Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (MGM, Estudios Churubusco Azteca, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 13) Turner Classic Movies was doing a tribute to Kris Kristofferson, country-folk-rock music star who made 51 movies. They were showing a film I’d had some interest in over the years: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, made in 1973 by maverick director Sam Peckinpah from a script by Rudy Wurlitzer. Peckinpah was criticized at the time for casting 44-year-old James Coburn as the 31-year-old Pat Garrett, and 36-year-old Kris Kristofferson as William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, who was just 21 when Garrett shot him. I’d been put off this movie for years because of Peckinpah’s reputation for violence – his immediately previous movie, Straw Dogs (his first non-Western), had grossed me out not only for its wall-to-wall violence but for its open advocacy of the fascist belief that violence “makes a man” of you. Indeed, the violence in the original cut was so extreme that MGM, which produced and distributed the film, made extensive edits in Peckinpah’s 120-minute director’s cut and chopped the film to 106 minutes largely by eliminating some of the violent scenes. The imdb.com “Trivia” page on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid describes an ultra-troubled shoot during which Peckinpah fought with everybody: with Rudy Wurlitzer (who wrote a book about the experience); with Kris Kristofferson (who later made up with him and worked for him twice more); and with James Aubrey, former CBS Wunderkind turned head of production at MGM when entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian bought the studio in 1969. It was Aubrey who supervised the cutting of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; we apparently owe the continued existence of Peckinpah’s cut (or at least most of it) to an anonymous drone in the editing room who stole a copy of it and hid it for decades until it eventually resurfaced. (Would that someone had done that to the original cut of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons!)

Seen today, with most of the violent scenes restored, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a mess, albeit an interesting mess. One thing I noticed about the film is it’s the only time I can remember Kris Kristofferson being clean-shaven, without his trademark beard. Another surprise is the actor playing “Luke,” a minor character in Billy’s orbit; when we first see him he’s topless and looked like a hunk – and I was mightily surprised to see the closing credits and learn that a very young Harry Dean Stanton had played him. I liked the soundtrack music, composed and performed by Bob Dylan – who’s also in the movie as a character called “Alias.” Apparently Peckinpah’s first choice for “Alias” was the singer-songwriter Roger Miller, but he luckily went with Dylan after Kris Kristofferson – whom Peckinpah had decided to cast as Billy after seeing him “live” at Doug Weston’s Troubadour nightclub in L.A. – recommended him. In their book The Golden Turkey Awards, Harry and Michael Medved nominated Dylan’s performance here as one of the worst ever given by a pop singer (though their winner was Tony Bennett in The Oscar) and claimed that Dylan outrageously mispronounced the character’s name as “Alley-Ass.” He didn’t; he pronounced it normally. Alias unobtrusively shifts loyalties from Billy the Kid to Pat Garrett and back; he spends most of his screen time just lurking around the main action, though there’s a scene inside a general store where, at Garrett’s request, he reads off the names of the canned goods on the store’s shelves and pronounces “beef stew” as “beef stoo.” Dylan also recorded the film’s musical score, and he did an excellent job; his simple country-folk noodlings with just guitar, harmonica (Dylan’s own), bass and drums work better than a big, expansive traditional Hollywood orchestral score would have.

According to James Coburn, Peckinpah drank heavily during the shoot and was usually plastered by noon; Coburn said Peckinpah was a genius in the morning and a drunk in the afternoon. (When Peckinpah fell ill during the shoot, members of the company reportedly made up a dummy to look like Peckinpah on a gurney being taken off the set – with a whiskey bottle hooked up to an I.V.) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is an uneven movie, with bursts of Peckinpah violence alternating with scenes of almost unearthly beauty. The story is set in New Mexico but Peckinpah shot it on the other side of the border in old Mexico, and the imdb.com page lists Churubusco Studios as a co-production company with MGM. Because of Aubrey’s budgetary restrictions, Peckinpah had to lay off much of his American crew and hire Mexicans to take their places. The real story of Billy the Kid has been the subject of a number of movies, including King Vidor’s 1930 effort for MGM – which had two separate endings: the European version had Pat Garrett shoot Billy as he did in real life, but the American version had Garrett allowing Billy to escape across the border – a 1941 MGM remake with Robert Taylor; Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw (1940); the 1958 film The Left-Handed Gun (in which Paul Newman played Billy after the originally set actor, James Dean, died in a car crash); Chisum (1970), in which John Wayne played a free-lancer who joined forces with both Billy and Garrett to fight against corrupt landowners in Lincoln County, New Mexico; and a peculiar 1971 production called Dirty Little Billy that cast Michael J. Pollard, C. W. Moss in the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, as Billy.

A few more good things about Peckinpah’s version: it features Jason Robards as New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace (best known today as the original author of Ben-Hur) and it depicts Billy’s gunslinging more or less correctly. The real William Bonney mostly killed his victims in formal duels in which they would both stand back-to-back, count to 10 and then turn around and fire on each other. In such a scene in the movie, both parties cheat – Billy’s opponent by turning around and firing on 8 and Billy himself by not walking back at all. Needless to say, Billy wins. I also liked the ending, even though it’s been ridiculed: Billy picks up a prostitute (played by Kristofferson’s real-life fiancée at the time, singer Rita Coolidge) and spends the night with her, and Garrett waits patiently outside the hostelry where this is taking place and only shoots Billy once he’s got sex. There’s also an extraordinary scene showing Garrett in bed with five hookers, at least one of whom is Black; apparently one of the things Peckinpah wanted to deconstruct about the Western genre is its usual sexlessness. And it was nice to see a lot of veteran actors in the genre, including Richard Jaeckel, Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, Barry Sullivan, Jack Elam, and Paul Fix, taking part in Peckinpah’s deconstruction of Western mythologies. It’s just that this film strikes me as a classic example of a good movie that could have been done even better in many ways: with a younger, stronger, more sensitive actor than Kristofferson as Billy (though he’s not at all bad; his beardless chin makes him genuinely sexy, even though we don’t see as awe-inspiring a chest as we do from Harry Dean Stanton), a script that made coherent sense instead of just leaping from one big action set-piece to the next, and a director not so in love with violence for its own sake – although, compared to Quentin Tarantino, Peckinpah was decidedly decorous! When my husband Charles came home from work about two-thirds of the way into it and I told him what I was watching, he said, “Is this before or after he shot The Cricket Match?” It took me a few seconds to realize what he meant: the Monty Python parody sketch of a cricket movie as directed by Peckinpah, complete with the various players using firearms to blow each other’s heads off in picturesque slow motion.