Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid (Turner Preview Classic Version 1988) xvid/ac3 avi

This is NOT Paul Seydor's 2005 cut, which runs 106 minutes and excises a number of scenes, shortens many others, and rearranges the chronology at certain points. This 1988 Turner Preview Cut runs 121 minutes; reassembled after the director's death, it is the closest approximation we have of Peckinpah's original vision. Mike Sutton @ thedigitalfix: Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is some kind of miracle. Directed in a chaotic frenzy by an out-of-control drunk, hacked to pieces by MGM, restored in 1988 and now restored again, it somehow survives everything that time, the critics, well meaning fans and the money men can throw at it. Derided or ignored on first release, it has gradually been revealed as a film which defies categorisation but is, without doubt, some kind of masterpiece. The problem is that it’s not like any other kind of masterpiece because it is fundamentally incomplete. We don’t possess it in the form which the director intended – and neither the 1988 Turner Preview version nor the new 2005 cut have any kind of absolute authority, although as you will see below I have very strong views about which is better. Even taking into account the circumstances of its production and distribution, its ragged and a little incoherent. Indeed, the word masterpiece is perhaps misplaced – but I can’t think of any other way to describe a film which is so gloriously, completely alive in every possible way. It gives us so much of its director’s vision – and it always did, even in the mutilated MGM version – that it remains as fundamental to the Peckinpah canon as The Wild Bunch and at its considerable best, it has things which are better than anything else he ever produced. It’s also wildly, madly, strangely beautiful in a way which is almost impossible to pin down. The film is unusual for Peckinpah in that it deals with real-life historical figures – Garrett, Henry McCarty AKA William Bonney AKA Billy The Kid, Lew Wallace, Chisum – but it does so with a characteristic combination of myth-making and debunking, a kind of check-and-balance which sees Peckinpah build up legends and knock them down in a single scene. Billy The Kid and Pat Garrett got to know each other in 1878-79 when Garrett was a bartender in Lincoln County. How close they were is a moot point but they clearly found each other congenial. However, when Garrett became Sheriff in 1880, he was required by his electors to hunt down cattle rustlers and he put together a posse to capture the Kid. The film follows this, give or take some discrepancy with dates, and shows how Garrett was required to hunt Billy down in order to satisfy the requirements for social order laid down by the New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace and the interests of bankers and cattle barons. The film begins with a flash-forward to Garrett’s death at the hands of his creditors who objected to his demands about goats grazing on his land and ends with the killing of Billy in July 1881. Essentially, the movie is about a friendship destroyed, one which we first see in its dying stages, and which haunts the entire story. In this sense, it’s reminiscent of The Wild Bunch and its central relationship between Pike Bishop and Deke Thornton. Pat and Billy are reunited at the beginning of the film in New Mexico but it’s a meeting which is more reminiscent of an impending divorce than a celebration of friendship. They reminisce a little about the old times but the prevailing tone is one of mutual suspicion. Pat, knowing that he is about to become Sheriff of Lincoln County, asks Billy to leave for Mexico –he doesn’t want to have kill his old friend but the reasons are not purely altruistic. Billy represents Pat’s past, his younger self that has been abandoned, and killing Billy will be a kind of spiritual suicide. In a sense, it could be argued that the two men are basically one soul which has been separated – Billy representing freedom, Pat the demands of commitment and domesticity – and this reading is encouraged by the ending of the film where Pat shoots his own reflection shortly after killing the Kid. But it’s a very simplistic psychological reading and one which I’m ambivalent about. Friendship is something far more psychologically complex and while two men can clearly complement each other, the division isn’t nearly so simple. Garrett, despite working for the politicians and landowners he despises, remains a maverick right up to the point where he allows Billy to finish his lovemaking before killing him and continues to be a thorn in the side of an establishment which (as the opening sequence demonstrates) has to have him killed. It could even be argued that Garrett is a far more daring man than Billy simply because he tries to live his own life within a framework which encourages conformity. He has responsibilities – Billy simply has his freedom and his friends. James Coburn’s Garrett is a glorious creation, one of the finest performances in American cinema. He embodies a spirit which has had to accommodate something which Billy has never had to consider – the failures and compromises of age and experience – and which is bucking against the chains which society wants to place on him. His life is a disappointment but what life isn’t when compared to the dreams of youth? But Garrett isn’t mellow or accepting. He may say that “this country is getting old and I aim to get old with it” but he’s still going into his middle age kicking and screaming. There’s a wonderful moment when he goes home, back to his loveless marriage and sterile domesticity, and pushes open the gate in readiness for his own personal hell – a motion which is later repeated shortly before he kills the Kid. Coburn’s delivery changes as the film goes on, his openness at the beginning gradually constricting into a combination of sarcastic aside and spit. This is particularly well demonstrated in the key scene where he goes to meet the Governor of New Mexico, Lew Wallace (Robards), and makes short work of some bankers who try to bribe him to kill the Kid. Right at the start of the film, before he dies, the voice has become so tight and whisky-sodden that you can barely hear what he’s saying. Coburn dominates the film but that’s not to say