Last night I got round to
See Rimbaud, this is what happens when you watch Westerns, people respond!
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
Easy there, cowboy. Which version?
Barely knowing who Dylan was when I first watched it, I asked the same question.
(I still barely know who Dylan is, btw).
I thought it was pretty good, but not spectacular.
To me,
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) feels like one of those movies that
should be spectacular but instead just ends up being
pretty, very, really good. It has spectacular moments of etherial, emotional resonance, no doubt. Like...
Or when Pat Garrett's murder at the beginning of the movie is intercut with Billy shooting the head off the chickens (which was cut depending on which version you watched).
Or the ending, when the Mexican kid throws a rock at Garrett's horse and walks off in disgust, cue freeze-frame.
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However, all these brilliant moments have no connective tissue. The movie just meanders in a strange, purposeless way. It's like a theme without a story, but the lack of story really leaves you unfulfilled and frustrated.
Have never seen any other Billy the Kid films (of which there are many),
Crap... which are the good ones?
The Left-Handed Gun with Paul Newman is good, Newman playing Kid more like an impulse-driven... well, kid, who doesn't fully understand what he's doing. Then there is the Robert Taylor version from 1941 simply called
Billy the Kid where Taylor plays Kid in more of a Shane-esque way, internal pain and longing and such. Then there is
Billy the Kid vs Dracula but... I probably shouldn't have mentioned that one in the first place.
That's the only good ones I can think of to recommend. Unless you're into
Young Guns and that shabang.
this seemed to stick close to the myth of Billy the Kid as a symbol of the freedom of the Old West
I think there is this point pushed that Billy is the last young hope for the mythic West to continue.
Most people that die in the film are rather aged. Peckinpah always had this theme of "the death of the West". The people are like dinosaurs, their way of life disappearing due to socio-economical developments that they are not even cognizant of. Garrett is the only one who gets this, trying to settle down with a wife and everything, turning turncoat when he is forced to hunt Billy down. During the raid on the river-straddling cottage, one of the enemy gunmen tell Garret that "Us good-old-boys shouldn't be killing each other off like this". Which is basically what the movie is about, aged gunmen killing each other off for good as civilization moves in (and as the protologue shows, not even Garrett escapes this).
Garrett hates himself in the ending, having killed Billy and thus ended the old West. His journey has elucidated to himself how nastily attached he feels to this place and time (with him visiting the whores despite being married). It may have been callous, rugged and violent, but these characters inhabited it, it was their home. Change is inevitable, as Garrett knew, but that doesn't lessen the impact off it. So I think it's very fitting that the kid threw a rock after Garrett's horse just as the film ended, him having destroyed their myth for good.
Although of course, there is a lot of violence too, which alludes to the harsh reality
Mostly I remember when Billy kills that old guy in front of his family during a duel. Not even his children react to it. They've become so callous living in this land that not even the death of their father drives out emotion in them.