Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (Peckinpah, 1973): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm
This 35mm presentation (also screening on April 21st) is part of the Sam Peckinpah season at the Prince Charles. Full details here.
This movie, one of my all-time favourites, was one of the films central
to my developing a passion for cinema. As is now widely known director
Sam Peckinpah had the film taken away from him soon after completion and
his work was substantially re-edited in order that the studio could put
out a truncated 105-minute version which they thought would prove more
popular in cinemas.
Peckinpah arranged for his original cut to be stolen and hidden away and
it was this version, which was found after his death and released in
1988, which will be shown tonight. The beginning and end are radically
different and scenes integral to the understanding of the relationship
of the two main characters are included in the director's 121-minute
cut.
I saw the film at the Cornerhouse cinema in Manchester and that
experience, plus reading Richard Combs's article on the restoration in the September 1989 issue of
the Monthly Film Bulletin, had a major impact on me.
Time Out review:
Restored and reassembled, this is the full
and harmonious movie that Sam Peckinpah wanted to be remembered by before
the butchers at MGM got their hands on it. Starting with a framing
sequence from 1909 which shows James Coburn's aged Garrett being gunned down
by the same men who hired him to get Billy the Kid back in 1881, the
additional 15 minutes introduce the menacing figure of Barry Sullivan's
Boss Chisum, a frolicsome brothel scene ('Last time Billy was here it
took four to get him up and five to get him down again'), some engaging
Wild West cameos, and a less obtrusive use of Bob Dylan's
soundtrack. All in all the film is more playful, more balanced, and
very much an elegy for the old ways of the West, rather than a
meandering bloodthirsty battle between Kristofferson's preposterously
likeable outlaw and Coburn's ambivalent survivor, Garrett. Like Ford's The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it both records and condemns the passage
of time and the advent of progress; and there is a sombre, mournful
quality which places the film very high up in the league of great
Westerns. Steve Grant
Here is an extract on YouTube with commentary on one of the most famous scenes.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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