2023 Saturdays with the Stars Recap

Yesterday we finished up our month with Kris Kristofferson, and today, we are putting the final cap on our "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood" season.  I will totally own this, our fifth season, is probably my favorite season we've done since Season 2 (when we tackled sex symbols), and maybe my favorite ever.  I knew going into this that westerns have always been one of my favorite genres, and getting to see such a wide array, including a lot of hidden gems that have been on the To Do list for a while, was an absolute treat.  But I didn't realize how many of the films would end up being downright classics, from Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy to some of the gorgeous westerns that Anthony Mann made with Jimmy Stewart, there are movies on this list that have quickly catapulted to my favorite westerns list, and I have even added a few already to my home collection.

The biggest thing that excited me, though, was how this really ended up being the tale of Hollywood, starting with The Big Trail and ending with Heaven's Gate, and how much of Classical & New Hollywood came in-between.  This has been the case in all of our seasons, but seeing it through the most American of genres, the western, it felt like I was hearing it for the first time.  We'll get into our sixth season, where we will be "Crowning America's Sweethearts," on Saturday, but one last time, take a look at some of the best from this season of "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood."

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Gary Cooper, Man of the West

February: James Stewart, The Naked Spur

March: Gregory Peck, The Gunfighter

April: Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

May: Randolph Scott, Ride the High Country

June: Yul Brynner, Westworld

July: John Wayne, The Shootist

August: Franco Nero, Querelle

September: Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

October: Robert Redford, Barefoot in the Park

November: Sam Elliott, Molly and Lawless John

December: Kris Kristofferson, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Marlene Dietrich

Clint Eastwood

Robert Redford

James Stewart

John Wayne

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

James Stewart, The Man from Laramie

James Stewart, The Naked Spur

John Wayne, The Shootist

12 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Big Country

Destry Rides Again

A Fistful of Dollars

For a Few Dollars More

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

High Plains Drifter

The Naked Spur

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Ride the High Country

Westworld

Winchester 73

Witness for the Prosecution

Top 12 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Ellen Burstyn, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Dan Duryea, Winchester 73

Mariette Hartley, Ride the High Country

Burl Ives, The Big Country

Katy Jurado, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Diane Ladd, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Elsa Lanchester, Witness for the Prosecution

Charles Laughton, Witness for the Prosecution

Una O'Connor, Witness for the Prosecution

Lee van Cleef, For a Few Dollars More

Lee van Cleef, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

OVP: Lone Star (1996)

Film: Lone Star (1996)

Stars: Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, Miriam Colon, Frances McDormand

Director: John Sayles

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Screenplay)

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 I mentioned last week, Kris Kristofferson's acting career never really recovered after the failure of Heaven's Gate, and he spent much of the 1980's alternating between forgettable movies like Songwriter and Trouble in Mind (the latter being a well-reviewed neo-noir that made zilch at the box office and is definitely going on my Letterboxd Watchlist as that feels up my alley) while having more success in music, forming the supergroup Highwaymen with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, & Waylon Jennings.  By the end of the decade, he had moved to a point where he was playing second fiddle to Paul Reubens in Big Top Pee-wee (which didn't even have the good sense to be a hit like its predecessor).  But in the 1990's, Kristofferson starred in his last important film, and appropriately enough, it's a western to close our series.  Made by noted independent filmmaker John Sayles, Lone Star was a modest hit in 1996, and a critical gem that has only grown in stature in the years that followed.  Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, while Kristofferson has worked for decades since, it feels a good way to close his career, and our fifth season of Saturdays with the Stars.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie alternates between two different time frames, focusing on a father-and-son, both of whom are lawmen in the border community of Frontera, Texas.  The son is Sam Deeds (Cooper), who is investigating the appearance of a dead body in the desert, which we learn after a while is the skeleton of Charlie Wade (Kristofferson), a corrupt sheriff who decades earlier disappeared, and was succeeded by Buddy Deeds (McConaughey), who would become famous for his straight-laced and honest approach to his work, reshaping the town for the better.  Sam has a complicated relationship with his father, who was a womanizer & not a strong father figure, and we also learn more about Sam's romantic life, including meeting his troubled ex-wife Bunny (McDormand) and watch as he embarks on a relationship with Pilar (Pena), a girl he loved in his youth but both of their parents wanted to keep them apart.  It turns out they did so with good reason, with two secrets leaking in the waning moments of the film.  We find that not only did Buddy help with the coverup of Charlie's death (he had been killed in a form of self-defense when he was going to kill an innocent man & say it was for "resisting arrest"), but we also learn that Buddy is Pilar's father, having had an affair with her mother years earlier.  In an inversion of the plot of Chinatown, which the film bares a strong resemblance toward, Sam & Pilar decide that, since she can no longer have children, that they should continue to see each other even though they are half-siblings.

