Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6725 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-01-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 237 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid may be the most beautiful and ambitious film that Sam Peckinpah ever made. The time is 1881. Powerful interests want New Mexico tamed for their brand of progress, and Sheriff Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is commissioned to rid the territory of his old gunfighting comrades. He serves fair notice to William Bonney--Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson)--and his Fort Sumter cronies, but it's not in their nature, or his, to go quietly. Peckinpah's theme, more than ever, is the closing of the frontier and the nature of the loss that that entails. But this time his vision takes him beyond genre convention, beyond history and legend, to the bleeding heart of myth--and surely of himself.

This is one strange and original movie. In 1973 most American reviewers responded by panning it and deriding its director, whom they saw as having betrayed the promise of Ride the High Country, been swept up in his own cult of violence, and become incoherent as a storyteller. Coherence wasn't helped by MGM's cutting at least a quarter-of-an-hour out of the finished film and removing a bitter, retrospective prelude. Subsequent releases have restored a lot of material, and now there's more widespread appreciation of the depth and power of Peckinpah's achievement.

The cast, teeming with fine character actors, is extraordinary, making the gallery of frontier denizens vivid and resonant. Coburn's Garrett, a man who comes to loathe himself for his mission yet cannot abandon it, is the high-water mark of the actor's career. L.Q. Jones, Luke Askew, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Elam, and Richard Bright create indelible moments, and Slim Pickens becomes the center of an unforgettably moving scene. The presence of Kristofferson (just starting out as an actor) and Bob Dylan (whose enigmatic role is nearly wordless) nudges us toward recognizing Old West outlawry as an early form of rock stardom--flesh-and-blood gods for a primitive society to feed on. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid starring James Coburn, Kris Kristoffersen and special appearances with Bob Dylan. Was an enjoyable movie although I wonder about the authenticity of the story.

Classic Western
This is the standard by which all westerns should follow. Great cast,
great storyline and best acting by veteran actors.

Classic cowboy flick
This is definitely a great western. Although it's a Sam Peckinpah movie and there's a lot of graphic, gory violence, the focus is actually on the acting, which is top-notch all the way around. James Coburn provides one of the all-time great western performances and Kris Kristofferson holds his end up nicely. Sam also collected quite a few familiar faces from the western genre and then gave each of them a showcase - however brief, every portrayal is memorable and excellent. There's a lot of first-rate dialogue but also quite a bit of impressive and effective facial expressions and body language. The Bob Dylan character is completely superfluous but he doesn't detract from the film at all, which is the best that an amateur actor can hope for. The screenplay itself is leisurely and meandering - a series of superb set pieces instead of a regular story arc. The plot is just a backdrop for Peckinpah's favorite theme of a dying way of life being inexorably and ruthlessly replaced by something must less honorable. This particular old tale long ago passed into legend but Sam P. apparently sticks pretty close to the basic facts and then greatly embellishes the rest for dramatic effect. A few examples are: the two men's original close friendship, Billy's working for John Chisum at one time, Billy's arrest and jailbreak, Pat turning from outlaw to lawman and then hunting Billy down, Pat firing two shots in their final encounter (one in Billy's heart and the other into a wall), Pat's ambush and murder years later. These were all real events, and a lot of the names and locations used were authentic as well.

Bob Dylan's performance is totally unnecessary but his musical score is superb and adds a lot to the film. Gorgeous folk singer Rita Coolidge, Kris Kristofferson's wife at the time, plays the perfect girlfriend (she never speaks!!! I guess she couldn't do a convincing Mexican accent so Sam kept her character silent) and does a brief nude scene. Too bad she didn't also get to sing on the soundtrack - she was very talented. Wonder whatever became of her?

I remember really liking the theatrical version when it appeared, but the story goes that Sam hated it. So now these two new versions have come out and they both seem pretty close to what I can recall, so I'm not sure what his objections were. I watched them on successive nights and thoroughly enjoyed both of them. Sam died a while ago so I guess we'll never see what he had intended but this result is quite fine, I think. My only complaint is that on Disk 2 (the 1989 Turner Preview Version) the sound goes haywire at the very end after Billy's death scene. Also, Richard Jaeckel appears wearing a very distracting, screamingly obvious, Colonial-era type wig. Why? Were people out west still wearing those things a hundred years after the Revolutionary War? He always was a fine character actor but that wig just called way too much attention to itself.

Anyway, it's a classic western and a fantastic exemplification of Sam Peckinpah's much-loved notion of outlaws outliving their time and being killed because of their refusal to adjust to a changing world.