Good to see that this year, the New Zealand film societies are celebrating what would have been Sam Peckinpah’s 100th birthday with what they are calling “Peckinpah’s West” – a tribute consisting of screenings of The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. That’s where the good part begins and ends.

Screening something with the title “Peckinpah’s West” but without including Ride The High Country (the director’s breakthrough film and the swan song of Randolph Scott) seems like a missed opportunity. Including that it would have reminded us that the elegiac aspects of the two later films were there from the outset. Among the first words uttered in Ride the High Country are “Get out of the way, old man.”

More to the point, the film societies – despite their dedication to quality cinema – are screening a version of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid that is far removed from what the director appears to have had in mind. Let me explain. As is fairly well known, there are several versions of this particular Peckinpah film. Namely :

1. The Theatrical Cut. After being butchered by MGM studio head James Aubrey, this 106 minute version was released into theatres in 1973 (to lukewarm reviews and poor box office) after the studio fell out with Peckinpah. As Roger Ebert noted at the time, six editors contributed to this handiwork.
2. The“Preview Cut ” aka the “Turner Cut.” This 122 minute version first surfaced in 1988. It consisted of the footage hastily assembled by Peckinpah to show the studio shortly after the film shoot had ended. Almost certainly, Peckinpah would have further edited this footage, but it remains the only edit of the film that Peckinpah had a direct hand in creating. Reportedly, this is the version he would show privately to friends – and to peers like Martin Scorsese - before he died in 1984.
3. The sanitised TV version.
4. The Special Edition aka the Seydor Cut. This 115 minute cut released in 2005 was assembled by the film historian/author Paul Seydor, according to Seydor’s own preferences about the footage, allegedly guided by notes made by Peckinpah as to the director’s possible intentions. This is the version commonly found in video stores. The sound mix leaves a lot to be desired.
5. The Criterion Edition, aka the 50th Anniversary Edition. Paul Seydor and the British editor/director Roger Spottiswoode made this 117 minute version for Criterion in 2023. (Spottiswoode worked on three Peckinpah films, and was one of those six editors responsible for the Theatrical Cut in 1973.) The duo revisited some of the earlier editing decisions and cleaned up some degraded film stock and the aforementioned muddiness on the soundtrack. Their decisions however, have created major problems.

Last year for instance, the author/critic Jonathan Lack wrote a detailed and balanced compare-and-contrast analysis of the three main versions mentioned above. Lack mounts a convincing argument that the Criterion Cut is a failed compromise between the Theatrical Cut and the Preview Cut, with no clear vision of its own, and adding nothing of significance to whatever Peckinpah might have had in mind. As Lack put it :

This new edit can best be described as an extended version of the Theatrical Cut; most of the full scenes that exist in the [Preview Cut] but were cut for the theatrical release are reinstated, but for the scenes that exist in both Peckinpah’s edit and the studio’s cut, the 50th Anniversary version almost always defaults to the theatrical cut’s editing, and as a result excises many of Peckinpah’s most characteristic, idiosyncratic, and furiously self-loathing moments. It therefore doesn’t play like a restored or reconstructed version of Peckinpah’s edit, but like the film released to theatres in 1973 with a few extra scenes. The result is a version that inherits certain strengths from both versions, but fails to create any of its own, and introduces some real weaknesses along the way that are not present in either existing cut.

In the Criterion Cut, one of the reasons for the repeated deference to the Theatrical Cut that Lack mentions, could be that Roger Spottiswoode had been significantly involved in shaping that 1973 version. Unfortunately, the Criterion Cut aka the 50th Anniversary Edition is what the film societies will be screening this year.

Editing It Again, Sam

Don’t get me wrong. Anyone coming to any of these versions for the first time will be seeing a great film, regardless. But I agree with Lack. IMO, the editing choices made by Seydor and Spottiswoode this time around have delivered Criterion a clean, smooth and somewhat airless end result that is far removed from what was evident in Peckinpah’s original footage. In a film that relies so much on its melancholy atmospherics, that’s unfortunate.

Thankfully, you don’t have to take my word for that. All of the versions of this film – including Seydor’s first editing attempt in 2005 – are readily available. Ping-ponging back and forth between the various cuts and seeing what footage/dialogue has been left in or cut out is also an instructive lesson in (a) how art and commerce get tangled up in the creative process, and (b) how the perceptions of even the best-equipped fanboys can differ over a work’s pacing, atmospherics and core meanings. More so than with any other major film, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid offers a ringside seat on the editing process. And since there is no definitive version, that re-thinking ( and the “what were they thinking?” responses) can go on forever.

