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.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Film: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Stars: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzetti
Director: Sergio Leone
Oscar History: In one of the worst decisions in the history of the Academy, the film received no Oscar nominations, making it arguably the best film ever made to never receive an Oscar nomination.
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

I recently bought a house, and as a project for that house I'm working on the creation of my own little movie room in the basement.  While it's not quite finished yet (I feel like I shall have a similar attitude toward my blog & novels about my house in that I'll never be entirely satisfied with it, always tinkering), it's the closest any room in the house is to being exactly what I was dreaming of it being, and as a result I've been inaugurating a number of my favorite films in the room.  This weekend, I gave the room arguably its biggest classic title yet with Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, my favorite western of all-time and a film that, quite frankly, I can't recall the last time I'd seen it and was a little worried that it had become too storied in my memory to actually live up to the hype.  A nearly three-hour epic western that regularly ranks in my favorite films list as one of the greatest of all-time (it's currently positioned at #11, and is well-poised to crack the Top 10 the next I update the list), I don't think I'd even seen my Blu-Ray copy of the film yet, and may not have seen it for at least four years.  Thankfully, my memory didn't evade me-Once Upon a Time in the West was better than I remembered and even more glorious on the bigger screen (that is featured in my movie room), particularly with the Blu-Ray.  A true epic in every sense of the word, and a landmark picture that, despite its growing fame, doesn't feel as essential to any movie-lover's "must see" list as it should.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is hard to summarize into one simple paragraph as we so often do in my reviews, but here goes.  The movie takes place in a land where modernity and the wild west meet-a train magnate named Morton (Ferzetti) is making his way to the Pacific Ocean before he dies of a debilitating illness (it feels like muscular dystrophy, but the illness is never identified in the picture).  In order to get there in time, he hires a ruthless band of thugs, led by one of the nastiest villains in film history, Frank (Henry Fonda, of all people, playing a truly cruel baddie that totally upends his longtime nice guy persona), to kill an Irishman and his family on the eve of his wedding to a New Orleans prostitute named Jill (Cardinale).  Unknown to Frank, Jill is not in fact his fiancé but his wife, having gotten married in New Orleans and is therefore the legal owner of his desert ranch, which it's later revealed is a shrewd investment since the railroad must run through it to get there, and her husband McBain (Frank Wolff) planned on building a train station and making a fortune.  While trying to figure out what to do with Jill & the ticking clock of the railroad, we are dealing with two mysterious men in the story.  One is Cheyenne (Robards), a bandit whom Frank impersonates while killing McBain in order to frame him for the murders, and Cheyenne is none-too-happy about this, vowing revenge on Frank and his men.  The second is a man that only goes by Harmonica (Bronson), his real name never being revealed, who is known for playing his eponymous instrument and always keeping a cool head and his strategy to himself.  The movie ends with a showdown between Frank and Harmonica where it's revealed (wasn't kidding about that spoiler alert) that Frank killed Harmonica's brother many years earlier, not by shooting him but by hanging his brother from a noose and then having Harmonica serve as a living gallows, knowing that he can't stand forever but having him fight to keep his brother alive.  It's a nasty reveal in the showdown, when you finally realize why Harmonica has to win, and why he's hated Frank with such a blaze.

The film, as I mentioned above, is the greatest western of all time, a much-maligned genre for those who simply think of Peter Griffin saying "pilgrim" when they think of the classics of this era, rather than realizing the rich history of the many westerns that challenged the John Wayne tropes (even Wayne's own The Searchers would do just that).  The movie's genius lies in the way that it starts a ticking bomb in its first, meandering opening scenes, where Harmonica kills three nameless robbers (played by veteran character actors Woody Strode, Jack Elam and Al Mulock).  From then on, both Harmonica and Frank are marching to their inevitable end, and the film in some respects feels like one long ending.  This wouldn't work in virtually any other film, but it's the ending of a story that began long ago, of the men who created the west, but were too rough and too violent to make a proper civilization in this short-lived period of American history.  Frank, Harmonica, and Cheyenne are relics, and they know it as the film progresses, each realizing their way-of-life is not just threatened, but gasping for air, and it will be Jill, thoughtful, planful, and modern, who will bring the new world to the West.  This is a tall order for a film to carry, and almost any other director would have fallen under the weight of such a task as creating a gargantuan epic about the decline of the American West, but Leone was clearly the kind of director who took such tasks to heart.  The last thirty minutes makes for one of the best endings to any movie, period.  Think of the risk of having Harmonica's true reason for killing Frank come just seconds before Frank's death, an ending where we don't entirely know if Frank understands why he's being punished by this mysterious man.  Or the gravitas that Bronson brings to his still-faced goodbye to Jill, his "someday" not being literal but in fact that men of his nature will eventually come to save the world from evil if they are ever needed...that should read as so hokey, but it really never does.  It's hard to grasp how many jumps the film makes with its viewer that could fall flat, but Leone's confidence that he's making just a near-perfect film won't be deterred, and it pays off.

The film received no Oscar nominations, which is an unforgivable sin.  I'd argue it's not just the best movie of the year, but arguably of the decade, and it was probably ignored because Leone's film performed poorly at the box office (the western being on its last legs of Hollywood glory at the time as well), but has been rescued in decades since by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, who both consider it a landmark.  The film surely deserved nominations for Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, and the top prizes, but perhaps most egregious would be Supporting Actor and Score.  The performances are uniformly good, with Claudia Cardinale tasked with a tough part, playing the introverted hooker-with-a-heart-of-steel, and Jason Robards a brute who is also kind underneath.  But it's Bronson and Fonda who deserved the most credit.  Bronson's lone wolf is mesmerizing, the sort of performance you don't know an actor has in him until you give him the script.  Known for his tough guys and the Death Wish pictures, Bronson gives a soulful, deeply-felt performance as Harmonica, and it's hard to look at this and still see the caricature he's known as in popular culture.  Fonda is his equal as nasty, vicious Frank.  Villains are Oscar's raison d'être for Supporting Actor, so I don't know why the Academy ignored Fonda here since he was woefully without an Oscar (he'd win one 13 years later for the fine but not remotely as good On Golden Pond). Both men deserved nominations more than any performance I've seen from that category in 1968, and the same surely goes for Ennio Morricone with the most luscious score in film history.  Seriously-this is the best work from one of cinema's finest composers, lilting and iconic, frequently associating specific music with each of the four leads and it's instantly recognizable.  Morricone's work, not to get too hyperbolic, is my favorite cinematic score of all-time, and as a result it's a crime that it wasn't victorious, much less nominated.  Still, though, Oscars are one thing, but a critical reputation that grows almost every year since it's release is another.  Once Upon a Time in the West may not have gotten the attention it deserved when it came out, but a movie this good will always be found, and thankfully critics and film-lovers have done just that.