Left Field Cinema

We, by the nature of being Human, like to rank things in a preferential order. We have popularised best of entertainments and lists, but when it comes to film this form of revisionism explodes exponentially. Every year, every actor, every director and every genre creates it own set of lists in every film fan and every film critic. Obviously every list is indicative of personal choice and of personal subjective experience, however any valid list should include an argument why number one is greater than number two, number two greater than number three etc. You need not look any further than the once a decade Sight and Sound top ten films of all time issue, which brings together top ten lists from critics and film makers across the globe and compiles two of the most comprehensive top ten film lists of all time. But in my own experience only one of the current entries is included in my own Top Ten films of all time and as such it maintains it’s subjective status. Thus a list becomes a mantra of opinion; it becomes the cliff notes of the argument. If Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time according to those directors and critics polled by Sight and Sound, then certainly many arguments have been formed as to why this is the case. Within the genre of the Western there are many such lists, the typical list features an unimaginative set of titles and usually Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is nowhere to be seen in and amongst them. So here we present an argument as to why Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid not only deserves to be included on said list, but is possibly the greatest Western ever made.

The Western as a cinematic art form has been with us since the very beginning. As if film was created and cinemas were built, to capture Westward expansion in the way literature and art could not. The visual splendour of the desolate land, the inherent lyricism of nature combined better on screen than in any other medium. The naturally more visceral components of film are more accommodating to the Western environment than theatre, literature or music. Perhaps even better than in life itself? With this in mind, what makes the greatest western of all time? It would have to be inclusive, if not restricted, to encompass all of the major sub-genres that proliferate the main subject as a whole. The greatest Western ever made would have to embody elements of manifest destiny, following the American Dream in this most American of art forms, the darkness of the nightmarish murderous plains and of course at least one good shoot-out. The Western, as a genre, was one of the first action genres. It made action heroes of many actors, not least John Wayne and Clint Eastwood who were endowed further with an iconic status mainly due to their work within this genre. A great Western encapsulates not only the best of cinema; expansive visuals, deep and complex themes, exciting motion, but also the best and worst of America. It is a forum used to discuss racism, religion, genocide, politics and death. The best examples of the genre do not shy away from these heady topics but tackle them head on. The Western is defined by America, in the same way as American is defined by a Western mentality. It is a symbiotic relationship and one that means beyond any other genre, The Western is forever linked to American filmmaking. Of course the likes of Akira Kurosawa and John Hillcoat have made their own Westerns in their native Japan and Australia, but the purity of their output’s genre categorisation is immediately compromised by geography, Seven Samurai and The Proposition are both Westerns in their own way, but they abstain from the genre fully because of location. Even the name of the genre itself is a geographical term; the Western is the West, the West is the United States of America, not Asia or Australasia.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was made by one of the great Western directors - Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah, along with John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetchiler, changed the whole genre in the 1950s and 1960s. They took something that was once as wholesome as apple pie and soured the edges. No longer were the good guys in white hats and the bad guys in black hats. Everyone seemed to wear a black hat now! Anthony Mann’s cycle of films with James Stewart and John Ford’s The Searchers made in the 1950s changed the genre for good. These films had racist murderers as the heroes. Audiences no longer felt comfortable in the West, it had become a scarier place to be, a place where no chivalry or honour exists, a place where John Wayne could desecrate a corpse by shooting out its eyeballs in order to exact some sort of vengeful satisfaction - post mortem. With this sort of darkness, a sense of loss and elegy for the past was also produced. Thus revisionism was born. Into the 1960s it took some foreign filmmakers to see the potential of this new violent and melancholic American form and the Spaghetti Western was created, when this new sub-genre filtered back to American filmmakers it created a new dynamic movement in genre development. This movement was arguably honed by the wild and maverick Sam Peckinpah better than anyone else. He took the brutality and darkness of the Spaghetti Westerns and entrenched his own form of merciless, relentless violence.

Peckinpah, by the time he came to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, had made four Western’s all pushing the genre’s boundaries. He had made the elegiac Ride the High Country, the epic Major Dundee, the apocalyptically violent Vietnam allegory The Wild Bunch and the gently comedic The Ballad of Cable Hogue. But Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is something as startling as all those other films combined. It is about something fundamental to all Human beings, it is about dying - The one constant which unites us all. This is a film created to investigate death. No other Western before or since has ever been so bold as to tackle such a simple, yet profound topic, even within Pechinpah’s own work the contrast is clear to see, in The Wild Bunch death is treated casually through cheap throw away blood shed to the point of saturation, death becomes stagnant and are anaesthetically administered. The distinction in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is that every death matters in its own small way. This is perhaps the most compelling argument to why Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the finest Western of all - its ambition. This investigation of death is filtered through a Christian parable, but instead of following Jesus, as is the norm, we follow James Coburn’s Judas ostensibly called Pat Garrett. A man who must betray and kill his friend for money. The themes of this film run very deep, as is common with the best of Sam Peckinpah’s work. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid opens with Garrett as an old man being gunned down by his former deputies while the Bob Dylan music plays and the scene is intercut with a young Billy and friends shooting at chickens. This is not merely juxtaposition; it is as if Billy is shooting at the older Pat. The bullet has travelled full circle through spatial and temporal reality, the beginning and the end are merged. The opening tells you everything you need to know about the film, it is about both human death and death of an era. The Wild Bunch may be about killing but Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is about dying. The plot can almost be condensed to such an extent that the film becomes nothing more than a series of death scenes. Yet every such death scene has resonance and is filled with sadness, each death brings the whole world that much closer to destruction. The tone of the film is of gentle regret tempered with inevitable destruction. The pain felt by the families of those departed, the bereavement of those who considered them friends, and the physical anguish of those final moments of an individuals existence are portrayed with such care and subtlety that this monotony of murder and death never loses its impact through the entirety of the films runtime.