Sam Peckinpah died in late 1984, aged 59. In film circles, much is made of the cult of the auteur director. Conversely, there is just as much talk about how film is really a collaborative medium. In this case, all the versions of the film fall somewhere in between. Yes, it is a classic Peckinpah film - but in all the versions that we have, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is also the end product of a series of flawed compromises filtered through the afterthoughts of people other than the director.

For me, that’s the rub. After all, the film societies are calling it “Peckinpah’s West.” With that auteur aspect in mind, why not screen the longer and problematic Preview Cut - warts and all - that Peckinpah used to show to his friends? Sure, there are some advantages and a lot of questionable baggage with the Preview Cut. Yet it is only when the Preview Cut belatedly appeared in 1988 that the film began to be re-evaluated, and started on its long critical journey to being recognised as the masterpiece that it is.

Problematic content? No doubt. All versions contain an early scene of animal violence. As others have said, the entire Mexican family sub-plot (shoe-horned into the narrative mainly to give Billy a reason not to seek lasting refuge in Mexico) was a laborious way to make a very small point. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Peckinpah included it mainly to give paid work to his good friend Emilio Fernandez, a celebrated film director and major presence in both The Wild Bunch (where he plays the Mexican warlord, Mapache) and in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia.

The Preview Cut’s longer version of the brothel scene is even more problematic, since Garrett has already slapped the crucial information about Billy’s whereabouts from Ruthie Lee. The longer brothel scene makes little sense (BTW, it is deliberately not titillating) since the Preview Cut also shows deputy John Poe beating the same crucial information out of a few of Billy’s ratbag acquaintances. Earlier, the Preview Cut had also removed a crucial counterpoint exchange between Garrett and his wife Ida, a scene that established Garrett’s soul-dead state of mind and body.

The only thing the Preview Cut gained through cutting out the scene with Ida completely – Garrett is simply shown hesitating before the closed family gate - is that this bookends neatly with him opening the gate at the Maxwell house later on, and proceeding onwards to kill Billy.

Also, and oddly to some, Peckinpah deleted from the Preview Cut the Dylan “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” backdrop to the death of the old-timer played by Slim Pickens. On occasions, Peckinpah would complain that the studio had foisted Dylan – whom he claimed to have never heard of before- upon him in order to make his film seem more commercial.

In fact, Dylan’s presence in the film had been instigated by Dylan himself after he separately contacted the film’s scriptwriter Rudy Wurlitzer and Kris Kristofferson, and asked them to help him find a way to get involved. According to Kristofferson, on Peckinpah’s first meeting with Dylan, the director - who had been drinking- had been reduced to tears by the “Billy” ballad that Dylan pitched to him as the film’s recurring theme.

One person who would have applauded cutting out “Knockin On Heaven’s Door”would have been Peckinpah’s regular film composer Jerry Fielding, who wrote the music for The Wild Bunch. Fielding was having a bad time of it. He had just had his entire score for Peckinpah’s The Getaway wiped and replaced by a score written by Quincy Jones.

According to Peckinpah biographer Garner Simmons, Fielding resented the crew’s fawning over Dylan and (especially) over “this knock, knock, knockin’ piece of crap” that Dylan brought to the film set one day. To its credit, the Preview Cut also contains a far longer version of a key encounter between Garrett and Peckinpah himself in a cameo appearance, that occurs just before Billy is killed. (In this scene, Garrett offers Sam a slug of whiskey, but Sam refuses.)

OK. But here’s the thing. Asa mentioned, the Criterion Cut that the film societies are screening this year improved on only some of these problems, and added more of its own. Yes, it does restore the scene with Garrett’s wife, Ida. It also restores the “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” song to the soundtrack. I know many people love the song and its presence in the film, but I’m with Peckinpah and Fielding on this one: delete it. It seems too on the nose, and is a lurch into a sentimentality that the film otherwise avoids. Besides, isn’t Katy Jurado’s grief enough? IMO, the song detracts from it.

Furthermore...in the Criterion Cut, that key scene between Garrett and Will the coffin maker (played by Peckinpah) is reduced to a meaningless sentence. Just as oddly, Seydor and Spottiswoode deleted everything that Garrett says (in the Preview Cut) after he has killed Billy and has realised – upon seeing deputy Poe’s attempt to cut off Billy’s trigger finger – the full extent of his own damnation. That anguish is evident in the final words thar Garrett utters so vehemently in the Preview Cut: “What you want and what you get are two different things!”

