Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Two-Disc Special Edition) | 
| Actors: Rutanya Alda, R.g. Armstrong, Luke Askew, John Beck, Richard Bright
Studio: Warner Home Video
List Price: $19.98
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Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 7781
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dvd-video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Number Of Items: 2
Running Time: 237 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: D65165D
ISBN: 079074600X
UPC: 012569516526
EAN: 9780790746005
ASIN: B000BT96DC
Theatrical Release Date: 1973
Release Date: January 10, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New and Factory Sealed Item Fast Shipping
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 78 more reviews...
 A Unique Masterpiece September 13, 2004
benjamin kerstein (israel)
100 out of 113 found this review helpful
Movies, especially genre pieces, are rarely unique; so one has to look at this film as a magnificent achievement, if only for its extraordinary originality and the manner in which it achieves that originality without demolishing the Western genre. Unlike Sergio Leone, who signaled his love of the genre even as he deconstructed it; PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID seems to spontaneously erupt out of Peckinpah's unconcious. I don't think he ever made a film before or after which speaks so effortlessly and so beautifully in the voice of its author. The result is a Western which is not only unlike any other Western ever made, but completely unlike any other film ever made, including Peckinpah's own.
Firstly, this film moves in an entirely unique manner, avoiding the three-act structure of the conventional film in favor of a cyclical arc which inexorably propels the film towards its violent climax. The film, quite literally, ends where it begins, both chronologically and geographically. Secondly, the film's dialogue is simply extraordinary. Screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (most probably in collaboration with Peckinpah) invents a patois which, for all intents and purposes, amounts to an artificial period dialect. The film essentially invents its own language. This, combined with John Coquillon's bleached-tan cinematography, creates a world so self contained that one begins to understand how its inexorable forces push against its characters, rendering them helpless before their fates.
This is also, without question, a masterpiece of acting on the part of James Coburn. His performance ranks with John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS as a towering pice of film acting. Coburn's Garrett is a weak-willed yet ferociously tough outlaw who is smart enough to realize that the outlaw's time is almost over; like Pike Bishop in THE WILD BUNCH, he wants to start thinking beyond his guns, because those days are closing fast. Indeed, the darkness is closing on everyone in this film. Its characers seem to appear like memories, ciphers out of a dream. They are lost souls who history has abandoned, and are left only with their fading memories of the West when it, and they, were once young. Coburn captures Garrett's tragedy, the tragedy of a man who cannot avoid his fate and yet fights desperately to do just that, in a performance of marvelous economy and subtlety. He barely raises his voice until the film's final moments, and yet one can almost see the forces tearing him apart inside. There are a handful of moments where this humanity bursts through to the surface - when he watches, with a look of pity and compassion, as the gutshot Sheriff Baker wanders to the river to die, his weeping wife silently at his side; or when he almost shoots a perfect stranger on a riverboat and suddenly realizes the absurdity of what he is about to do; or, most especially, the split second look in his eyes the moment before he pulls the trigger and kills Billy the Kid, a look halfway between weeping and despair - and these moments are marked by Peckinpah's unrelenting camera as beautifully as John Ford's shattering closeups of Wayne's face, contorted by rage and sorrow, in THE SEARCHERS.
The rest of the cast, while not as magnificent as Coburn, nonetheless provide an extraordinary array of grotesque and tragic characters, simultaneously ugly and unforgettable. Kris Kristofferson's Billy is essentially a child, incapable of seeing or understanding the forces with which Garrett is reckoning. He too cannot escape them, yet he has no conciousness of his own doom.
The films' elegiac sense of inevitability is underlined by the presence of a myriad of aging Western actors: Chill Wills, the extraordinary Katy Juarado, and, most especially, Jack Elam, who turns in a shockingly moving performance as Alamosa Bill Kermit. It is simply astonishing to think that the man who played a monosyllabic thug in the opening scenes of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST has here been transformed into the sad, good-hearted old man doomed by merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Peckinpah's skill with actors is rarely mentioned, even by his supporters, but it must be noted that the performances in this film (many by non-actors) are, even in the smaller parts, universally moving and memorable.