Lone Star is the sort of difficult, cerebral film that could only be a hit because it's good, and that's the case.  We see a lot of the tropes of the west that we saw throughout this year-the honorable lawman, the tough-as-nails woman who survives in a world that wants to tear her down, and the corruption of the system in the form of Kristofferson's Wade, holding the West back from modernity.  But it also looks beyond that, which makes it interesting.  Much of the modern scenes with Cooper's Sam talk about the ways that the racism that happened during Wade's reign-of-terror was substituted for a "they're replacing us" mentality.  We get a number of moments where we understand the politics of this community will continue to give more power to the growing Latino population, and even Sam is likely to lose his position as Sheriff soon because a Latino lawman will be elected to replace him.  It's a fascinating dichotomy here that was usually ignored in the Western, where we knew that white men would ultimately control all of the power over the Native American populations they're fighting with, the ones that originally held these lands.  Lone Star smartly talks about how, eventually, the West will always be made by those who come to it, and no one holds sway there forever.

And that ends both our month with Kris Kristofferson and our season of "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood."  Kristofferson is still alive, and in the decades after Lone Star made films, though almost all of them supporting roles in lukewarm franchises like Blade and Dolphin Tale.  The western continues to survive, and every few years pops up with another classic like Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, Gran Torino, and The Power of the Dog, with Yellowstone the closest it's come to consistent mainstream success in television.  As I mentioned last week, we'll start our new series looking at the concept of America's Sweetheart through twelve actresses who embodied that title in the 20th Century, but tomorrow we'll have a proper sendoff to our season with one last cattle call of the best of our twelve western stars this year!

OVP: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Film: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Stars: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Cotten, Jeff Bridges, Terry O'Quinn

Director: Michael Cimino

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction...though at the 1981 Oscars, not 1980)

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.

While we didn't start this season with John Wayne (I wanted to pick a month with five Saturday's for Wayne given how important he is to the western genre), I made a point of covering The Big Trail this year, which was not the first Hollywood western, but it was the first one to be playing in the field of "epic tale of good-vs-evil" that would be a hallmark of the genre for the next fifty years.  Even after the collapse of the studio system, the western survived well into the 1970's, in some cases because people like Wayne continued to be profitable even as other Golden Age actors fell.  But in the same way that The Big Trail was a landmark for the western but not the first, Heaven's Gate was not the epitaph of the western...but it did mark the end of it as a major, consistent presence in Hollywood.  Michael Cimino's follow-up to his acclaimed (and commercially successful) war film The Deer Hunter was a gargantuan bomb, one of several that would happen throughout the 1980's, and would become synonymous with flops, to the point that when Kevin Costner's expensive failure Waterworld came out, it was nicknamed by the press "Kevin's Gate."  Unlike Waterworld, though (which actually made a lot of money, just not enough to recoup its budget), Heaven's Gate has a weird second life in the decades since, hailed by many as a masterpiece, in some ways akin to what Cimino achieved with The Deer Hunter, and I have spent much of this year looking forward to it, though a little concerned by the 219-minute run time (not a typo-this film approaches Gone with the Wind-levels of patience).  I was curious what the "last" Hollywood western would have in store for me.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is an epic tale focusing on the real-life Johnson County War that took place in the 1890's in Wyoming.  Despite a gigantic, long story, you can actually summarize it pretty quickly.  We have at its core Averill (Kristofferson), who starts the film a promising young man at school, but in a flash forward we understand he's now a grizzled marshall, someone who has seen too much of the world, and is employed in Johnson County, which is seeing a battle between the cattle barons of the region and the burgeoning immigrant population trying to find a hold in the West.  The barons are angry about the immigrants, and want to pin a series of cattle thefts on them, and quickly decide to put bounties on the heads of 125 different immigrants in the area, in hopes of killing them and driving the remainder out.  The rest of the film centers around this conflict, and eventually involves a wide array of figures, including a bordello madam named Ella (Huppert), who is caught in a love triangle with Averill and a hired hand for the cattlemen named Champion (Walken), before culminating in almost everyone involved dying...but the immigrants likely being able to carry on in their homes.  Averill survives in the end, living on a yacht in a proper life that feels unfulfilling...a sign that he left his spirit in the West, never to be reclaimed.

