Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid

So if you haven't been paying close attention to Agitation Of The Mind's Peckinpahfest you've been missing out on some truly excellent and insightful film criticism. Go catch up now if you haven't got a chance to yet. I contributed two pieces earlier in the blogathon, and the great Neil Fulwood gave his usually excellent taste a rest and asked me for a third, which I couldn't help but oblige.

The first time I heard about Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, it was described to me as a Western by Antonioni. This didn’t exactly compel me to see the film, as Antonioni’s ennui powered cinematic slogs have never been my favorite flavor of filmmaking (with the notable exception of Eclipse). I was really only familiar with The Wild Bunch and The Getaway at that point, and I didn’t see Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid until much later when I really started to devour Peckinpah, instigated by the one two punch of Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (Which I was inspired to seek out by Ebert’s brilliant essay) and Ride The High Country.

But when I finally did see the film I had to admit the term was just right. Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is a slow, existential, muted, dreamy film, which chronicles the death of a personality as much as it does the end of an era (No coincidence that the movie was originally written for Monte Helleman. Undisputed King of muted, existential, dreamy slow paced films). Like Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, Pat Garrett is a strangely subjective movie (Why hasn't The Acidemic reviewed it yet?), symbol heavy and nearly stream of conscienceness in the way that everything external in the movie seems to be just a twisted reflection of Garrett’s internal strife (Part of what makes The Getaway so frustrating despite its pleasures is the fact that in this and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia Peckinpah proved that he was more or less the only person in the world who COULD have shot El Ray) It’s a surreal film sans surrealism, a mere naked midget and rain of blood away from being a Jodorowsky film.

Though I think it’s a flawed film, some of the fault coming from the notorious Studio interference the movie endured some of it not (but we’ll get to that later) it is also one of my favorite Peckinpah films, behind only The Wild Bunch and Ride The High Country and in isolated moments of grace remains unmatched in Peckinpah’s oeuvre.

As I mentioned before the movie is impressively abstract. The film opens with Garrett’s own death intercutting with the raucous party Billy is throwing that ends up starting the rest of the film. It’s a ballsy way to open the film, with the foreknowledge that we’re basically going to spend the movie watching a dead man kill someone. It highlights the absurdity of the whole situation. In Billy, Garrett basically seeks to execute a younger version of himself. The entire film is just one long journey towards death (when Garrett finally reaches his destination who does he meet but a coffin maker.) It’s a mission of self negation done at the beck and call of men that Garrett can’t stand. The flashback structure is also significant given that just about everyone we take the time to meet in the film ends up dead. For most of the runtime Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is a movie populated strictly by Ghosts.

If Wild Bunch is about death’s horror and brutality(the normal term when used to talk about Peckinpah is violence but what is violence but death’s ambassador?) Ride The High Country is about its tragedy, and The Ballad Of Cabal Hogue is about its necessity, then Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is about its absurdity.

Unlike in The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, or hell just about every Peckinpah movie in which someone dies, nobody in Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid WANTS to kill each other. But they somehow manage just the same. Most of the people fighting know each other, and their gun battles are punctuated with them talking about old times. Even in the film’s most Gruesome (And kind of Glorious) death scene the infamous “Shot Gun Full of Dimes” bit the prison guard just happens to be in the way, albeit his sadism does make his grisly end a bit satisfying (For an interesting bit of autuerist study check out the way Arthur Penn that other great cinematic poet of violence directed the same sequence in The Left Handed Gun). This is of course highlighted in The Raft sequence in which Garrett and a family floating by on a raft start shooting at each other, and keep doing it until they both gradually realize they have no reason to. The violence is so literally pointless that its comical.

Unfortunately a few other things are comical in Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid as well, unintentionally so. Particularly in the disastrous stunt casting of Bob Dylan as Billy’s gibbering knife throwing sidekick. Playing at his most mumbling and twitchy, as though somebody told him his character was a Gremlin, Dylan’s jaw droppingly bad. Which leads to the other elephant in the room, Dylan’s score is also jaw droppingly bad.

This is obscured by the fact that the moment when Knocking On Heaven’s Door plays over Slim Picken’s Death is one of the finest that Peckinpah ever committed to celluloid. Infact just for truth in criticism here it is.



The problem is the rest of it. Its lyric heavy, distracting, and laughably bad. Don’t believe me? It contains the line “Drinkin Margaritas/ With the Senoritas.” That line gets repeated. Dylan actually sings with a straight face “Oh Billy They Don’t Want You To Be So Free.” It’s mind blowing.

