“Crazier than a mule humping goat.”
It’s fitting that Sam Peckinpah’s final western, Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973), should be a eulogy for the genre. The entire film is drenched with death. There are the literal deaths in gunfights and such but there is also a sense that a certain era of masculine chivalry had passed. There is a cultural death that comes with the revision of the Western mythology that haunts all of Peckinpah’s films, but none more potently than this.
Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid is a film of juxtaposing dichotomies. The film marks the end of the Western film of the forties and fifties. Gone are the romantic films of John Ford and the larger than life characters of Howard Hawks. Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid de-mystifies the coded mythology of the western film, reducing its most romantic tropes to dust by way of embracing a frail, human characterization.
But it is also a film that pits the latter day studio culture of Peckinpah and James Coburn against the counter culture of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson. They are of two generations with different codes of masculinity. Early on in the film Coburn has the line “It feels like times have changed” which is exactly the message of the film.
For Peckinpah the sun has set on the American Western with Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. It’s become a genre that can no longer sustain mythological heroes like John Wayne. Instead the Western is a worn out and disillusioned idiom cast adrift by a culture grappling with the realities of Vietnam and Civil Rights.
The new fiftieth anniversary cut of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid puts this reading at the forefront. Scenes of Coburn in the bath have been removed with other instances of sex to streamline the film and put at the forefront Peckinpah’s eulogy. It’s a cut for our time that betrays the vision present in Peckinpah’s cut (available in the same set). Peckinpah wanted his “heroes” to be flawed and complicated men and that’s been somewhat sacrificed to meet contemporary sensibilities.
Yet, no matter how people tinker and re-cut Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, the film retains its eulogistic poetry and beauty. It’s a masterpiece of its genre and perhaps the last truly great Western ever made in the states. It’s a mediation on friendship, betrayal and self-annihilation that charts the twilight of the Western genre. It must be seen in any form.