Heaven's Gate became a flop for a couple of reasons.  First, the production is the stuff of legend, with Cimino allegedly having something of a God Complex (it was the 1970's, and we were entering the saturation point of auteur theory between this and Apocalypse Now!'s sprawling location shooting).  He went over budget, and months over deadline.  According to legend, one of the films stars (John Hurt) was able to shoot his Oscar-nominated turn in The Elephant Man during production of Heaven's Gate, it took so long to make.  Cimino would tear down sets for no reason, and the film basically ruined his career two years after being crowned the toast of Hollywood at the Academy Awards.  The film also destroyed United Artists, and caused it to be sold to MGM in 1981 during the tumultuous Kirk Kerkorian years for the studio.  The movie's budget basically made anything short of a Star Wars-style payday to be a flop, and on a $44 million budget, it barely cracked $3 million at the box office (a loss of $74 million when adjusted for inflation).

It's easy to see why the public didn't like the movie.  It's long, and while I saw the longer director's cut, it also doesn't need to be if you solely focus on plot.  There's not a lot here.  The tropes of a western (good vs. evil, the little guy being overtaken by a powerful government, a love triangle between a sex worker and two lawmen with different ethos) are all there, but in the 1950's you could get that done in 100 minutes...and Heaven's Gate does.  In the remaining 2 hours, you largely just see a really beautiful reconstruction of the West.  No extra plot, just pretty pictures.

There's a trend in recent years to only focus on the plot, to the point where many people who are against sex scenes in movies use "is it relevant to the plot?" to argue against certain scenes in movie (we saw that earlier this year with Oppenheimer).  But Heaven's Gate is a solid explanation as to why you shouldn't do that.  Because Heaven's Gate is a good movie almost entirely because of how it looks.  Film is a visual medium first-and-foremost, and Cimino definitely gets good use out of bankrupting a studio.  You see every penny of his work in the production design, costumes, & cinematography, all first-rate and glorious on the screen, with entire towns built from scratch and giving us a lived-in look at the west.  The film's fatal mistake (other than its accounting) is that it casts our star (apologies to Kris Kristofferson, who has had a rough month with me in terms of reviews) incorrectly.  Kristofferson is handsome & genial, but he's not Clint Eastwood or John Wayne-he doesn't have an automatic connection with the audience, and he's too reserved as an actor for us to invest four hours into his character.  It's easy to see years later, when he's now a legend, but Jeff Bridges (who plays a smaller role in the film) would've been perfect for the lead, and Kristofferson would've been a good fit for Bridges' less showy part, but in 1980 that wasn't the star structure that was in place.  Heaven's Gate would change that.  While Bridges would go on to fame, glory, & an Oscar in the decades that followed, Kristofferson would essentially be banished from the A-List after this movie, forced into character parts.  We'll get to one of his most notable ones, and the final western of 2023, in our season finale next week.

OVP: A Star is Born (1976)

Film: A Star is Born (1976)

Stars: Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey

Director: Frank Pierson

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Original Song-"Evergreen," Cinematography, Scoring, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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.

Few films live in such storied annals as A Star is Born, a film that has been told 4-5 times depending on how you handle What Price Hollywood?.  It is the quintessential Hollywood story, the public name-check when we talk about the entertainment industry.  But specific to our film today, few productions have the kinds of legendary tale as that which comes from the 1976 A Star is Born, one of the most infamous film shoots in movie history.  Written by the journalist It Couple of the 1970's (John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion), the shoot involved pretty much everyone hating each other.  Kris Kristofferson, then a huge star, hadn't been the first choice for the film (Streisand wanted Elvis Presley, who honestly would've been an interesting choice had that come about even though Kristofferson is the better actor of the two), and by the end of the production loathed both his leading lady and director Frank Pierson.  You've got Barbra Streisand having an affair with colorful 1970's mega-producer Jon Peters (who had just gotten a divorce from Lesley Ann Warren), and using her position as the most powerful person on the set to run roughshod over director Pierson, including getting final cut which may explain how the ending ends with a seven-minute long shot of Streisand.  A production where all of the cast isn't speaking (except the ones who are fucking each other), by the end of it can sometimes become a grand situation if the movie is good (look at Hell's Angels, now considered Howard Hughes' finest movie), but if it sucks, it becomes a Don't Worry Darling-style fiasco.  And A Star is Born sucks.

