Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

The loners in Sam Peckinpah's films are not noble Romantics, even if they are as symbolic as anyone in John Ford's late Westerns. Peckinpah's aesthetic is too grimy, even in the poetics of its slow-motion, to lend itself to contemplation, and when his gruff characters spit out their hard-boiled dialogue, one must make an effort to draw loftiness from their words, which are too concerned with personal problems to give a damn about "the times" once "the times" start affecting things outside of their own bubble.

As with most of the director's films, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a simple story: a lawman, Garrett (James Coburn), pursues an outlaw, the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), reluctantly and even looks for ways to avoid the confrontation. Yet the film, restored almost to the director's intended vision with a 1988 Preview Version to atone for the butchering of the original, uses Peckinpah's style of jumping into the shit with his grimy characters to flesh out what so many dismissed as chauvinistic caricatures. There is no hero in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and the only true villains are left mostly off-screen.

Civilization is as corrupt in Peckinpah's West as it is in all the others, and it has consumed Garrett by the start of the film, set in 1909 as the cattle ranchers who bought him to kill Billy the Kid decades ago double-cross the aged Garrett, blasting him in an ambush as the opening credits begin to flash.


The credits sequence alone is worth a review, moving fitfully in freeze-frames that sap the color from the frame, return it, then drain it again as the text appears. As Garrett attempts to get back up to face his attackers, only to collapse back into the dirt (perfectly timed to reveal the film's title), Peckinpah moves back to 1881, when Garrett turned on his old friend, the Kid, a scene that opens with Billy's gang popping shots at chickens buried to their necks for target practice as the freeze frames continue. The juxtaposition of Garrett's helplessness in his final moments with the chickens' creates a chilling framing device, and when a younger Pat arrives in the flashback and begins to shoot the chickens from a distance to impress his old buddy, we do not feel the sense of awe and admiration that Billy's posse does. He is going to die a brutish death at the end of a miserable, regretted life, while the legend of the Kid will live on for a century.

Pat and Billy head for a drink, at which point Pat tells his buddy that he's set to become the sheriff of Lincoln County, and that this is Bill's last chance to escape to Mexico before Pat will have to chase after him. Billy won't be intimidated by the law, even when it comes in the form of his friend, and the "directed by Sam Peckinpah" credit freezes on this moment of defiance in a striking foil to the title's placement over Pat's death. There's something chilling about the entire film being laid out in the first few minutes, to the point that the last truly relevant plot point rounds out the credits, thus allowing everything that comes after to be an exploration. Furthermore, by freezing on that moment, Peckinpah shows in an instant that Billy will know glory in death that Pat will not even find in life.

Again, however, Peckinpah does not present Billy as the hero just because he does not entirely side with Pat. He presents the Kid as a wanton killer, whose occasional display of generosity and camaraderie is more a demonstration of his capriciousness than any hint of nobility. He's a rapacious, arrogant fool, ignoring the chance to flee to Mexico just because he thinks he can have some fun with Pat, who attempts at first to dispense with the matter as quickly as possible and surrounds Bill's safehouse with a massive posse the first day he becomes sheriff.

What Peckinpah demonstrates through Billy, as well as the cattle herders that come to control the territory, is that neither civilization nor the outlaw hold the answers. Even in the longer cut, Peckinpah devotes only the sparest time to the ranchers, allowing Pat to interact with each of the Chisum/Wallace/Poe alliance that creeps across the steppe once. These encounters show villains who are totally and hopelessly boring, avaricious, conniving weasels who know nothing of the living conditions of the common folk living in dusty hamlets and thus do not care. The only thing that interests them is money and power, the two dullest goals in life -- neither has any inherent worth; they are means, not ends -- and their prim dress and clean skin shows just how removed they are from the people they will force into modernity. I'm reminded of a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when a peasant says that Arthur must be a king because "he hasn't got shit all over him." Why they even care so deeply about killing Billy the Kid isn't quite clear, other than he represents what they need to destroy in order to complete their conquest.