As Jonathan Lack says, it is inexplicable that Seydor/Spottiswoode deleted this line. It is of a piece though, with how the Criterion Cut rushes the film’s ending. Peckinpah shot the scene after Billy’s death during a brief sunset-as-sunrise moment. Amusingly, one take was ruined by Harry Dean Stanton and Bob Dylan choosing that moment to go out jogging across the background of the shot. When faced with Peckinpah’s fury, Harry Dean claimed he had been running after Dylan, in order to bring him back.

In the Preview Cut by contrast, the morning-after lingers with the sour feeling of a hangover. The sun is out but people are still in the same clothes and still clinging to the night when someone dear to them was still alive. Time at this point is supposed to slow down, and not be rushed. It is a almost as if Seydor/Spottiswoode do not appreciate that this is Garrett’s story as much as – or more than – it is Billy’s.

No doubt, Peckinpah would have further edited the film footage if MGM had given him a chance before the studio sent its version off into the theatres. All up though...if you’re purporting to celebrate “Peckinpah’s West” then the flawed Preview Cut remains the closest thing we have to the real McCoy. Arguably, the film societies should trust their audience, and let them make their own judgement call on the content of the Preview Cut rather than let Criterion make it for them. If you claim to be paying tribute to a great director, don’t make a half-assed job of it.

Footnote: In what follows, I’m going to try and contextualise the events depicted in the film, and add what I know of the film’s original vision, partly by drawing on a rambling, three hour long, fanboys together “interview” I did in the mid-1970s with the late Donnie Fritts (1942-2019) a member of Kristofferson’s band who had a bit part in the film, and who was on set throughout.

Fritts had confessed to Peckinpah about feeling nervous about remembering his lines. In reply, Peckinpah told him that in all of his scenes, his character (called Beaver) should just randomly repeat something that someone else had just said. Listen for it.

The Authentic Death

Peckinpah’s film and the 1961 Marlon Brando film One Eyed Jacks were acorns from the same tree. Both films drew heavily on a 1956 novel called The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, written by Charles Neider. It is the Billy the Kid fable, thinly disguised. The same jailhouse/escape scene is a central episode in the book, and is depicted at length in both films, with some verbatim dialogue. Before being fired by Brando, Peckinpah had provided him with two rewrites of the script for One Eyed Jacks, as derived from Neider’s novel.

Unlike Brando’s vanity project though, Peckinpah’s own film homes in on the world-weary fatalism that Neider had written deeply into his Billy character. At the time, Kris Kristofferson was 36, playing a 21 year old. On the upside, his age did enable Kristofferson to add his own legendary charm to the Billy character, while also showing just how soul-tired (and bereft of options) Billy really is - and do so in a way that might have seemed like an affectation in a younger, more age-appropriate actor.

Amusingly, the despicable, doomed deputy killed by Billy during his jail break in One Eyed Jacks was played by Slim Pickens, who got to play the tragic, dying old-timer bathed in light in Peckinpah’s film, as Dylan comes a-knock, knock, knockin’ on the soundtrack.

While living in Denver in the late 1970s, I wrote to Neider angling for an interview about the contrasting ways his book had been handled in both films. Instead, he sent back a hardcover copy of his book. Later this year, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is due to be re-published with a loving introduction written by the musician Will Oldham, better known these days as “Bonnie” Prince Billy.

Neider set his book and the Garrett/Billy conflict on the Pacific coast near Monterey, California. Brando’s film retained that ocean-side setting, but Peckinpah’s film – mindful of the political/economic forces driving the key players – is set in New Mexico, where the original events occurred.

Pity the poor prologue

Talking of which...what James Aubrey at MGM really, really hated about the Preview Cut that Peckinpah sent him was the way the director chose to frame the story entirely as a flashback. Keep in mind that Garrett had hunted down Billy the Kid in 1881 in order to bankroll his own personal security, in changing times.

In the deepest of ironies, Garret was murdered in 1908 by much the same big money operatives who had hired him to get rid of Billy in the first place. So much for achieving lasting security from betrayal. In the end, not even being under the initial protection of President Theodore Roosevelt could save Garrett.

