PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID
** (Worth seeing) Directed by Sam Peckinpah Written by Rudolph Wurlitzer With James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Jason Robards, John Beck, Barry Sullivan, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Harry Dean Stanton, and Chill Wills.
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Restoration work carried out in recent years on many of the surviving German films of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives and Queen Kelly, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, George Cukor’s A Star Is Born, and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia has ensured that different versions of all these films now exist, although few, if any, of the longer versions are identical to the original releases. For rereleases of Playtime, Tom Jones, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the respective directors made alterations of various kinds–Jacques Tati restored a major scene to Playtime (although Tati’s original cut reportedly survives today only as an unprocessed negative), Tony Richardson cut some material from Tom Jones, and Steven Spielberg both cut from and restored material to Close Encounters. Terry Gilliam was obliged to make somewhat different versions of Brazil for the European and U.S. markets, and although David Lynch spoke a few years back about releasing his original cut of Dune on tape, this plan may have been sabotaged; a much longer version that wound up on TV was so far from his intentions that he had his name taken off it.
To polemically counter the notion of a “perfect” version of a film, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet have put together four separate versions of two of their most recent films, The Death of Empedocles and its sequel Black Sin. The dialogue and camera placements in all four versions of each film are the same, but because the settings in which the films were made were subject to constant fluctuations in weather, what looks dark and overcast in one version might be bright and sunny in another, and the offscreen ambient sounds are similarly different. (Seeing or sampling different versions of both films at the Rotterdam film festival a few weeks ago–the only place and event that has been willing to show more than one version of each–gave me some bracing insights into how variable different experiences of “the same film” can be.)
Wurlitzer’s original script about former outlaw Pat Garrett hunting down his old friend Billy the Kid is structured on the existential premise that Garrett and Billy don’t meet during the course of the film until their final confrontation in Fort Sumner in 1891, when Garrett kills Billy; the film covers the last three months of Billy’s life, after he escapes from the Lincoln County jail. Peckinpah demolished this premise at the outset by beginning the story proper with a reunion between Garrett (James Coburn) and Billy (Kris Kristofferson) in Fort Sumner before the latter’s arrest and escape; Peckinpah also added a prologue devoted to Garrett’s death 18 years later, which is intercut between the opening credits with Garrett’s arrival in Fort Sumner in 1891. (When he arrives, Billy and his companions are shooting the heads off live chickens buried in the ground, and Peckinpah structures his elaborate intercutting around the gunshots in the two scenes 18 years apart, using freeze-frames that shift from color to black and white.) The studio cut jettisons this complex, intercut prologue and simply begins with Garrett’s arrival in Fort Sumner during the chicken massacre.
But the most memorable acting in the film comes from the extraordinary cast of secondary character actors–including Jason Robards, Barry Sullivan, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Harry Dean Stanton, Chill Wills, Elisha Cook Jr., and Gene Evans. Many of these actors appear only once, but Wurlitzer’s flavorsome dialogue and Peckinpah’s direction usually milk them for all they’re worth; in one especially touching scene, involving a minor character named Baker dying while his wife looks on, Slim Pickens achieves what is likely the apotheosis of his career, and Katy Jurado as the wife is almost equally moving.