With these barons representing the rise of organized society in the West, it's no wonder that Billy looks appealing at times. The Kid has a magnetic energy, so beguiling many of the people he meets that entire towns will not attempt to stop him or aid the sheriffs, even when he viciously kills two deputies for everyone in Lincoln to see. One of those deputies, in fact, displays a warmth toward Billy, as he, like Pat, was once an outlaw himself; when the two play cards, Bell throws several games just to buck up the Kid's spirits before the planned execution. Yet the reason he appeals to the common man is that he openly practices a violence that society does not cure, only sweeps under the rug. As can be seen in Straw Dogs, modern society only buries mankind's penchant for barbarism, bottling it up until it explodes in a way that looks even more shocking than the many, many (seriously, many) deaths contained in Peckinpah's Westerns.

The sheer number of deaths on-screen in Pat Garrett certainly won't do anything to dispel the notion Peckinpah's critics level against the director, that he is a bestial man with an almost pornographic fixation on violence. After all, for a film that establishes its plot in the first five minutes and could have gone straight to the last three long before it does, Pat Garrett certainly spends a great deal of time exploding paint-filled squibs in slow-motion. Yet Peckinpah's attitude toward violence is always one of revulsion, a great deal of it self-directed. He does not focus on male characters out of rampant sexism but because patriarchal societies have been sociologically demonstrated to breed a violence than female-dominated societies do not; as a male himself, Peckinpah does indeed have an ingrained fascination with violence as his critics contend. Yet he sees that in himself and hates it, and Peckinpah used the graphic content in his films to rid others of the desire that consumed him, that the only true martyr in Peckinpah's filmography is himself. In his overblown, stylized orgies of death is an earnest attempt to show us how ugly it all is. His reworking of Western archetypes is entirely based on how each stereotype only trades in a different kind of violence. Rather than sit back and judge, the director throws himself into the fracas like a documentarian with aesthetic flair. Who else would show children tossing scorpions to red ants (as he did in The Wild Bunch) or a kid with his foot in a noose swaying on the yardarm as if playing on a swing (as he does here)? Those children are inured to the depravity around them, which is the last thing the director wants; it is that nonchalance that results in films like his.

Besides, there may be no better proof of Peckinpah's disgust with killing than this film, which is about a man so reluctant to kill he ironically ends up killing many other people to avoid executing his friend. In the film's most beautiful and haunting sequence, Pat recruits another town's sheriff, Colin Baker (Slim Pickens), to help smoke out Black Harris, one of Bill's gang, in order to get the Kid's location. Baker is a haunting glimpse into what Pat will become in a few years: a bored, regret-filled lawman watching everything he knew -- whether he loved it or hated it is beside the point to Peckinpah -- dies, so sick of life that he does not even exercise authority anymore -- when Pat comes calling, Baker must ask his wife where he put his badge. Baker is building a boat so he can "drift out of this damn territory," and the uselessness of the pathetic dingy he's fashioning in his yard (and its ineffectiveness in transporting him across what is almost entirely land, save a small river at the edge of town) and the futility of his desire to find some spiritual oasis that contains a hint of the good ol' days that never existed.

Baker and Pat find Harris, and a shootout, as it must, ensues. During the typical Peckinpah carnage, Baker gets shot in the stomach, but in a cold, matter-of-fact way, not the heightened manner expected of one of Sam's targets. Baker stumbles away from the fight to that river, revealed at last to be so small that even Baker's unfinished canoe could have handled the trip. Baker's wife finds himself and stands framed by the evening sky, looking at her husband with tears in her eyes, unable to speak as he looks at her and nods slightly, the life draining out of him as Peckinpah pulls back to show the tranquil of the landscape, now marred by blood. This quiet moment of hurt between two people who cannot voice their goodbye, undercuts any notion of Peckinpah as a schlock-meister. The scene even puts forward the case for Peckinpah's sense of reverse Romanticism, not one tinged with longing and admiration but elegiac remorse. Peckinpah's films remind me of the Van Morrison song "T.B. Sheets," an account of watching a loved one die of tuberculosis in quarantine that combines Morrison's impressionistic word sketches and horrifyingly precise detail that turns death into something even more frightening as poetry gives way to a stifling sense of simplicity, something that just is, something without characteristics and therefore something that cannot be truly stylized.


