Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Film: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Stars: James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Jaeckel, Jason Robards, Bob Dylan, Rita Coolidge, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Harry Dean Stanton

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we mentioned in our intro this month, Kris Kristofferson had actual cowboy bonafides, something few actors this year we've profiled came with.  He was a military brat who grew up in Brownsville, Texas, and his first touch with fame wasn't in acting-it was in music.  According to legend, he got that start by landing a helicopter in Johnny Cash's front yard (the helicopter seems undisputed, whether he had a beer in one hand & some music in the other when he did it is up to who tells the story).  Kristofferson would spend much of the 1970's as a country act that didn't translate into the US mainstream in a major way, though he did have one big hit with "Why Me."  It was as a songwriter that he gained most of his success, writing for Cash ("Sunday Morning Coming Down"), Gladys Knight ("Help Me Make It Through the Night"), & Ray Price ("For the Good Times").  His biggest hit was for his then-girlfriend Janis Joplin (Kristofferson had been dating her when she died).  Kristofferson had written a song that he had recorded, as had Kenny Rogers & Gordon Lightfoot, but while they had done well, none of them had become synonymous with the ballad until it was released posthumously by Joplin, and became her signature tune: "Me and Bobby McGee,"' a song that would eventually make it on the Rolling Stone list of the greatest of all-time.

(Spoilers Ahead) We are going to end up in a movie today that has a lot of music, though oddly none of it was sung by Kristofferson.  This is another tale of Billy the Kid (Kristofferson), a figure that has been seen repeatedly in westerns of the era in various forms, but this is about the end of his life, when he is being hunted down by his former friend and lawman Pat Garrett (Coburn).  Now that Garrett is the sheriff, he intends to arrest him.  He gives Billy an ultimatum-leave the country & head into Mexico, or face the gallows.  Billy chooses to take his chances with the latter, and a chase ensues.  The two eventually come across each other, and Pat fulfills his promise, killing Billy in a bit of trickery, earning himself the reputation of the "man who shot Billy the Kid."

We see in the opening shots of the movie that this comes with its own set of baggage.  The film starts decades after the incidents in the remainder of the film, and shows the eventual murder of Pat Garrett (this is true to real life-Garrett really did kill Billy, and Garrett was also later murdered) in an ambush.  This is something of the message of the film-you can't outrun your fate.  The beauty of Pat Garrett is that it shows a tale not of the evolution of these men, both of whom are hard-headed and stubborn (as a result, the leads are good but not as good as they should be), but instead about the ways the west pleads with them to let it go.  The film is littered with references to not just a lost Old West, but the dying Hollywood western, with figures from the heyday of the western like Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, & Katy Jurado all appearing in small roles, and showing that the west is dying...why add another corpse to it.

The movie's best scene encapsulates this, with Jurado mourning the death of her longtime companion Slim Pickens (both really good in small parts...this is also the best I've ever seen Chill Wills) after he's shot.  The music playing in the back is a mournful ballad...but it's also a rock classic.  The most famous thing to a modern audience about Pat Garrett is that Bob Dylan is in it, and not only did he do songs for the movie, but he composed the score.  The song playing, a song somehow skipped by the Oscars (it was eligible for Best Original Song), is "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," a Dylan staple, which is original to this movie.  Dylan is not a good actor, but he does get a great moment where James Coburn is about to kill a man, and Dylan is in the background reading the names of different canned goods.  The most famous figure in 1970's counterculture, talking about baked beans...it's just an odd touch in a very good late western from Sam Peckinpah.