| What was the most important American film of the '70s?
In terms of what was to come in the decades that followed,
the answer would probably be Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977).
For sheer artistic achievement and innovation I would nominate
John Cassavetes' Husbands (1970). But for its place in the
ongoing history of Hollywood filmmaking with respect to what
came before rather than what was to follow, Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973) is definitely the most
interesting film of its time. Sam Peckinpah occupies a unique,
transitional position in the history of the American cinema.
He was probably the only director of genius to emerge from
the Hollywood system during the '60s, the most insecure period
of its history since the coming of sound. While the fearlessly
independent Cassavetes was creating the most important and
revolutionary body of work in American cinema since Griffith,
and the Underground was flourishing in New York, Hollywood
saw its old formulas dying at the box office and rogue projects
like Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Easy Rider (Dennis
Hopper, 1969) stealing their thunder. Within the context of
the Western, where Peckinpah did his best work, he is probably
the last great creative force. He brought this most flexible
of Hollywood genres into the era of Vietnam during a decade
in which the Hollywood Western seemed to be drying up. Indeed,
Peckinpah started making films just as the greatest decade
for the Western genre, the '50s, drew to a close.
In
1961, Peckinpah graduated from an exceptional career in
television to direct his first feature, The Deadly Companions.
One year later, he established both his greatness and his
most characteristic themes with the dignified Ride the
High Country, a moving Western elegy that has quite
rightly become an established classic. If he arrived just
too early to be part of the new generation (i.e. Hopper,
Penn), he was also too young to be classed with the Old
Masters of the Western such as Ford and Walsh. Peckinpah
was responsible for the most influential American Western
of the '60s, The Wild Bunch (1969). Due to its spectacular
reinvention of screen violence, it understandably remains
Peckinpah's most popular film. Equally understandably, if
regrettably, it typecast him, making his name synonymous
with the graphic depiction of violence to the frequent neglect
of his more subtle virtues as a director. For better or
worse, this cathartic vision of flawed heroism changed the
face of genre filmmaking. As an actor's director, Peckinpah
invested his best films with an extraordinary depth of characterisation.
He was as tender as he was tough, his evident love for his
bruised, often brutal anti-heroes setting him apart from
most storytellers. His finest works are permeated with an
intensely haunting atmosphere of melancholy, loss, and displacement.
His heroes are exiles, men out of step with their dehumanised
times, alienated from love or domesticity, yearning for
a redemption that they seem able to find only in self-destruction.
It is a dark but intensely romantic vision. If for nothing
else, Peckinpah admires his heroes for their staunch individualism
in the face of a world that is changing for the worse, eroding
under the blindly ruthless power of money. This overriding
sense of poetic despair achieved its fullest expression
in the early '70s with Peckinpah's two greatest and bleakest
films: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Bring
me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
The
classic Western was the bedrock of American narrative filmmaking
since The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903).
A drama born out of a myth of conquest, of the victory of
civilisation over the wilderness, the Western began as a
clear-cut vehicle for a simple morality. A fundamentally
optimistic vision that praises positive, purposeful action,
narratively it is centred around the act of violence. Speaking
generally, violent acts mark the major decisive points in
a Western, moving things forward to their conclusion. Plots
are robust, forceful and action packed. The amazing versatility
of this form is perhaps the most fascinating phenomenon
in Hollywood history. In the decades between Porter and
Peckinpah, the Western genre had been twisted into a dizzying
variety of forms, embracing every imaginable theme, and
it had survived. As time went on, it had begun to question
itself and had grown somewhat sadder. But the vitality of
its underlying principles, especially the decisiveness of
violence, remained intact. The Wild Bunch was a major
development in this respect. Rather than the suspense of
the outcome of the violence, the power of the action scenes
comes from a visceral immersion in the confusion of the
moment of violence, an almost abstract sensory experience.
Yet in spite of this raising of the stakes, violence was
still a decisive if somewhat messier factor, and cathartic
as never before.
Revisionism
was the order of the day in the early '70s Western and numerous
directors were having a go at debunking the myth of the
West, with movies such as Little Big Man (Arthur
Penn, 1970), Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson, 1970), McCabe
and Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) The Culpepper
Cattle Co. (Dick Richards, 1972), Bad Company
(Robert Benton, 1972) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians
(Robert Altman, 1976). With an arsenal that ran from sarcasm
to visceral bombast, these younger directors attempted to
use the mythology of the most purely American art form to
criticise modern American society. Ironically, none of these
films, which seem to be striving so hard to be up to date
in their thinking, have aged well, often appearing much
less powerful than many of the sort of films they set out
to attack. One movie obviously made with a different set
of intentions was Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid. Whereas the revisionist directors gleefully attacked
the genre from outside with often glibly political ideas,
Peckinpah used this film to deconstruct not the famous figures
of the Western nor its landscape, but its narrative form.