The outlaws of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, both the ones still howling at the moon and the ones who, like Pat, became lawmen because they valued life over happiness (and thus further emphasized the lie of the "legitimization" of these regions through law enforcement), understand the finality of it all, and death in this film becomes something of a clarifying device. A young tag-along in Billy's gang, Charlie, tells the Kid upon hearing news of Pat's defection that Garrett does not scare him, only to finally admit the opposite when the Kid and his partner stare him down. But when Garrett and his posse open fire on the safehouse and mortally wound the boy, Charlie decides to go out in a blaze of glory and notes "I ain't afraid of him now" before heading out to a swifter death than the round in his belly will give him. Ollinger, the ultra-religious deputy who watches Billy with Bell, treats the Kid roughly. When he returns to the station after hearing Billy shoot Bell, Ollinger freezes in the Kid's sights; someone shouts that the Kid killed Bell, and Bob can only whisper, "He's killed me too" before Billy pulls the trigger. Perhaps these men commit violence so much because they seek nothingness; given the option to either continue on or live pathetically in the new New World, the abyss can make for a surprisingly appealing "none of the above" option. Until that time comes, however, each must make his choice. "You're in poor company, Pat," drawls Bill when Garrett first captures him. "Yeah. I'm alive, though." "So am I." Eventually, that blustering will vanish, but for the moment the two tell their lies, as much to themselves as each other. It's telling that, when Pat at last delivers Billy from a world that's quickly eclipsing him, the outlaw-cum-lawman immediately shoots a mirror before the Kid even hits the ground, just so he won't have to face himself. Billy may have eaten his words in the end, but he didn't have to live with the shame afterward, and perhaps the 1909 ambush that bookends the film is as much a release for Pat as the nocturnal sneak attack was for Bill back in 1881.

Pat Garrett's characterization is so rich that its studio butchering seems all the more egregious even among Peckinpah's always contested corpus (only Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia hit theaters in exactly the way the director wanted it). The movie goes nowhere fast, but its deliberate pace reveals the coward underneath Pat's hardened exterior, as well as a man who truly wants nothing less than to kill his friend; when he learns of Billy's escape, he heads straight for the barber's to get a shave, casually telling a boy messenger there to have some posse members come to meet him and also to tell Mrs. Garrett that he'll be staying for dinner that night -- never chase fugitives on an empty stomach. Pat abuses prostitutes as much as Bill; more so even, as we only ever see the Kid with one at a time. The film also contains some of Peckinpah's most beautiful shots, such as a scene of Garrett riding along a lakeside, his figure covered in shadow while only the mirror image of him and his horse appears inverted in the lake; naturally, Peckinpah diverts attention away from the reluctant lawman that is the Pat Garrett we see to reveal the larger reflection of his true character, a wild man just like the Kid, and just as wretched.

Even so, Pat Garrett suffered some of the worst tampering of the director's body of work. The entire film, in fact, could well be an allegory for Peckinpah's dealings with MGM president Jim T. Aubrey, Jr. The Garrett stand-in, Aubrey, came to prominence as the tyrannical overload of CBS entertainment, which he ran with an iron fist but also to ratings dominance. Aubrey hated damn near everyone, but he had a golden touch, and the critically despised programs he put on the air (The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island) managed to win over the nation to such an extent that the other networks seemed like also-rans. When MGM tapped him to preside over their failing brand, however, even popularity didn't seem to be Aubrey's goal. Meant to oversee the massive downsizing of MGM into its new hub, the MGM Grand hotel/casino being built out in Las Vegas (the best place for a tacky shrine to something that lost so much of its luster it needs casino lights to add sparkle). Aubrey promptly axed a dozen productions upon taking the reigns and slashed others, including this film. Peckinpah was of course a tyrant in his own right, an artiste who was not only exacting on his crew but falling deeper and deeper into substance abuse problems that made him an even greater pain. But Peckinpah's madness was directed toward something, something personal, while Aubrey sold out even commercial concerns to oversee a corporation abandoning everything its people knew to turn a profit elsewhere.