As for Billy himself, I’ve always found him a bit problematic as well. Kristopherson is a fine if limited actor. When he plays Billy as the center of his own universe, like when he calmly saunters out of the town after executing the two deputies charged with guarding him, mocking the cowed townsfolk, who seconds before where yowling to watch him die, he’s perfect. Unfortunately the film has him spending so much time being beautific (something I’d attribute to Wurletzer over Peckinpah) that he remains a cipher through most of the runtime, and not a particularly interesting one. When he assumes a cruciform right before his death I was only shocked to be reminded that he hadn’t been standing that way for the entire film.

One could argue that given the fact that I’ve argued that the film is a movie of abstracts its fitting that Billy be purely symbolic. But there’s too much life around the edges of the film for me to fully except the way he’s portrayed.

I feel like I’m being too rough on the film though. Its one I truly do love, and I should point out that the only reason I’m able to articulate what bugs me about it is that I’ve seen the film a couple dozen times. Pat Garrett remains a stunning and unique cinematic vision. Its a rich movie. One of the few films that actually earns that stock hack critic phrase, “A meditation…”

Major Dundee

Returning again to a tribute to Agitation Of The Mind's Peckinpah Month. I'd love to keep doing these, but I've got to start putting out my year end stuff there's going to be alot of Essays and I want to make sure I've got the time. Still We'll see if the spirit doesn't move me once more before the end of the month. I rarely miss a chance to write about Pat Garret and Billy The Kid.

Major Dundee is a maddening film to look at from in terms of Autuerism. On one hand no one but Peckinpah could have possibly made the film, but at the same time the differences from the rest of his oeuvre are maddeningly many.

Chief among these differences is the tone; all of Sam Peckinpah’s films starting at Ride The High Country are pitched at the tone of an elegy. Even his so called “lighter” films such as The Ballad Of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner deal with men who have been left behind by time and who have become completely isolated from the outside world. Even the slapstick heavy Hogue ends with the hero literally being run down by the modern age. Major Dundee on the other hand is something of a celebration, with relatively clear lines between good and evil, and an end in which the hero literally rides off into the sunset.

The next incongruity is in the hero. All Peckinpah protagonists, are heroes out of their time. There are the Wild West heroes of Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch, Cable Hogue, and Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid who run into the modern age like a brick wall. The modern day outlaws with no need for society in The Getaway, Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia and, lord help me, even Convoy. The man out of time is seen again in the Soldier fighting in a desperate war he is about to lose in Cross Of Iron, and the timid Mathematician who finds himself first out of place in the “brutish” Cornish village he has moved to, and then when the pendulum swings the other way, ostracized from all society when he gives into brutal Neanderthal violence when his home is threatened. Even his twin CIA thrillers The Killer Elite and the regrettable The Osterman Weekend hinge their plots on the fact that the protagonists still believe in outdated notions of honor, loyalty, and fair play. Only Major Dundee breaks this mold.

From the outset it looks like Dundee is a perfect fit for the Peckinpah mold. Regulated to a dusty frontier base for “Fighting his own war,” Dundee seems like someone who might only be comfortable as a Spartan waging total war in ancient Greece. Further backing this interpretation, is the fact that Dundee is a Calvary man, a form of warfare that itself will be an antique by the time the next war rolls around. This is further evidenced by the fact that most of Dundee’s ire is projected onto the cowardly Lt. Graham, who as an artillery officer represents the modern form of war that will make Dundee obsolete.

However, the film fails to follow through. Now, as even this restored version is 45 minutes shorter then Sam’s cut, this might not be entirely his fault. However, in the context of the film we are offered, this line of thought is abruptly dropped. Dundee is not out of his time at all, his methods win out, he and his men survive, and when he returns to The United States having declared war on France, we are not even allowed to see any consequences of his actions. He is not reprimanded or punished; he is a conquering hero.


It is tempting to say that Richard Harris’s character is the “Peckinpah character,” but on further observation this is simply not so. The Harris character may only be as Dundee chastises him, “An Irish Potato farmer,” rather then Southern Gentry but the fact is that Harris has made himself to fit into his time. As he charges into enemy ranks at the end of the film in one last glorious stand he is every inch the cliché of what the Southern gentleman is supposed to be.

Another small but crucial difference between this and other Peckinpah films is the fact that this is the only film in which Indians are viewed as the antagonists. Peckinpah always preferred to have the rot come from within. Here, aside from a few throwaway lines from James Coburn about the civil war, and Heston’s drunken “Jesus beard” inducing freak out, the enemy is always a foreign entity.