Another major part of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid's success is Bob Dylan, not only the soundtrack he attached to a film but also his performance as Alias, who is Chaplinesque in his simplicity and guile. The soundtrack in the Western genre is something that is as important as the action or the direction. Think of all of the great Westerns and you will inevitably think of a great piece of music, in the Western the music is usually transcendent. The soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a thing of wonder: the themes written for Billy as a character, the haunting score which accompanies Pat, and Knockin’ on Heavens Door which gives Slim Pickens one of the greatest death scene captured on film. Despite the lyrics of the track in question perhaps seeming a little on-the-nose in this day an age, at the time the music fitted the scene perfectly. Modern music is a tricky business within period cinema, the dreadful Jake Scott film Plunkett and Macleane for example showcasing exactly how not to employ this particular tactic. But here the music never seems out of place. This is a scene that captures the final death of the Old West in one moment, this is where America lost its innocence for good, this is no country for old men years before the Coen Brothers took on Cormac McCarthy meditation on the same topic. The plot has depth and takes a few detours but ends where all know it must, with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And what a final reel… Is there a better scene in the Western genre than Billy's final demise? This preceded Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by thirty-five years and yet captures much of the same magic. Garrett by pulling the trigger has killed not only Billy but also himself; he just has to wait for the bullet much like young Robert Ford has to wait for his after executing Jesse. We all know that the bullet with his name on it will find him; it is not only inevitable, we have already seen it in the opening moments of the film. Peckinpah never cheapens the subject, he never varnishes nor sensationalises the content, this is not Geoff Murphy’s Young Guns II which maintains a similar concentration on the deaths of those around Billy the Kid (as played by Emilio Estevez) and yet loses all of its depth by employing fun and excitement centred antics and poor casting of naturally good looking clean cut men in the central parts. Although in Young Guns II Garrett is played by the marvellous William Petersen, Petersen is no James Coburn. Coburn was never better than when he played Pat Garrett, he brings a lean grittiness to the character. He also subverts his natural charm into something all the more dangerous. Coburn's Pat Garrett hunts and kills his best friend. He is a despicable character. One of the first truly despicable characters of the Western, there is very little hero in this man. Kris Kristofferson brings an easy going, witty and playful charm to Billy; he makes him the ultimate counter point to the tiring Pat Garrett. These men are two sides of the same coin. They are friends and this only enhances the melancholy of the film. The paradox and indeed the added realism which Peckinpah brings to this particularly potent historical dynamic is that despite Garrett’s treachery and the Kid’s affability, both characters display traits of the other, the Kid mercilessly guns down men, shoots them in the back when they’re not looking, or worse still, when engaged in an honourable duel. Garrett continually displays regret for his actions towards those he once considered his kin. This is humanity at its best and its worst within both men rather than exclusively within one and other. Because of this duality, the audience does not know who to root for, setting us in a quandary as all thought provoking cinema is capable of doing. Yet the film even filled with all this darkness has a wild beauty, the script is highly quotable, every sentence reverberates off the screen with a dirty poetry and grace, it is funny and sad at the same time.

A final theme which runs through Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, another theme that is prevalent in a lot of Westerns is industrialisation versus the frontier spirit. This film again shows how America was divided and bought and sold by industrialist’s forever pushing individuals away from what they could have called home. It shows how America may be the land of the brave but it was never the land of the free, but rather the land of money and greed. Billy is the antithesis to this way of thinking ''things may of changed. Not me.'' and Pat is seduced by his greed and ultimately pays a spiritual, emotional and eventually physical death for it. Anyone who quotes the popular Gordon Gecko adage ''greed is good'' should be immediately tied to a chair and forced to watch this film.

The film is so rarely included on any of the aforementioned lists. The American Film Institute rank them as follows: Cat Ballou, Stagecoach, McCabe & Mrs Miller; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Peckinpah’s own The Wild Bunch; Red River; Unforgiven; Shane; and predictably High Noon and The Searchers taking the top spots. There is no room for death in their list, no room for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Instead John Wayne gets his niece back and Gary Cooper walks into the sunset with Grace Kelly. Although as mentioned The Searchers began to expose the racism of the mythical West it still maintained a family friendly veneer and although Unforgiven tackled the difficulties which come with killing a man, Clint Eastwood drove the film along with a similar revisionist mentality, at once showing the horrendous guilt men experience when they take a life and avoiding the pitfalls of unrealistic and PG friendly Western action, but Unforgiven flounders in its last act and crow-bars in an absurd shootout which frankly destroys any authenticity the film had so painstakingly built over the preceding two-hours. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid never makes any of these sorts of concessions towards audience satisfaction, it maintains its bleak and death centred core from first to final scene and for that it is a superior film to Unforgiven, a superior film to The Searchers, and a superior film to High Noon. Is it the finest Western ever made? That’s for you to decide.

Wilson McLachlan and M.Dawson