(Spoilers Ahead) This story is as engrained in Hollywood lore as you can get, so I don't know that I need a spoiler alert, but for those of you somehow unfamiliar, this is the story of John Norman Howard (Kristofferson), a washed-up rock star, who is more familiar with the bottle than the Billboard charts by the time the movie opens.  He meets, at a bar, a young singer named Esther Hoffman (Streisand), who is clearly a talent, and becomes smitten with her.  Eventually, he's producing one of her albums, and she's clearly headed to the top of the charts, and they even get married.  But there's a problem-John's demons are not only still there, but they're exacerbated by his jealousy over his wife's success, and she wants him to join in on it, rather than letting him slip into the background or not fight for what he's got.  In the end, this is the marriage (and John's) undoing, as he dies in a drunk driving accident, though unlike some of the other movies, it's not entirely clear that this is intentional or not.  Esther is now alone, but a fully-transcendent star, one who understands that she'll forever be linked with the man who fell before her.

This has been told very well (Judy Garland, Constance Bennett), solidly (Janet Gaynor), and poorly (Lady Gaga) before.  But this is the worst of the versions, because even with the others, specifically 2018's (I don't think Lady Gaga has proven capable of being a dramatic actress, and I think she's bad in the movie when she's not singing, but she gets coverage because Bradley Cooper is good and also because Gaga is a strong singer who gets one truly fantastic scene with "Shallow") there was something crackling between the two lead actors.  Gaga & Cooper, March & Gaynor, and especially Mason & Garland...there's heat.  But this film has zilch sexual chemistry between Streisand & Kristofferson, to the point where you genuinely don't understand why he fell for her.  This makes the film over-long, boring, and honestly...the leads give bad performances, particularly Streisand, who plays Esther less as an organic character onscreen and more as Barbra Streisand as herself.  Nothing about this works; honestly, I read a comment about how this feels an hour longer than the Garland version even though it's much shorter, and that summarizes my feelings exactly.

The film won four Oscar nominations, but it only earned one of them.  The sound is fine, but not spectacular (the concert scenes in Nashville a year earlier did a much better job of giving you a sense of talking at a performance, and of framing the musical numbers), and the cinematography is a similar situation, needlessly glossy & framed in a way that stops it from being romantic or creative.  The nomination for Best Scoring makes sense given the sales on the soundtrack were insane (I'm surprised it didn't win), but with one exception, none of the songs are either any good or performed organically-unlike Gaga's A Star is Born (where Gaga as a songwriter wrote plausible hits), it's not clear why the public latched onto either John or Esther as performers...save for "Evergreen."  One of the most iconic numbers of Streisand's discography, the song becomes the love theme for the movie, and while the movie's romantic overtones are never believable, lost in a song "as soft as an easy chair" you'd be forgiven for assuming this is a classic (because "Evergreen" is).

OVP: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

Film: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

Stars: Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Kris Kristofferson, Harvey Keitel, Diane Ladd, Valerie Curtin, Jodie Foster

Director: Martin Scorsese

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Ellen Burstyn*, Supporting Actress-Diane Ladd, Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

Last week we talked a little bit about Kris Kristofferson's very successful early career in music, but during the 1970's you'd be forgiven for thinking of him as a movie star in the same breath as thinking of him as a country music titan.  Kristofferson's career in movies is unusual because two of his biggest films of that era are movies that, while he got top-billing, he was totally overshadowed in terms of press coverage (and eventual recognition) in favor of his female costars.  That's certainly the case for today's movie, which is a pretty major crossover into the Oscar Viewing Project, as I watch my final (to date) Ellen Burstyn Oscar-nominated performance, and the only movie Burstyn ever won an Academy Award for.  The movie also happens to be the first studio movie that Martin Scorsese (who, like Burstyn, is still working) ever made, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is something of a road trip film, at least in the first half, with Alice (Burstyn) a former singer who has recently been widowed by her neglectful husband, taking her son Tommy (Lutter) across the country.  She wants to go to Monterey, her childhood home, where she dreams of picking up her singing career again, but along the way things get messy for her.  First, she meets a younger man named Ben (Keitel), who seems charming, but is actually an abusive married man whom she ends up fleeing town with after he threatens Alice.  At that point, in Tuscon, she gives up (temporarily) on her dream of becoming a singer for the more realistic life of a waitress in Mel's Diner, a local, fast-paced watering hole, where she befriends the outspoken Flo (Ladd), and starts romancing a regular named David (Kristofferson).  But her relationship with David is complicated by her increasingly unruly son, and eventually things come to a head when David physically disciplines Tommy.  The movie ends with them moving past this, and forming an unlikely family, with Alice giving up on her dream of being a singer, but finding a different kind of happiness with David instead.