Peckinpah allows the oft-filmed characters of Pat and Billy
to retain their mythological status unlike, say, Altman's
Buffalo Bill or Penn's Wild Bill Hickock or General Custer
in Little Big Man.
Far
more radical than The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett
deconstructs the Western in a number of ways. If it is a
genre celebrating progress, in Pat Garrett (as, admittedly,
in several others Westerns and almost all those by Peckinpah)
progress equals the dehumanising take over of an open country,
and the end of a way of life, by the ruthless forces of
big business and civilisation. If it is an optimistic genre
looking to a more civilised future, Pat Garrett presents
us with a country full of men without a future, whose way
of life is being replaced by the evil forces of eastern
business interests. If the Western is fundamentally about
a struggle for survival in the face of a hostile wilderness
and its forces, Pat Garrett is about people just
waiting around to die. If the West is a wide-open country,
Peckinpah's sees it as a prison from which almost every
decent person is trying to escape, without success. If violence
is the key element around which the Western revolves, in
Pat Garrett it is shown to be a pointless, inconclusive
(with the notable exception of the Kid's death), comparatively
unspectacular act carried out almost from a force of habit.
Perhaps most startlingly of all, if a tight, dynamic plot
is essential to the Western, this film is practically plotless.
Instead, Peckinpah presents us with a loose series of poetic
vignettes pointing towards the moment when Garrett shoots
the Kid and then his own reflection in a mirror. Rather
than leading up to this action, the film seems simply to
wait for it. The historical and even legendary basis of
the story, the outcome of which is well known, adds to the
sense of inevitability in this wait. This morbid inevitability
is further heightened by the opening of the film which shows
the murder of Garrett in 1909, some three decades after
the main body of the film takes place. What Peckinpah does
is to impressionistically present a protracted state of
grace from the Kid's escape from jail early on in the film
all the way through to his literal death, Garrett's spiritual
death and the death of entire way of life -- all inevitable
and interconnected. This takes the form of a sort of existential
and geographical vacuum through which his characters move
purposelessly.
Unlike
the revisionists, Peckinpah displayed a deep and genuine
love for the West and its macho values to which he subscribed
in life. But he also had a first hand knowledge of their
shortcomings which only intimacy and affection can provide.
Even if David Weddle's fine biography If They Move...
Kill 'em indicates that Peckinpah's famous rough and
ready frontier upbringing was later exaggerated by the director,
he fully lived up to the myth. By all accounts as larger
than life as any of his heroes, Peckinpah was a hard living,
hard drinking, womanising, knife throwing self-destructive
with a prominent streak of genuine artistic sensitivity.
In Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Peckinpah laid
these shortcomings bare in a way no director before or since
has been able to. Unlike the revisionists, his best films
were at least partially self-portraits as opposed to 'issue'
movies. He exposed the emptiness at the heart of the myth
from the inside with the same anguish that he might feel
in disclosing a fatal disease from which he was suffering.
It is this depth of feeling that really sets this film apart
from its contemporaries and has ensured its survival in
the face of time.
By
removing each and every underpinning of the genre (as opposed
to just one or two, as many directors had already done),
Peckinpah collapses it from within. We see a genre crumple
up and collapse in the dust before our eyes in the ecstatic
slow motion the director had made his trademark. What remains
has as much in common with the European art cinema as the
Western. Hellman had already presented the West in starkly
existential terms to considerable effect in his two 1966
Westerns, Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting.
But the jarringly implacable barrenness of his vision differs
from Peckinpah's strong sense of sadness and loss. All three
of his great Westerns -- Ride the High Country, The
Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid --
are elegies for an increasingly obsolete way of life, but
nowhere is this melancholy as all-pervading as in Pat
Garrett.
Although
The Wild Bunch gave Peckinpah the reputation of being
a flamboyant visual stylist, his approach to the look of
Pat Garrett was much more muted. Director of photography
John Coquillon's formally composed images are suffused with
an appropriately dusky magnificence that has led Pat
Garrett to be called Peckinpah's most visually beautiful
film. The aggressive editing patterns he often employed
are also minimised, coming into play in some imaginative
inter-cutting at the start and close of the movie.
*
* *
Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid is a film about betrayal,
about the extent to which people can remain true to themselves
in the face of changing times. At its centre is Pat Garrett,
played by James Coburn with an understated intensity. He
gives up his old life and companions to become Sheriff and
ends up having to hunt down and kill his best friend, Billy
the Kid. It is a process of self-betrayal as the Kid represents
everything Garrett has to sacrifice in order to integrate
himself into the new order. The conflict between the two
is made explicit in a dialogue exchange in the opening scene.