The Bob Dylan soundtrack, often cited by the film's detractors, is also quite unique. Like Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack to SUPERFLY, the soundtrack does not enhance the film so much as add another dimension to it, acting less like accompaniment and more like a chorus keeping watch over the proceedings and signaling to us the complexities its characters cannot grasp. More than anything else in the film, Dylan's score provides the sense of tragedy and loss, the tear-jerking inevitability of the passage of time, which raises this film out of its genre origins into the realm of cinematic poetry. (Legend has it that when Dylan first played Peckinpah the film's signature theme "Billy", the icon of cinematic machismo - who had no idea who Dylan was - was reduced to tears, blubbering "goddamit, who is that boy? Sign him up!")
A word has to be said here about PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID's place in the history of the Western. It is, in my opinion, THE oustanding masterpiece of the later Westerns; begun by John Ford himself in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and culminating in Clint Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN; an era in which the Western was looked at for the first time in a concious manner and its conventions were subverted and, ultimately, re-mythologized. This film must stand alongside ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST as one of the most extraordinary reimaginings of the Western ever put on film; but whereas Leone's film is an operatic fantasy, Peckinpah's film is a dusty folk song, an elegiac, late-evening ballad laced, perhaps, with a bit too much Mexican tequila but, nonetheless, suffused with that sense of sadness and loss that has marked all the great Westerns of its era. It is a film whose violence, dirtiness, and occasional sadism only underline its wounded heart, the heart of its director, who loved the Western and its conventions even as he blasted them to pieces in slow motion. Peckinpah might have occasionally reveled in blood, but there was method in his sadism, perhaps summed up in the line of one his characters, who only wanted to enter his house justified. None of the characters in PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID can hope for such a consummation, but the same cannot be said of its creator. Whatever accolades may yet come Peckinpah's way, and he is long overdue for a reassessment, this film proves that every one of them is, unquestionably, justified.
*This review refers to the long version of the film, included on the second disk of this DVD package. The new Special Edition, while interesting, is ill considered in my view. The added scenes are superfluous and the trimming removes some of the films best lines and disturbs its measured pace. Quite frankly, it plays like a two hour preview. The reconstruction seems to have been done by people seeking to impose their own ideas of what Peckinpah intended rather than allowing the longer version to stand on its own. While it is true that, given the abscense of its creator, there is and can be no truly definitive version of this film, the longer version is, in my view, clearly the masterpiece its shorter counterpart is not. A wounded masterpiece, perhaps, but even wounded masterpieces are, generally speaking, better left alone.
Times Maybe...Not Me November 3, 2005
Olga Shewfelt (Los Angeles, CA, USA)
28 out of 38 found this review helpful
Peckinpah's tenth film, eighth western, and the movie he wanted to be remembered by before a record total of six editors at MGM cut it to ribbons. A deceptively rambling, elegaic Western in the classic Peckinpah style, "Pat Garrett" distinguishes itself from all other film versions of the Billy the Kid story (around forty) through its beautiful, azure blue-tinted, unabashed fatalism, which never grows tiresome. On the contrary, although on the surface Peckinpah's film seems to be a series of cowboy cameos strung together by several exemplary set pieces filled with trademark slow-motion violence, it is never less than absolutely riveting. Billy's run from Pat across a lake drenched in soft dusk light, Slim Picken's inevitable death set to "Knockin on Heaven's Door", and Garrett smoking a cigar out on Billy's porch, waiting for him to finish making love before he kills him, are as indelible an image as any Monumuent Valley action sequence from a John Ford western.