I'll be totally honest-the ending of the movie doesn't work.  The movie's naturalism is its key asset, and that assists in a lot of the performances, but not in the ending.  The only logical reasons that David & Alice end up together are that it makes a cleaner ending than her pursuing a dream the audience knows won't happen, and that Kris Kristofferson circa 1974 is so hot you kind of look past the obvious, toxic masculinity flaws.  But it's not earned.  It's also hard to totally look at this from a modern lens without realizing that there is something seriously wrong with Tommy, who is a truly spoiled brat, and one who exhibits a lot of the same cruel tendencies that his father also exhibited at the beginning of the picture, which is going to be a problem for Alice in the years that follow (writing children in the 1970's was a nightmare unless you cast Tatum O'Neal or Jodie Foster, the latter of whom has a small role in this).

But the acting is good.  Burstyn brings a naturalism to her Alice, a modern woman who doesn't understand that it's not her gender, but her age, that will hold her back with the dreams she gave up to start a family.  There's an interesting commentary there about how the women's liberation movement came too late for a lot of women who now had the opening to make their dreams come true, but not the time.  Coupled with Ladd, who is superb in a side role as Alice's rival-turned-friend where she continually steals scenes, it's a great pairing and proof that Scorsese is capable of getting strong performances from women when he tries.  Kristofferson doesn't have a lot to do here but look pretty and then bounce off of Burstyn's monologues (this is very much an actress showcase film), but he does that well.

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.

Saturdays with the Stars: Kris Kristofferson

Each month of 2023 we are taking a look at a star who made their name in westerns, rustling cattle & riding horses during the brief time when cowboys ruled Hollywood.  Last month, we talked about Sam Elliott, a character actor who managed to carry on the tradition of Ward Bond & Walter Brennan into the New Hollywood era.  This month, our final month of western stars, we're going to look at a first for us-someone arguably better known as a singer & songwriter than as an actor.  But this man did get a period as a leading man in Hollywood, playing opposite actresses like Ellen Burstyn, Barbra Streisand, & Ali MacGraw, some of the biggest names of the 1970's.  This month's star is Kris Kristofferson.

One of the few actors this year that actually came from the stereotypical west, Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas, an army brat who moved around frequently because of his father's work in the US Army Air Corps.  Kristofferson has one of the most unusual pre-acting careers of anyone we've done in our five years of Saturdays with the Stars.  He was a Rhodes Scholar, studying English literature at Oxford, and eventually joined the military, being stationed in West Germany during the 1960's.  Rather than become a professor at West Point, though, he went to Nashville (to the shame of his military family) and got into country music through the help of Johnny Cash (allegedly getting his attention by landing a helicopter in Cash's front yard, though Kristofferson & Cash both tell different versions of this story, so it's hard to tell fact from fiction).  Though while with the exception of "Why Me" his songs weren't really successes for him as a singer, Kristofferson wrote massive hits for a number of big stars of the era, including "Help Me Through the Night" (covered by everyone from Gladys Knight to Willie Nelson to, my favorite recording, Sammi Smith), "For the Good Times" (Ray Price), and "Loving Arms" (which he recorded with his second wife, Rita Coolidge).  No song, though, had the kind of shelf life that Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" would have when it was recorded shortly before the death of his then-girlfriend, Janis Joplin.  This would go on to become her most well-known song, and in my opinion, one of the best songs of the 1970's.

Kristofferson's movie career, despite taking a back seat to his music career, honestly was a pretty successful one.  He would achieve leading man status throughout the 1970's, culminating in the massively-successful but critically-maligned A Star is Born with Barbra Streisand (which I have never seen, and we will discuss in all of its messy glory).  Kristofferson would start his career in movies in westerns for Sam Peckinpah (we'll talk about one later this month), and then destroy his acting career with the film that forever killed the Hollywood western as a regularly-produced genre (and the movie that, maybe more than any other, I have been looking forward to seeing for the first time all year): the critically-debated, box office disaster known as Heaven's Gate.