Another difference between this and other Peckinpah films is the violence. The violence level is surprisingly high (although as I am only familiar with this cut I am unable to judge how much of this is due to the leniency of modern times). There are burning bodies, bloody children stuck with arrows, and gunshots and knife wounds that actually bleed. However, there is one crucial thing that separates this from Peckinpah’s other films. On one hand the action set pieces are the first that look like Peckinpah’s trademark style (Ride The High Country Shootouts are for the most part shot in classical form), with their split second edits, attention to small detail, confused melees, and bloody consequences. On the other hand, almost all the damn action scenes are set at night, where it is almost impossible to see anything. The result is we have the techniques, but none of the sickening clarity that they provide. It’s maddening and one feels a bit like a Pavolovian dog who has heard the bell and now waits impatiently for the damn treat to come. Instead of the sickening lucidity there is mere frustrating confusion.

Still there are quite a few things to enjoy about Major Dundee, and plenty of Peckinpah’s signature touches remain. For one thing his wit and smartass attitude are firmly in place. There is that wonderful moment when the Union soldiers, Confederates, and Cowboys ride from the base one after another, each singing their representative songs as they clash with one another. The idea of showing the divisions within the camp with literal “discord” is an ingenious one. Another sly reference comes when Coburn informs Heston that he makes “a mighty suspicious Mexican.” An Orson Welles fan in the audience has to laugh at that line.

There is no Peckinpah film that is without its moments of eerie poetry. One moment in particular stands out as the Calvary in full formation rides through the ruins of the Mexican village. The sequence starts on its outskirts, moving past the hung bodies, and dogs feeding upon a human course, past the old women and starving children who seem to be all that’s left of the town, as children pick the beans out of the dirt. The sequence shot in long takes is surreal, and haunting presaging Apocalypse Now.

Also fully formed is Peckinpah’s love of Mexican Culture, with the fiesta scene that is a clear predecessor to the one in The Wild Bunch. The Bunch deepened its fiesta sequence by mirror it with one in the enemy camp which had a kind of Satanic grandeur. Still it’s hard to disparage the pleasures of the scene. It’s filled with an easy camaraderie, and good humor (Dundee is a surprisingly funny film in whole). The scene has an Altman like sense of enjoyment of itself. It takes its time and allows us to discover the characters, and all and all it really is quite lovely. Peckinpah’s respect for the Mexican culture is evident as well, the Mexican characters in a Peckinpah film are always characters, not stereotypes, and this one is no different.

As I said, Dundee is a maddening film, a comprised film that is truly Sam’s, an entertaining film that is highly flawed, simultaneously a mess and a masterpiece.

Ride The High Country

Neil over at the excellent Agitation Of The Mind is devoting the month of December to Peckinpah. As the man ranks in my top five filmmakers of all time I couldn't help but join in. I'm taking a look at two of Peckinpah's early formative films. Today its Ride The High Country one of my all time favorites, tomorrow its Major Dundee, which is slightly more problematic but still a crucial piece of his filmography. Hope you enjoy.



“My father says there’s only right and wrong, good and evil, but it ain’t that way is it?”

“No it’s not it should be, but it ain’t.”

-Ride The High Country”-

If the above words aren’t inscribed on Peckinpah’s tombstone they should be. It is hard to think of another film so early in a director’s career that so completely captures their ethos as Ride The High Country. Romantic in a classical sense but deeply cynical, a crowd pleading genre film with poetry in its soul, a hard uncompromising work about men out of time and out of their time, Ride The High Country neatly sums up almost everything that makes Peckinpah Peckinpah.

Many people call Peckinpah a nihilist. I’ve always found this analysis to be laughably shallow. The second line alone proves that. Peckinpah was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic; he believes that there should be order, and despairs at finding none. Most nihilistic writings I’ve read have a distasteful smugness to them, as though the authors are overjoyed that the world gives them so many events to prove their philosophy. It is true that most Peckinpah films look at life with the view that friendship (Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, Ride The High Country), family (Junior Bonner), and love (Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia) will inevitably be betrayed, but he gets no satisfaction from these events only deep sorrow. These films are pitched at the level of an elegy, never a celebration of this loss.

