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Rating: There is one scene above all in "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" that perfectly encapsulates the elegiac spirit of the film; Mrs. Barker (Kathy Jurado) watches her husband (Slim Pickens) approach the river to die, after being hit by a bullet fired by some members of Billy the Kid's gang. Mrs. Barker's face lights up with tears; a fiery sunset in the background. Dylan's immortal "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" echoes; it's impossible not to be moved. For Peckinpah, here and in other moments of the film, he achieves the magical mix between vitality and death; an ancient force of emotions, rooted in the "naturalism" of the old west, a destiny of death. We are perpetually in the glory of a warm twilight.
"Let's go die," says William Holden in "The Wild Bunch," and Ernest Borgnine replies, "Why not?" The men of the old frontier molded by Peckinpah are nihilists attentive to male friendship, with women willing to grant them the warmth of their loins; the males are males and act as such, the females are females.
The rule doesn't change even in "Pat Garrett"; Luke (Harry Dean Stanton) is woken up by Billy (Kris Kristofferson) while he's in bed with his woman. Courtesies, then Luke sneaks away and Billy gets into bed with his lady, and they make love. Billy falls in love with another. Maria (played by Rita Coolidge); he takes her and is loved and mourned until the end. Loyal, gathered in her wild long hair. We are in an enchanted, idealized world.
Not all women are like this in Peckinpah's films; in westerns, only the Mexican women are sincere and in love. It's known that the director had a preference for the downtrodden, crushed by the capitalist power of the American Yankee. Pat Garrett consorts with prostitutes; one of them knows where Billy is. After a hearty drink, he goes to the saloon to the whore, slaps her, since she doesn’t want to talk. A hard scene that puts Garrett in a bad light; however, when the door opens more colleagues come in, and they all give themselves to the sheriff, including the Kid's friend, now forgetful of the beatings and having betrayed her friend. Everything feels like a final bewildering inebriation, to feel alive and forget they are going to do a nasty business that will change their two lives.
In the underrated "One-Eyed Jacks" (1960), Marlon Brando acted in and directed this original western (which was supposed to be directed by Kubrick) reimagining the relationship between "Dad" (Karl Malden) and "Kid" (Brando himself) in an Oedipal key. Although the names Garrett and William "Billy the Kid" Bonney are not mentioned, the story takes the two famous western heroes as an alibi to revisit them from a Freudian perspective, subjected to Brando's neuroses through the psychological filter of the Actor’s Studio and Elia Kazan. Previously done, with notable results, by Paul Newman in Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun", even more so in Stanislavski ethics (Newman replaced Dean at the last moment).
Peckinpah is not interested in psychoanalysis; too drunk and drugged to dabble in Freudian theories and too wrapped up in the nostalgia of a sentiment toward a west that perhaps never existed but is beautiful to think there once were giants.
The killer that killed the true west and the real men who inhabited it is the capital, seen by the director in a Nietzschean perspective of decadence and the victory of the weak over the strong, a bit like Leone did in "Once Upon a Time in the West," representing it in the figure of the powerful/powerless Morton: Garrett and Kid were both employees of the landowner John Chisum. Then, with the advent of modernity and the victory of capital, a choice was imposed. Garrett wanted to age in peace, Kid to remain true to himself. Their death is encapsulated in those two choices: in the director's cut: Kid is found and killed by the ex-friend sheriff who finds him making love with Maria, healthy, alive, in love, and grants him one last night of love. Then he shoots the mirror reflecting his image, in a motion of shame. In the director's cut, the film starts with Garrett being taken down by the same men he hired to find Kid; he is unable to live fully by the sly rules he embraced, being himself a man of the old ways, and those rules foresee his elimination.
The idea of screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer was to never have the two meet during the entire narrative except for the final showdown. Peckinpah opposed, perhaps because he couldn’t avoid the two seeing each other face to face during the story, as if one were a mirror of the other. Garrett saw what he could have been; Kid what he chose not to become.
Accompanied by the ballads composed by Bob Dylan (who has a brief, charming role as Kid’s friend and label reader on cans), "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" dismantles the myth of the frontier that decades of previous cinema had established and creates another one. Peckinpah, more than telling us the truth about the events that transpired, tells his own dream, his own idea of life, painted by John Coquillon’s beautiful cinematography, which would establish the western aesthetic for all the seventies (each decade has its western aesthetic, from the little hats and pistols of Alan Ladd to the Armani-look of "Tombstone") and with the classic tributes to stars of the golden era (Katy Jurado, Slim Pickens, Jack Elam, Emilio Fernandez, playing their old age). Less apocalyptic and significant for the genre than "The Wild Bunch," it differs from the latter for sidelining the hysterical bestiality in favor of a ballad tone.
Despite the ending, despite the inevitable failure of the two heroes, there is a sense of serenity with fiery surges. At the end of the film, when Garrett arrives at the fort where he will find Kid to kill him, Peckinpah appears in a cameo; he is in the square in front of Fort Saunders and asks the sheriff to be quick so they can cut this story. And the West.
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