Get us in your inbox

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

  • Film
Advertising

Time Out says

Restored and reassembled, this is the full and harmonious movie that Peckinpah wanted to be remembered by before the butchers at MGM got their hands on it. Starting with a framing sequence from 1909 which shows Coburn's aged Garrett being gunned down by the same men who hired him to get Billy the Kid back in 1881, the additional 15 minutes introduce the menacing figure of Barry Sullivan's Boss Chisum, a frolicsome brothel scene ('Last time Billy was here it took four to get him up and five to get him down again'), some engaging Wild West cameos, and a less obtrusive use of Bob Dylan's soundtrack. All in all the film is more playful, more balanced, and very much an elegy for the old ways of the West, rather than a meandering bloodthirsty battle between Kristofferson's preposterously likeable outlaw and Coburn's ambivalent survivor, Garrett. Like Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it both records and condemns the passage of time and the advent of progress; and there is a sombre, mournful quality which places the film very high up in the league of great Westerns.
Written by SGr

Release Details

  • Rated:18
  • Duration:121 mins

Cast and crew

  • Director:Sam Peckinpah
  • Screenwriter:Rudy Wurlitzer
  • Cast:
    • Jason Robards
    • Richard Jaeckel
    • Luke Askew
    • Chill Wills
    • Charlie Martin Smith
    • RG Armstrong
    • Jack Elam
    • Katy Jurado
    • Bob Dylan
    • Harry Dean Stanton
    • Barry Sullivan
    • Slim Pickens
    • Kris Kristofferson
    • James Coburn
Advertising
You may also like
You may also like