When Billy asks him how his selling out feels, the newly
elected Sheriff replies "it feels like times have changed."
"Times, maybe. Not me" is the Kid's answer. The
Kid, played by Kris Kristofferson, is a rather enigmatic
character, an easygoing free spirit who is never fleshed
out but left as almost a symbol. His laid back inscrutability
is a brilliant, subtly taunting contrast to Garrett's increasing
grimness.
While
Garrett allies himself with the ruthless forces of big business
("every goddamn landowner trying to put a fence 'round
this country"), Billy is close to the poor. This is
brought home in the jailbreak scene when a Mexican peasant
helps him in his escape. The expression on the Mexican's
face speaks volumes. As the film progresses we see Garrett
become increasingly alienated and sadistic in his pursuit
of the Kid. This reaches its highpoint in a saloon scene
in which he comes across a number of members of Billy's
gang, whom he terrorises and humiliates before killing one
of them. He then proceeds to a brothel where all the girls
working there service him. It is at this point that he is
informed of the Kid's whereabouts.
Chronologically,
the last we see of Garrett is in a flash-forward to 1909
when he has become a landowner himself, the transformation
from what he was during his days with Billy now complete.
Yet for all this, Peckinpah never quite puts him at the
level of the forces of big business. When offered a bribe
to bring the Kid in, he tells some of the wealthiest and
most powerful men in the state what they can do with their
money in graphic detail. As a sharp contrast to even Garrett
and as a sort of ambassador of the new order, there is the
businessmen's own bounty hunter, John Poe (John Beck), sent
to 'help' Garrett. A thoroughly evil man, who thinks nothing
of beating up old people, he even wants to cut the dead
Kid's finger off for a trophy. Although he is treated with
contempt, his viciousness is seen to prevail: he is still
around in the 1909 flash-forward, participating in Pat Garrett's
murder.
If
Garrett and the Kid are the opposite poles of reaction to
the changes occurring around them, their extremes are put
into contrast by a number of other characters' reactions.
Some, like Billy's sympathetic jailer, J. W. Bell (Matt
Clark) who claims that "the only belief I haveŠ is
knowing I'm a little man with a job to do", are resigned
to blowing with the prevailing winds. Many are so sickened
with the way things have gone that they just want to leave,
to 'drift' (to 'drift', seemingly the only form of movement
available to characters in this film) out of the territory:
the disgruntled lawman played by Slim Pickens who dies in
a gunfight; Billy's friend Paco (Emilio Fernandez) who tries
to take his family back to Mexico but is tortured to death
en route by men in the employ of big rancher John Chisum;
or the character played by Peckinpah himself at the end
of the movie. There is no way out. Even when Billy himself
tries to go to Mexico, he comes upon the dying Paco and
turns back to avenge his murder, only to be killed by Garrett
that night. Paco's last words movingly express a yearning
for a future to believe in. He describes a house he would
have built for them in Mexico and the ordered, idyllic existence
they would have there: "I will have three chairs and
I will sit in the middle one and anyone who doesn't do right
according to nature and my mother, I will blow his head
off". (A good example of the unusually rich dialogue
writer Rudy Wurlitzer filled his screenplay with.) But when
Billy sets out for Mexico he gets a rather more realistic
view of his possible future from one of his gang, played
by Harry Dean Stanton: "Hell, in Old Mex you ain't
gonna be nothing but another drunken gringo shitting out
chilli peppers and waiting forŠ nothing."
Or
waiting for death? Almost certainly. Few films can be as
saturated with death as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
The tone is set from the inspired opening scene, which inter-cuts
Billy and his gang shooting chickens with the murder of
Pat Garrett years later. There are one or two action scenes
in the traditional sense, but the vast majority of the killings
are dealt with in a perfunctory style. Regret, rather than
excitement is the key emotion of these scenes. Unlike the
traditional action scene -- or, for that matter, the very
untraditional ones in The Wild Bunch -- the emphasis
is on dying, not killing, and more often than not the killing
is reluctant. One of the best examples is the showdown between
Alamosa Bill (Jack Elam) and Kristofferson. The Kid arrives
at the house of a family he knows, looking for a meal only
to discover a deputised Elam already eating there. Like
almost everyone else chasing him, Elam used to be a friend
or acquaintance. They eat and then, full of regret, go out
to count the ten paces. Death in this film is almost always
accompanied by wistful anecdote. Here the father of the
house poignantly complains about the fact that they are
now going to have to use their new door upon which to bury
the loser. The previous door was used to bury his son who
died in a gunfight some time before. The duellists stand
back to back and begin the count to ten. Both men cheat.
