Scored with unhurried, percussive sketches by Bob Dylan and arriving in 1973, director Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid seemed well positioned to evoke plaintive pangs for the old, American west and the rascally outlaws that enlivened it. Peckinpah and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer's film proves much meaner than that though. It's a period piece balanced precariously on the cusp of the twentieth century and shot through with a palpable bitterness. Its subjects are lousy with the tetchiness of thwarted ambition; an all-consuming regret seems to roll off the screen and into the audience. James Coburn's Pat Garrett and Kris Kristofferson's Billy the Kid are former friends who have, in the fullness of time, found themselves on opposite sides of the law. Garrett, the older of the two, has sided with the money men who are slowly dividing up this formerly unconquerable expanse. Garrett, newly elected to the office of Sheriff for Lincoln County, immediately endeavours to prove his usefulness to the emerging system by assassinating Billy and sundry hangers-on.
The Kid, on the other hand, has refused any opportunity to transform himself. He deliberately dawdles in conspicuous hide-outs, seemingly inviting the challenge his former ally represents. Although the pair squat at opposing ends of society, in Peckinpah's film both men foretell ruin for those unlucky enough to find themselves in their orbit. Again and again, this separated pair brush up against figures from their earlier lives, men who have diverted and digressed, putting down roots or raising families, all in an attempt to draw a line under their past misdeeds. The outcome for these old accomplices is never favourable. Tension hangs in the air - every time - as evasive, sometimes incomprehensible chatter winds its way towards an inevitable flash of anger. Even this violence, when it finally manifests, avoids the out-and-out titillation suggested by pirouetting bodies packed with squibs. Always, these participants are trapped and damned, forced to comply with the whims of madmen who just so happen to be incredibly good at extinguishing life. In Kristofferson, comfortably a decade too old to be playing Billy the Kid, Peckinpah has found a smiling sociopath whose every action tells you that he has long worn out his welcome.
Bystanders to Billy's carnage regard him with the shock and awe associated with celebrity. As bodies lie cooking in the midday sun, shredded by shrapnel, crowds gather round to make themselves party to the legend. To pick and poke at the blasted, bleeding bodies and get a closer look at what Billy is up to next. The stunning lack of empathy for the victims, or self-preservation when peering at an armed crook, reflective either of the everyday numbness experienced by these downtrodden people or the sheer gravitational pull of Billy. Either way, townsfolk gather again and again to observe this criminal. In this context the unbeatable bandit apparently fulfils the function of a slumming superstar who has deigned to mingle with the little people. A flash of excitement before the drudgery of the everyday resumes. Even Kid's compatriots are cowed and obliging in Billy's presence, presumably for fear that his lethal attentions may soon fall on them. Coburn's Garrett is even worse still, a Judas who has betrayed his former associates in return for the steady income and status offered by the expanding criminal enterprises, such as the Santa Fe Ring, that weave themselves into government then call themselves legitimate.
Coburn's Garrett is a creature of pure, consumptive excess. Although the sheriff refuses food every time it is offered to him these are not the actions of an ascetic. Garrett instead prefers to extract his calories from the whisky in his hipflask or the sherries he sips with conspiring governors. Garrett then rarely seen not nipping at some pungent, brown liquor. Seated and coiled, Garrett is able to disguise the tremors that bottle after bottle have enacted upon his body. He can bully people from a stationary position in his chair, turning his cold, hard gaze upon them or, if that fails, his pistol. When he flees from these situations, Peckinpah allows us to see just how unsteady he has made himself: the wobbles, the grasping for balance as the world beneath him tremors treacherously. Garrett's appetites are not limited to alcohol either. When staying at a saloon, where he hopes to learn the whereabouts of his quarry, Garrett has half a dozen women sent to his room for entertainment. Billy, for all his faults, enjoys a string of semi-romantic couplings with partners who either bashfully or hungrily receive him. Garrett picks and prods at his gaggle, demanding to be treated like a king among courtesans. When he finally staggers from away from this orgy to pursue a lead on Billy's whereabouts, Coburn, by clattering down a flight of stairs like a stiffened corpse, is playing Garrett as completely empty. A man who has purged every finer, human quality he ever had in pursuit of pure, unadulterated greed.
