Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
1973, Sam Peckinpah, USA
Content Note: Sexual assault theme & animal cruelty
Focusing on a period of American history both fleeting and foundational, the idea of mourning the ‘end of an era’ is inseparable from the Western. Sam Peckinpah may get credit as one of the key figures of the ‘revisionist’ Western of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but the genre has long employed American icons to memorialise themselves, right back to its origins in washed-up frontier figures re-enacting their own exploits. Even if the genre is inherently elegiac, you’d be hard pressed to find a sadder obituary than Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
Towering figures of musical Americana Kris Kristofferson (RIP) and Bob Dylan (of Timmy Chalamet fame) lead the eulogy. James Coburn stars as ageing lawman Garrett, hired to take down Billy (Kristofferson). Dylan plays the mysterious stranger Alias and provides the soundtrack, most notably ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’
This was Peckinpah’s last film set in the old west and features his usual preoccupations with violent masculinity but here they are infused with the kind of iconoclastic sadness that would go on to define later films like Unforgiven and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Join us in celebrating Peckinpah’s 100th birthday with one of the greatest Westerns ever made.
“[The scene in which Garrett comes home to his wife after visiting the barbershop] is the sharpest scene in Peckinpah where a woman tells one of the men not just to go to hell, but to stay there, because he’s there already.”—David Thomson, ‘Have You Seen…?’