When they reach three the Kid turns around and points his
gun at Elam, who turns at the count of eight and is fatally
shot. The latent cynicism in this scene is completely ignored
by Peckinpah, who instead opts for a tone of gentle regret.
Neither man is angry at his opponent's cheating. "That
wasn't ten, hoss" Kristofferson remarks. "I never
could count", the dying Elam mutters resignedly.
Music
is of key importance in this film and Bob Dylan's brilliant
score contributes enormously to the atmosphere. (In fact,
Dylan appears on screen, playing a rather ambiguous, ill-defined
character called Alias ["Alias what?" "Alias
whatever you please."], drifting around the wonderfully
rough edges of the film.) It also subtly highlights the
distance between Garrett and the Kid and our perception
of them. While we achieve a certain closeness to Garrett
and his psychology, the near mythical status of the distant,
slightly enigmatic Kid is highlighted by the fact that he
is frequently being sung about on the ballad-like soundtrack
rather than being fleshed out as a character. Music plays
a big part in the nature of the violent scenes as well.
Whereas most scores (including those of Peckinpah's usual
composer, Jerry Fielding, who loathed Dylan's work on this
movie) would tend in one way or another to play up the violence,
to heighten the drama, here the music plays against it,
softening it. It diminishes the excitement and adds instead
to the prevalent mournful, contemplative feel. Killing in
this film is unheroic, an empty and almost banal ritual.
It
might be an exaggeration to call Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid a series of death scenes, but not much of one.
Even children play on the gallows, in a scene reminiscent
of the children torturing scorpions in a red ant's nest
in the famous opening of The Wild Bunch. The scene
that perhaps best encapsulates the mood is one that is blatantly
'unnecessary' in terms of traditional narrative construction,
but one of the most haunting and evocative Peckinpah ever
shot. Garrett sits under a tree overlooking a river. A houseboat
carrying a family drifts by. The father is shooting at a
bottle drifting in front of the boat. Garrett raises his
gun and takes a shot. Startled the father turns and points
his gun at Garrett, who aims at him in turn. For a long
tense moment, the two men stand poised for violence. Then
the boat drifts out of sight.
All
of this death foreshadows and culminates in one of the most
eerily beautiful pieces of filmmaking in the history of
the cinema: Billy's death. This fifteen-minute scene inter-cuts
Billy's arrival at the house of his friend, rancher Pete
Maxwell (Paul Fix) and his final tryst with his girl with
Garrett's (and Poe's) final search for him. Much credit
for its atmosphere must go to Dylan's unforgettably haunting
music. Not since history remorselessly engulfed the heroes
and sometimes whole casts of films such as Young Mr.
Lincoln (1939), They Were Expendable (1945) and
Fort Apache (1948), has the inevitable closing in
of destiny been so movingly evoked. Pat Garrett captures
a potentially Fordian moment of myth taking over from life.
But in place of the bittersweet self-sacrifice of Ford's
heroes, defined by Peter Bogdanovich as 'glory in defeat'
(1), Peckinpah presents us with a vision of remorseless,
numbed out despair.
As
Billy arrives at the ranch, old Pete launches into the last
of the melancholy anecdotes that so often accompany killing
in this film, telling about a murder performed by putting
a rattlesnake into a man's bedroll. But his reminiscences
are addressed to the empty room as Billy and the girl have
retired to a bedroom. Their lovemaking is tender and gentle,
a contrast to Garrett's whorehouse exploits in the previous
scene. Meanwhile, the hunters close in. The dusty, nocturnal
landscape through which the lawmen prowl is shot by Coquillon
to almost resemble an alien planet from a science fiction
film. Immediately prior to locating Billy, Garrett is accosted
by Peckinpah playing a self-referential cameo role, giving
voice to the Sheriff's conscience. Peckinpah's character
claims that he will bury all his possessions and leave the
territory, decisively elevating Garrett's betrayal from
a personal or legal matter to one that affects the whole
country. Then he taunts him "When are you going to
learn you can't trust anybody, not even yourself Garrett."
After
killing the Kid, Garrett shoots his reflection in a mirror,
before examining his face in the remaining shards. His spiritual
death is complete. All he has to do is wait some thirty
years for his actual death to catch up with him. The West
is not only dead, it is death itself. So much for the optimistic
myth of the traditional Western. In the two hours it took
him to tell the story of Pat Garrett killing Billy the Kid,
Sam Peckinpah killed the Western. There has been a handful
of great Westerns since -- The Shootist (Siegel,
1976), Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992), Last of the
Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1993), -- but none of them have
significantly developed the genre or taken it anywhere near
as far as the heart of darkness Peckinpah reaches in this,
his last Western.
©
Maximilian Le Cain, March 2001
Endnotes:
(1)
Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (University of California
Press, 1978)
©
Senses of Cinema 1999-2002
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