Perhaps the sense of anguish over knowing his film would be sliced down to an hour-and-a-half no matter what led Peckinpah to insert himself into a scene every bit as troubling (for meta-structural reasons, not human ones) as Baker's bleed-out by the river. Just before Pat creeps into the hotel/brothel where Billy sleeps, he stops to exchange words with the Fort Sumner coffin-maker, Will. It's a part tailor-made for a character actor: Pat offers Will some whiskey, which he waves off politely but sternly before goading Pat into just getting the job done already. With Peckinpah in the role, however, Will takes on a much darker meaning. "I'm gonna put everything I own right here," Will says as he gestures to his freshly made coffin, "And I'm gonna bury it in this ground and I'm gonna leave this territory." Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid would be Peckinpah's last Western (though I'm quick to argue Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia as a revisionist Western the way I do for No Country for Old Men and other modern dust pictures), and certainly his most mistreated, and Peckinpah indeed leaves something in the dirt here. The rest of his films, even the good ones, would be made under some sort of booze-'n'-coke haze and/or artistic compromise. Faced with the bitterness of Peckinpah, the film's true symbol of Billy the Kid, Pat leaves without another word as Will heckles him, ashamed of himself and incapable of sharing space with the man who sees not only outside the situation but outside the movie. You might attribute Pat's shame as a sign of ego on behalf of the director, but I see it as a transference: Peckinpah knows that his own downfall is inevitable, so he goads Pat to just go inside and kill his avatar. Billy is already haunting Pat even before the sheriff kills him, and thus the ghost pours his sadness and regret onto his destroyer. At least the fictional version of Aubrey will live with guilt in his heart for the rest of his life.

Steven Spielberg: 1941

As with most of the films that eventually "caused" the death of New Hollywood, the reports of 1941's commercial and critical failure have been vastly overstated over the years. The film turned a profit and, while it certainly received its share of negative reviews, its reception never reached the abysmal levels of a Heaven's Gate. It does, however, validate some of the primary criticisms of the late New Hollywood period, in that it is several times too big, too fussed over and too much a slave to the whims of its director.

That 1941 is a comedy proves hairier than New York, New York or Cimino's infamous bomb. For comedy, despite being the broadest and most exaggerated of genres -- well, perhaps second to the musical, but if that's true it's at least partially because nearly all musicals are themselves comedies -- also relies on reservation in delivery. Yes, everyone remembers Buster Keaton whirling himself about and positioning himself just right so that the wall of a house could fall on him without harm, but it's Keaton's deadpan, or Chaplin's sincerity, or the quieter moments in the more recent Kevin Smith/Judd Apatow fare, that linger longest in our hearts and minds.

For someone as visually resplendent as Steven Spielberg, however, recreating those major sight gags with the added benefit of increased budgets and vastly improved effects technology made for better bait than the desire to bring back some of that old comic charm. Ergo, Spielberg attempted to make a comedy out of American fears in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, using the techniques he'd learned from his blockbusters, and the result is a feature so loud, so grandiose, so unreasonably, unjustifiably huge that the comedy loses any hint of subtlety as it must shout incessantly to be heard over the din.

The audio track of 1941 bustles at all times with roaring planes, grinding tanks and exploding shells. Occasionally, you can hear some people talking. When they do, they speak in old-timey period voices, barring those instances where the actors simply don't feel like doing so. I can't blame them: Spielberg clearly placed the actors on the ladder of importance a few rungs below the effects. The situation brings to mind that old hypothetical: if an actor stops caring in the middle of an explosion, does anyone notice?

Well, the answer is yes. For all the distractions and the fundamentally mismatched pairing of Spielberg's formalism and a hyper-zany WWII comedy, the biggest weakness of the film lies in some of its casting. For every actor who delivers -- a sadly underused John Belushi, Slim Pickens, Dan Aykroyd, the ever-delightful John Candy -- and elevates the questionable material, there is a corresponding piece of dead weight -- John Di Cicco, the arguable protagonist; Treat Williams, more of a villain than the invading Japanese; Tim Matheson, essentially parlaying his Otter character from Animal House into the role of a more straight-laced yet irreverent captain and leaving behind all the charm in the process. Particularly noticeable is the woeful use of such legendary actors as Toshiro Mifune (in one of his few American roles and the first in which he spoke all of his own lines without relying on dubbing) and Christopher Lee (naturally playing a Nazi on account of being British), whose roles leave little room for comedy and largely mine racial humor when they're given lines meant to elicit laughs.

