On Criterion Blu-ray - Rod Bishop comes down hard on on PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (Sam Peckinpah, USA, 1973)

Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

 

Back then - and 50 years later - it’s hard not wondering whether this Sam Peckinpah ‘revisionist’ western would been made if Two-Lane Blacktop hadn’t appeared two years earlier. 

Written by the same scriptwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer, it also boasts two famous musicians with little acting experience in the main cast, and it valiantly strives to recreate the languid ennui of Monty Hellman’s seminal road movie in similar wide-open landscapes.

In 1973, casting musicians in films was hardly a new idea. But after the counter-culture highs (ahem) – and lows - of Easy Rider (1969), a film that blew up the Hollywood business model; and after Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and folk prince James Taylor - neither of whom had acted before - headed up Two-Lane Blacktop, why not give it a try?

Country singer Kris Kristofferson had acted before, in 1971’s Cisco Pike, but if he’d learnt anything from that outing, it certainly doesn’t show up here. His self-conscious performance as the notorious Billy The Kid is close to awful, and his technique with rifle and pistol so abysmal, it’s hard to believe he could hit anything, let alone all the cowboys hiding behind barns and rocky outcrops and riding their horses. 

Charismatic is a word often applied to Bob Dylan songs, but never to his screen performances. That’s because he simply can’t act. Even if he has been watching James Caan with his knife in El Dorado. Dylan’s role in Pat Garrett is so marginal and perfunctory, it’s clear he’s in the film because he is Bob Dylan - and you’re not.

Kristofferson's and Dylan’s lack of acting chops are compounded by the presence of seasoned professionals forced to work with them – James Coburn, Barry Sullivan, Jason Robards, Jack Elam, Harry Dean Stanton, Elisha Cook Jr and, best of all, Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado who use their limited screen time to give the film its only true moment of emotional clout.

Peckinpah’s last western was a dismal failure and it’s still hard to believe it came only four short years after his best, The Wild Bunch. 

Gene Siskel in The Chicago Tribune felt Pat Garrett “appears to have been made in emotional slow-motion, and the self-inflating lethargy and mugging of all concerned reduces the enterprise to an exercise in pretension.”

Criterion have now released a 4K Blu-ray package including no less than three versions of the film - The 50^th Anniversary edition (1 hour 57 mins); the Theatrical Release (1 hour 46 minutes) and Peckinpah’s Final Preview Cut (2 hours 2 mins).

Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid was bad back then. It’s even worse now.