The prologue was intended to cast an ironic shadow over Garrett’s actions throughout the film. Moreover, one of the key figures in Garrett’s murder was Albert Fall, later to become the central player in the Teapot Dome political scandal of the early 1920s that destroyed the presidency of Warren G. Harding.

In Peckinpah’s mind, all of these things were linked. He was making his film in the shadow of Watergate. Via the prologue, Fritts told me, Peckinpah wanted to draw a direct line of moneyed power and corruption stretching from the deaths of Billy and Garrett at the hands of the business elites, onwards to Teapot Dome and to Watergate. This was to be not only a tale of the Old West, but a story of the American Way. All those strands of the wider story were lost when James Aubrey hacked off the prologue from the film’s theatrical release.

With hindsight, one can sympathise a bit with Aubrey. Both versions of the prologue (there are slight editing differences) would probably leave any audience coming to this saga for the first time, more confused than enlightened. The information dump is too condensed. What is the Santa Fe Ring? Who is Poe, the guy with Garrett and how could anyone later recognise him to be the same creepy guy seen working for Garrett during the hunt for Billy 25 years earlier?

Basically, this was the structural problem with Peckinpah’s ambitions for the story. The film seeks to convey the tragedy of the Billy the Kid myth – a young hell-raiser cut down in his prime by his former friend - while also making a vast political statement about endemic American corruption and violence. The prologue, as written, simply can’t carry that weight. That’s probably why in the Preview Cut, Peckinpah added an epilogue to try and tie the ends together.

Peckinpah’s ambitions did not find favour either, with the film’s original scriptwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer. In particular, Wurlitzer fought with Peckinpah over the director’s insistence on including an initial scene establishing the prior Garrett/Billy friendship. Wurlitzer – erroneously, IMO – wanted the pair to meet only in the final scene.

Really? Surely, the entire Billy & Garrett = Abraham & Isaac aspect of the Billy story hangs on its “father killing son” tragic dimension, seen up close and personal. Chill Wills, as the debauched bartender Lemuel, even gets to say it out loud to Garrett:“You were like a daddy to him.” Wurlitzer later wrote a book dissing Peckinpah’s actions and creative decisions.

The Criterion Cut adds to these problems. Clumsily, Seydorand Spottiswoode chose to (a) re-locate the opening credits and (b) place some of them on top of still images of scenes from the film yet to unfold. So... after barely digesting an intercut prologue and flashback, the Criterion Cut then chooses to hit us with fore-shadowing. In doing so, it severs the “ He’s my friend” scene from the rest of the film, in the sort of overthinking that seems good in theory, but that plays badly on screen.

To be picky, Seydor/Spottriswoode’s edit also puts a portentous weight on the“ He’s my friend” line that is not present in the Preview Cut, where Billy, if anything, sadly undercuts the line. Also, Peckinpah had used a subtle instrumental version of the “Billy ballad over his opening credits, while the Criterion Cut’s opening credits blokily feature Dylan singing about killing a whore, in a verse that rhymes “shot one” with “hot one.” Yikes.

IMO, the placement and edit of the Criterion Cut’s credit sequence undermines the impact of the scene that Peckinpah had introduced to establish the previous friendship between Garrett and Billy, and it makes the Criterion Cut’s throat-clearing opening of the film feel interminable.

None of this second guessing of course, changes Peckinpah’s status as a genius film-maker, and not simply of action sequences, either. The last 15 minutes of Garrett’s descent on the Pete Maxwell house where Billy has been hiding in plain sight, are flawless. That said, the surrender to combative and self-destructive impulses wasn’t simply a theme of this film. By and large, it was also the story of Sam Peckinpah’s entire career.

At the time, Peckinpah wasn’t merely at war with the studio over the money being spent to make the film. During the shoot, many of the film crew in Durango were stricken with an outbreak of influenza; there were technical problems with local gear and crew that required costly re-shoots; Peckinpah was also fighting Wurlitzer and juggling Jerry Fielding’s’ resentment of Dylan, on top of the workaday problems common to almost any film set e.g. in the serio-comic aftermath after Billy’s lethal jailbreak, he falls off his horse in the town square before finally riding out of town. In that scene, Kristofferson’s stunt double broke his foot, badly. In the Durango of the early 1970s, that was a bigger problem than it might have been otherwise, elsewhere.

This was all landing on Peckinpah’s plate at a time when the industry was counting him out. No wonder his drinking intensified on this production.