Peckinpah also had the sense to keep up to date with the times in which he lived. Therefore, it seems to be no mistake that Billy (as played by Kris Kristofferson) seems as much like a 60's counterculture rock god as well as an Old West outlaw and that Bob Dylan (unfortunately) appears in the film. With the advent of the "ME" generation of the 70's, however, even a counterculture heroes' pool of popularity was drying up. Similarly, the forces of civilization, capitalism, and big business have destroyed the vestiges of a free landscape for both Pat and Billy, except that Pat is willing to conform. Similarities to "The Wild Bunch" are only surface-deep. We can see that Peckinpah envisioned this film entirely differently, with results that can stand behind Ford's "The Searchers", Howard Hawks'"Rio Bravo", Anthony Mann's "Man of the West", and "The Wild Bunch". Arguable the greatest western ever made.
 A overlooked near-classic well worth a look April 11, 2001
J. Remington (Adams, Oregon USA)
25 out of 35 found this review helpful
Maybe Peckinpah and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer work far too self consciously hard at creating a contemporary (for 1973) spin on the gunfighter myth. Maybe too, Peckinpah focused far too much on creating a mood piece through music, photography, staging and obscure dialouge and forgot the narrative.And maybe, Peckinpah's considerable talents were beginning to erode from the constant flow of Tequila that ran over his lips. Certainly, MGM hadn't a clue of what do make of this film when they first released it which accounts for the literal butchery and burial this film suffered in its initial release.No matter though, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, although not for all tastes, is a sadly overlooked near-classic in desperate need of an audience. Firstly the score by Bob Dylan (I'll say nothing of his poor excuse for a screen performance), is mythic, romantic, pensive and sublime. It really represents some of his best instrumental work. Coupled with Peckinpah's uncanny sense of staging, the music paints a complete image of a time that never was. The cinematography looks like a classic painting brought to life. Filled with autumnal colors and plenty of magic hour sunsets washing across the scene, this film is breathtakingly beautiful to look at. Several frames could stand on their own as photographic works of art. Peckinpah always knew how to stage a scene. His use of the actor's face and sense of casting works miracles here. Taking virtually every surviving Western character actor, Peckinpah lovingly frames them against the dying light of day. Slim Pickens, Chill Willis, Harry Dean Stanton, Luke Askew and Jack Elam all have glorious road maps that speak volumes. Through economy (it really is suprising, considering his reputation, how tastefull, whimsical, romantic and sentimental Peckinpah was!) of movement and gesture, "Bloody Sam" brings Mount Rushmore to life. The film unspools at a leisurely pace (and in some ways, that is a kind anaylisis) and many scenes fail to fully develop, but for those souls who enjoy texture and mood for their own sake as well as enjoying a rich western mythic dream, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is well worth your time.
One of the great westerns... March 15, 2000
Jules (Birmingham, England)
20 out of 30 found this review helpful
...in fact it's my personal favorite. Slow and majestic, yet gritty and tough with plenty to say about how the times were/are a-changin' (there's certainly parallels to be drawn with Peckinpah and the studio system). This director's cut is an improvement in many ways over the studio-butchered original, but, sadly, we do lose the scene where Slim Pickens' character dies to the soundtrack of Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door". A pity.Dylan, by the way, gives an enjoyably eccentric (Chaplinesque?) performance, but the real stars here are Kristofferson and Coburn (which, as they're playing the title roles, is as it should be). Both are first class. Highlights include the Kid singing to the townsfolk of Lincoln after he's tricked the guards, and the scene where Garrett makes Alias read out the labels of a whole shelf of canned goods. And the inevitable finale still manages to be wonderful cinema. "What you want and what you get are two different things!" - Well, Peckinpah certainly found that out when the film was first released, but this cut is something else. Rent or buy as soon as you can.
Always great fun to watch August 4, 2007
James Durney (Tampa Bay area)
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
The story of Billy the Kid is a movie staple done multiple times over the years. The ugly little sociopath is transformed into a good-looking likable Robin Hood. Penkinpah's version will not change the trend by casting Kris Kristofferson as Billy. James Coburn as Sheriff Pat Garrett is the star of this film producing his best acting as a man trapped but determined to get ahead.
Penkinpah always had good casting and this film is no exception. Each actor is right for his role and always believable. This is the fully restored version of the film the way we were to see it not the edited fit into a time format that the Studio released. All of his films are better restored on DVD, the way he planned them, this is no exception.
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