It is amazing that Peckinpah was able to catch this tone as a young filmmaker. World weariness is usually distasteful and annoying when filmmakers who have not had significant reason to be world weary attempt to affect it (witness Vincent Gallo). Ride the High Country does not feel like a young man’s film. The entire world has been rundown, the characters have been defeated by life, the old carry deep wounds close to the surface, and the young have no idealism. The West no longer holds the promise of the clean slate that the frontier once provided, and the society that is encroaching is no better. The tenets of civilization have eroded, as Elsa discovers when she realizes that the family she has married into intends to share her in more ways then one and the community she has been brought into heartily endorses this arrangement (the frankness of this scene is somewhat amazing considering the code had not yet lost its power). The authority from the state, personified by the judge is drunken and corrupt, and other traditional sources of authority such as the church as conspicuously absent (the judge even underlines this when he begins his marriage ceremony with the words “This is not a religious ceremony and I am not a man of the cloth”). The violence is realistic, and it hurts.

While the violence in Ride The High Country is by no means graphic, it is realistic in the unblinking way it stares at death. There is a lovely echo in Pat Garret and Billy The Kid to a scene in Ride The High Country. In Pat Garret and Billy The Kid, when Slim Pickens is mortally wounded he calmly makes his way down to a river and quietly watches as his life leaks away, in what is perhaps the most touching scene Peckinpah ever filmed. In Ride The High Country, when one of the villains is shot he simply slumps over, holds his chest, and takes one last look at the surrounding wilderness. Despite our disdain for the character the scene is truly touching. The unsentimentality of the scene is underlined, when Randolph Scott returns to the scene of the killing to find that the dead man’s brothers have not even bothered to remove the body. The man is dead, and there is simply no way around it.

Sam Peckinpah is so often discussed as a stylist that the level of realism he brought to his films is all too often forgotten. As in his portrayal of the mining camp, which presages McCabe and Mrs. Miller by over a decade, and at least matches that masterpiece in its harsh reality. This is not the proto commune of Paint Your Wagon, or the boomtown of the classic Hollywood western. This is a dank dirty little hole where desperate men and hard women have decided to make their living. The miners live in pathetic ripped tents. The few buildings that do stand teeter ominously above the ground. The insides are dark, cramped, and rotting. The film uses long takes to allow the viewer to reveal the world to the viewer in the Bazianian sense.

Many scenes in this sequence have a strange Altman like intimacy and objectivity with characters viewed at the end of long hallways, and discussions conducted in deep shadow and long shot, these shots are held not vivisected with reassuring close-ups. As a result we are able to study the place where the characters and we find themselves, and despite the horror being more understated then say The Wild Bunch, we are able to grasp the sickness of this parody of civilization. This sickness is emphasized in the subjective shots from the young Elsa Fisher’s point of view. Finally running away from her tyrannical puritan of a father she finds herself thrown head first into the insanity of the camp. The garish colors of the whorehouse, the bestial nature of her husband(s), and the assortment of drunks and other unrespectables in the corner make this as dizzying indictment of humanities ugliness and appetites as anything Fellini directed.

We have an interesting contradiction in Ride The High Country. Peckinpah is known as the director who popularized the use of montage in American film. Using it in cases of strong violence or emotion to create an inescapable trap, time became elastic and with the aid of slow motion Peckinpah could make a horrible moment seemingly last forever, trapping us like insects in amber desperate to move past what it was we thought we wanted. However, in Ride The High Country the entire power of the film’s style is derived from the mise en scene, there is hardly a quick cut in the entire production and the film achieves the invisible style of the classical era of Hollywood.

The basis of the films mise en scene is all in the contrast. The righteous Joel Mc Crea is shot from low angles emphasizing his power and moral certainty. Randolph Scott is often shown from high angles and standing on a lower plane to emphasize his lack of moral firmness compared to Mc Crea. The film further emphasizes this in the sequence where Scott redeems himself in the final gunfight. We are given a low angle tracking shot as the heroes march on the villains. They now stand equally and as they march abreast they seem to tower over the screen itself.

Like all westerns the mise en scene comparing civilization to the wilderness are of great importance. However, this being Peckinpah the contrast between the two is a bit different from the directors of the classical era. Unlike John Ford who emphasized the frontiers mysterious and poetic beauty, or Howard Hawks who saw it a giant playground for a mans man to have fun in, Peckinpah takes the Cormac McCarthy route, painting the frontier as a place that will swallow the blood of the dead and strip the flesh and bleach the bones of the forgotten. While the landscape is not quite as harsh at it would become by Pat Garret and Billy The Kid, or say Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, the landscape is not sentimentalized, the mountains are dust choked, the forests are thin and scraggly, and the exteriors in the mountain camp are a blighted frozen chunk of misery where nothing living grows.

It is something of cliché to say that Orson Welles lived out his own version of Citizen Kane; however, I would posit that it is equally true that Peckinpah lived out his own version of Ride The High Country, as a man who stuck to his principles when it seemed as though the entire world was struggling to get him to compromise.