The Lincoln County War

The events depicted in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid occur soon after the finale of the Lincoln County War. At the time, Lincoln County in New Mexico was vast, being almost the size of Pennsylvania.There is a detailed 1907 account of the background to the conflict and its main events available here.

Billy was on the losing side. A bunch of dry goods merchants and racketeers known as the Murphy-Dolan faction were on the winning side. Even so, the war ended up bankrupting them, and sent Lawrence Murphy to his grave not long after Billy. James Dolan became a Republican Party boss and alcoholic, before dying at the age of 49.

To get the full significance of Garrett’s betrayal, one has to consider the other failed father figures in Billy’s short life. (There’s a reason why Charles Neider re-named the Garrett figure as “Dad Longworth” in his book.)

When dirt-poor Henry McCarty aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid arrived in New Mexico from New York (via Kansas and Colorado) in his mid-teens, he went to work for a young English-born rancher called John Tunstall. At the outbreak of the Lincoln County War, Tunstall was murdered by a gang hired by the Murphy–Dolan faction. Murphy and Dolan were well connected to the Santa Fe Ring, a group of corrupt Republican office holders who fixed the prices on the government contracts for supplying beef to Army posts and to Indian reservations, while enriching themselves mightily in the process.

Locally, Murphy-Dolan had been keen to retain their own price-fixing monopoly on dry goods and cattle deals in the face of the challenge being mounted by Tunstall and his business partner, the lawyer Alexander McSween, who were intent on taking over the lucrative monopoly.

After Tunstall’s murder, tit for tat killings occurred between the Murphy-Dolan faction (which included their own sheriff William Brady) and the “Regulators” that included Billy, and who owed their allegiance to Tunstall and McSween. The Regulators even had their own figurehead sheriff in Dick Brewer, another early casualty of the war.

To add to the complexity, Tunstall/McSween had briefly enjoyed the imperial support of the richest cattleman in the region, John Chisum. In the Peckinpah film, Chisum is repeatedly invoked as the spectral Big Bad, and the incarnation of corporate evil. In reality, the evil in the Lincoln County War was pretty well shared out on all sides.

The war culminated in a five-day siege of McSween’s house, which was set on fire. An unarmed McSween was gunned down while (in some romantic accounts ) walking through the smoke and flames with a law book in his hand. Public sentiment by this time, merely wanted peace and stability, whatever it cost. Eventually, John Chisum gifted 40 head of cattle to Susan McSween, Alexander McSween’s feisty widow. She transformed that stake into a cattle empire of her own, being whispered to have had many lovers on her way to becoming “The Cattle Queen of New Mexico” before her death in 1931.

In the short term, the public desire for peace had also swayed New Mexico’s state governor to meet Billy in person and proclaim an amnesty to the survivors on both sides of the conflict, a point referred to at the outset of Peckinpah’s film. Billy’s foolhardy decision to then steal horses from all and sundry (and to steal cattle from Chisum as payment for an imaginary debt) not only ended the amnesty, but saw Garrett hired to track Billy down.

At the start of the film, only Billy and his two hapless colleagues, Charlie Bowdre and Tom O’Folliard remained of the original Regulators. Peckinpah added an early shoot-out scene too, over Wurlitzer’s objections, although as a concession he cast Wurlitzer as O’Folliard, before killing him off.

Billy was captured and sentenced to hang – in the film, for the killing of Andrew “Buckshot” Roberts, but in real life for his part in the killing of Sheriff Brady. By then, the Murphy-Dolan faction enjoyed the support of state governor Lew Wallace, played in the film by Jason Robards. (In retirement, the real Lew Wallace went on to write the Biblical novel Ben Hur, a book memorably filmed in the 1950s with Charlton Heston in the title role.)

Telling, or Asking

Some genius once described Peckinpah’s film as the story of a man who wanted to be caught, being chased by a man who didn’t want to catch him. Even more so than in The Wild Bunch, there is an overwhelming sense of melancholy to the point of paralysis. By the end of Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, Billy and his gang members are almost immobile in the dusty light, as if waiting around for the inevitable.