But is the film so bad? The picture slips into tedium from time to time, yes. Some actors are either saddled with poorly written characters (relatively speaking; they're all shallow) or simply to weak to pull of any of the one-liners or gags. But a fair amount works, more than you would expect in an infamous "flop," anyway. The idea that, with the threat of a Japanese invasion of Los Angeles looming, the local base commander would elect to forgo his duties to catch a screening of Dumbo is funny, more so when Spielberg occasionally returns to the theater to watch the man choking back tears and mouthing along with the words. There's a lovely piece of deadpan at the beginning when the Japanese submarine surfaces and the sailors search for targets. The commander (Mifune) asks if there are any honorable targets in L.A. to attack, and one of his subordinates excitedly shouts "Hollywood!" A running gag of the film involves Birkhead (Matheson) attempting to seduce an old flame, Donna (Nancy Allen), by playing on her erotic fixation on flying. The various double entendres and broader comedy that derives from this setup is not exactly clever but most of their scenes earn laughs despite neither actor bringing much to the film.

Some of the physical bits work as well, pushed as they are so far into the red that, if nothing else, you have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. The entire final hour of the film counters much of the leaden exposition of the first, and it plays out basically as one large fistfight/gunfight/explosion. Nothing in this lengthy stretch of film makes a lick of sense, but Belushi's madman shtick works well for the role of a pilot who might be every bit as loony and over-committed as the kamikazes, and the rapid crescendo of action across the last 55 minutes at once moves the film into even more insane territory as it finally gives the comedy a chance to catch up and join the madness instead of lagging behind. 1941 climaxes with the Japanese firing upon a Ferris wheel in an amusement park and a house falling into the ocean, and I find myself agreeing with no one in particular that it really is the only possible way the film could have ended.

It's also interesting as a Spielberg fan to watch the film and see the connection to the director's other films, particularly ones he hadn't made yet. The opening scene is of course a thorough parody of the director's own Jaws, down to the same camera shots and setup (Spielberg even brought back Chrissy herself, Susan Blacklinie, to play the skinny-dipper), only this time the woman is not dragged down by a hungry monster but launched from the sea as the Japanese sub rises from underneath her. The blazing neon signs and smoky air around the section of L.A. where the military men let off steam recall the fuzzy luminescence of A.I.'s Pleasure Island. For that matter, the use of Dumbo ties into the mention and even emphasis on the Pinocchio story in both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A.I. The fight that breaks out inside the dance hall -- indeed, the interior layout of the dance hall itself -- brings to mind the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The pompous Sitarski (Williams) attempts to rape the beautiful Betty, the object of our hero Wally's desire, and Wally's masculine rescue would be pasted over almost entirely into the George McFly-Biff Tannen-Lorraine Baines triangle of the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future. Now, Robert Zemeckis wrote and directed that film and co-wrote this one, which begs the question: what the hell is it with Bob Zemeckis and his perception of rape as a means to lighthearted character development?

Ultimately, 1941 is not a good movie. A neat encapsulation of what to expect with the picture comes at the start, when Spielberg transitions from the terrifically funny Jaws spoof and formation of the plan to attack Hollywood to a mercilessly unfunny scene in a diner that introduces Di Cicco, Williams, Aykroyd and a number of other major character. There's also the matter of the gentle but noticeable racism, some of which you could argue is a reflection of the way people spoke back then, particularly only a few days after the Japanese attack, but there are racist caricatures on the submarine without any brash, white Americans around (it's interesting that a few of the clips from Dumbo that Spielberg show the crows that have been since cited as racist). Despite the flaws, however, there are enough entertaining moments here to justify spending the two hours to watch the film, and Spielberg's too-slick direction even aids him at times, such as the dance/fight and a series of rapidly editing together tracking shots from different POVs involving a motorcycle sidecar separating from the bike and careening through the streets. It's understandable that such a big film could see its minor disappointment magnified to match its grandiosity, but a mild disappointment is all it remains, undeserving of some of the pure hatred directed its way.