatest westerns ever made, which means it’s also one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s a glorious film that works on many levels, and is arguably director Sam Peckinpah’s best film.

Peckinpah is one of those directors I’ve always admired more than liked. “The Wild Bunch” (1969) is an undoubted masterpiece, but it’s not an easy film to sit though. “Major Dundee” (1965) has some marvelous visuals, but a disjointed narrative, even in the restored version which recently came out on DVD.

A maverick personality, in the best and worst senses, Peckinpah was in many ways his own worst enemy. But that was the future.

“Ride the High Country” is a beautifully elegiac film, teaming two legendary stars, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott for the first and only time. This film gives Scott a wonderful final screen appearance that ranks up there with the final films of John Wayne in “The Shootist” (1976) and Humphrey Bogart in “The Harder They Fall” (1956) as worthy screen goodbyes.

Joel McCrea plays Steve Judd, an ex-lawman who is hired to transport gold from the mines. Needing help, he runs into his old partner Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) to help him. Gil brings along his partner Heck (Ron Starr, don’t know what ever happened to him) to help. It’s established early on that while Gil and Steve are friends, there’s some tenseness there. Judd is a straight shooter, interested in living a dignified, honest life while Gil has more than a touch of larceny in him. Indeed, he and Heck plan to steal the gold for themselves and make off with it.

On their way to the mines they stop off at a ranch owned by a fundamentalist, Bible thumping rancher (R.G. Armstrong) whose daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley, in her film debut) is itching to get clear of the ranch. She leaves the ranch and asks the three to escort her to the gold camp where her fiancé Billy Hammond (James Drury) is mining with his brothers.

The Hammond brothers are pure Peckinpah, dirty and grimy and with the morals of alley cats. They’re played by later Peckinpah favorites Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones. The mining camp is a dinghy, depressing place, but a touch of beauty and grace emerges during Billy and Elsa’s wedding. On their wedding night, Billy gets drunk and passes out and the Hammond brothers decide to take his place in the wedding bed. Her screams bring Steve, Gil and Heck to her rescue, and after a tense stand-off they elect to bring her back with them, along with the latest gold shipment.

The next day the Hammond brothers take after them to bring Elsa back. Gil and Heck steal the gold but Judd stops them, and ties them up. He tries to make his way back through the high country with prisoners in tow and the Hammond brothers right on his trail, with blood lust in their hearts and guns drawn ready to kill.

Like “The Wild Bunch,” “Ride the High Country” deals with western men whose time has passed. The west they’ve known is gone, replaced by a town teeming with automobiles, a Chinese restaurant, and a carnival featuring a race between a camel and a horse. Judd is ordered to clear the streets by the local police, who are dressed like the Keystone Cops.

Judd’s time is over but he’s determined to live the rest of his life with the dignity he’s always possessed. As such, Steve Judd is the perfect role for Joel McCrea.

McCrea was a Hollywood anomaly, a good, decent man. Married to actress Frances Dee for more than 50 years, he lived a quiet life with his family entirely devoid of scandal or rumor. He starred in all kinds of movies in the 1930s and 1940s, including some of Preston Sturges’ best-loved films, but after World War II he made almost exclusively westerns. When not making movies, he was a working rancher, and, as such, was an authentic cowboy.

His career paralleled co-star Randolph Scott’s in a few ways. Like McCrea, Scott appeared in everything from comedies to musicals, to westerns to melodramas in the 1930 and 1940s but after World War II he made nothing but westerns. They both liked making westerns, they knew their fans liked them in westerns, and since both actors were consistent money makers, why rock the boat?

Beginning in 1955 with “Seven Men From Now”, Randolph Scott made a series of tight, B westerns directed by Budd Boetticher that are marvels of tightness, speed, action and Freudian overtones. Check out “The Tall T” (1957) sometime if you ever get the chance.

“Ride the High Country” is the perfect screen coda for them. Their time has come but Steve and Gil, like McCrea and Scott, are going to go out in a blaze of glory. Composer George Bassman contributes a lovely theme which is a perfect complement to the autumnal aspects of the story.

There’s a terrific shoot out scene in the rocks where no music is played, but the lonely sound of the wind makes for an equally effective soundtrack. The final shoot out at the ranch is one of the most melancholy, yet satisfying, in all westerns. Steve’s final words with Gil are poetic in their simplicity and are matched by the haunting final image.

McCrea made three or four cameo in later films and one final film “Mustang Country” (1976). Scott decided to call it quits. A shrewd businessman, he invested wisely and retired a wealthy man. But their films still play and connect with audiences who respond to the values their characters espoused. We will never see their likes again.

Rating for “Ride the High Country”: Four stars.