In other words, the tone of “Peckinpah’s West” deepened and darkened over the course of his three major Western films. The differences are stark. When death arrives in Ride The High Country for the undervalued man of principle played by Joel McCrea, he says only that he hopes “to enter his house justified.” In The Wild Bunch the gang finally choose to burn out on their own terms, rather than rust away. They wouldn’t have it any other way. No such code of honour or chivalry is evident in the two main figures in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

IMO, that’s the main reason why the film initially gained lukewarm reviews, and did only middling domestic box office. Instead of the exhilarating “rip, shit and bust” finale of The Wild Bunch, this one plays out like a sombre dirge. IMO, it is the lack of uplift, and the futility of the bargain that Garrett made with the devil that now makes the film feel so contemporary. It is a masterfully executed bummer. It is not only true to the compromises with expedience that all of us make, one way or the other. In the case of the wider American Dream...well, the film’s depictions of violence, corruption and disillusionment make it plain that all of these now come with the territory.

BTW, I’m not kidding about the lack of chivalry. Billy (reluctantly) shoots one man in the back. In the traditional Western gunfight scene, both Billy and his opponent cheat, but Billy survives by being the bigger cheat. Garrett is a walking zombie throughout, incapable of any emotion beyond self-hatred. His wife says he has stopped touching her, but he pays for sex and information from women he is not averse to slapping into submission. Garrett also executes one of Billy’s gang after he has first stupefied the man with alcohol, at gunpoint.

And so on. After killing Billy without warning, Garrett then shoots his own reflection in a mirror. When Billy escapes from jail, kids had run after him admiringly. When Garrett rides off at film’s end, a young child throws rocks at him. There’s no hint of even an autumnal glow in this darkness. This is definitely not a sentimental tale of the Old West, and how the times are a-changin’ .

“Billy, they don’t like you to be so free,” Dylan sings on the soundtrack, even though a nihilist like Billy doesn’t seem to have enjoyed being “free” all that much. He just resented all of the available alternatives, as presented. (“Are they telling me, or are they asking me?”)

Yet the Billy the Kid myth endures regardless, for a reason. Who runs the myth-making machinery? Probably, it has been run by the likes of the Dylan character, Alias. As others have noted, one can readily imagine Alias later writing it all down, and mythologising his slain hero. In one key scene, Alias panders to Billy’s vanity by conceding that yes, Billy could escape to personal safety in Mexico (pause) but only by doing serious damage to his legend: “It depends on who you are.”

In that sense and in others, seeing the Dylan character – as the balladeer/leech-like hanger-on forever seeking Billy’s approval – makes more sense in the extended versions of the film than it did in the original theatrical release. Dylan, about whom so many myths have been woven, is here playing a character who is entirely at the service of the Billy myth.

Footnote One : In a film laden with historical footnotes and character delineation, it is a minor miracle that one beautiful and mysterious scene survived all of the cuts. This is the scene where Garrett (alone on a river bank) wordlessly confronts a group of people on a raft who are drifting down-river to whatever destiny had in store for them back in 1881. (The scene reminds me a lot of this painting.) They survey each other, and shoulder arms. James Aubrey wanted to cut that scene, too. According to Donnie Fritts, all involved let it be known to MGM that if that scene was cut, there would be no film at all.

Footnote Two: To his credit, Peckinpah gave paid work on this production to almost every single living character actor in the history of Western movies: Jack Elam, L.Q. Jones, Slin Pickens, Richard Jaeckel (he was the doomed young gun in the Gregory Peck film The Gunfighter), Chill Wills, Harry Dean Stanton, Paul Fix, Elisha Cook Jnr (he was the farmer killed by evil Jack Palance on the muddy street in Shane) etc etc.

R. G. Armstrong had played the tyrannical Bible-quoting father in Ride The High Country. In the Garrett film, Armstrong plays the brutal jailer determined to see Billy repent before he dies. Barry Sullivan (who played the male lead opposite Barbara Stanwyck in Sam Fuller’s frenetic Forty Guns) plays John Chisum.

Footnote Three: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid will be screened on the following dates by local film societies: Dunedin (26 February) Timaru (18 March) Canterbury (7 April) New Plymouth (14 May) Whanganui (9 June) Wellington (23 June) Hamilton (7 July) Auckland (14 July) Palmerston North (30 July) Nelson (20 August) and finally, Tauranga on 1 October.

Footnote Four: The Canterbury Film Society will not be screening The Wild Bunch. Last year it screened three Carol Reed movies, and is screening two Bergman films this year. I guess they know their audience. But it is a bit dis-heartening to see a city conforming so thoroughly to its stereotype.

Footnote Five: Yes, it is ironic to write a 5,000 word article about the virtues of good editing.

Finally, here’s Bob Dylan with the ballad that allegedly reduced Sam Peckinpah to tears, and that anchors the whole movie:

© Scoop Media