that it’s a one-man show. Kris Kristofferson has never been so sheerly likeable as he is in this film. His Billy The Kid is a tough, cheating, shoot-em-in-the-back bastard but also courageous, funny and resourceful. He acknowledges that the Kid was fucked-up but he doesn’t try to psychoanalyse him into a frontier juvenile delinquent. Surrounding the central duo is a quite astonishing cast of familiar Western faces where the omissions are easier to enumerate than the inclusions. I don’t mean the big stars – you wouldn’t find John Wayne going within a million miles of a Peckinpah movie, particularly not one as left-wing as this – but the character players who filled up a thousand Hollywood oaters over the past forty years. Some of them are familiar Peckinpah faces – L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong, Emilio Fernandez – while others come from an older tradition – Chill Wills, Barry Sullivan, Jack Elam, Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, Elisha Cook, Paul Fix, Dub Taylor. This is entirely appropriate because the elegiac quality of the film comes partly from its status as one of the last major Hollywood westerns, albeit one which was then destroyed by the studio which made it. It’s the ending of a whole tradition, presented both with love for the old ways and a determination to find new things to say and new ways of saying them. Essentially this is what the studio system always hated, it’s an politically subversive genre film. In Peckinpah’s films, the prevailing political tone tends to be left-liberal. You can take away from that Straw Dogs where his macho bullshit gets the better of him, but generally speaking Peckinpah is on the side of society’s rejects – the outlaws, the refugees, the poor, the oppressed. Sometimes this is relatively subtle but more often it’s as schematic as the very basic opposition between truck drivers and police in Convoy. Peckinpah tends to have an instinctive distrust of authority and particularly moneyed authority; his social analysis is basically anti-capitalist. Time and again, the real villains in his work are landowners, bankers and politicians; anyone who is able to use money and property to get what they want at the expense of others. Government is usually corrupt, local government particularly so. Pat’s becoming Sheriff isn’t only a betrayal of his own principles, it’s an acceptance of the necessity and inevitability of corruption – his small triumph is that he still manages to find his own way of preserving what he sees as his honour. Meanwhile, of course, the West is irrevocably changing as it always does in Peckinpah’s work. The film is set earlier than his previous two Westerns but even in the 1880s, civilisation was overtaking the West and the money men were busy carving it up into fenced-off divisions. It’s still possible to think of Mexico as the idyllic paradise which The Wild Bunch so comprehensively debunked but the possibilities for ever getting there are rapidly being closed off. The West portrayed in Pat Garrett is brutal and dirty and all sense of romanticism has been shrugged off. We don’t need the lengthy massacres of the earlier film to tell us this – the early scene when the youngest of Billy’s gang is riven with bullets is enough to slam the point home. Peckinpah, in this farewell to the genre, seems to have completely despaired of a world where loyalty and friendship are becoming impossible and money and power are what gives meaning to life. Life is cheap, with even Billy’s life worth a mere $1,000 to the bankers who find him so troublesome, and short and nasty. Endemic political corruption is already breaking the country apart as the scene with Wallace and the Santa Fe ring makes clear – and this was particularly relevant in 1973. The darkness of the world of this film is reflected in John Coquillon’s rich, moody cinematography, far different from the look which Lucien Ballard gave to The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah went through hell making this film and encountered a multitude of problems, some of them not his own responsibility. The Durango shoot was riddled with illness and MGM were aghast at the dailies and putting pressure on the producer to rein Sam in. However, his drinking was becoming a major problem by this point in his career, causing the film to go over schedule and wildly over budget. Had he behaved more responsibly, it’s conceivable (perhaps) that the outcome of his battles with MGM might have been more positive. But what MGM ultimately did in taking the film away from him merely confirmed Peckinpah’s own view of himself as the misunderstood artist at the mercy of uncomprehending philistines. They simply played into his hands – and this was unfortunate because it no doubt prevented any serious self-examination on Peckinpah’s part. You can see the film as a parable about the role of the director within Hollywood, at the mercy of the men who hold the purse strings. Forced to disclaim everything they believe in, turn on and reject their friends, the artist-professionals are eventually destroyed by all the compromises they are forced to make. The only positive result of the battles on this film is that it led directly to Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, one of the great fables about the maverick artist operating within an essentially corrupt system. Yet the real miracle is that despite all the troubles, the film is packed with unbelievably gorgeous things. There’s the editing of the opening, where a chicken shoot is cross-cut with Garrett’s own death as Billy seems to jump through time and shoot his one-time friend many years after his own death; the death of Slim Pickens as he goes down to the river to meet his fate and shares a look with his lover Katy Jurado as he gradually slips into the void; Garrett sitting and waiting for Billy to finish his lovemaking before he dies; Jason Robards as Lew Wallace musing about the melancholy Mexican evenings; the scene where Garrett and a boat pilot shooting at a bottle on the river. Then you’ve got the witty, literate and poetic script, the rich, dark cinematography and Bob Dylan’s lovely music score, the later proving particularly crucial during the final confrontation. The film is clearly flawed and some of the subplots - notably the one with Paco the Mexican played by a miscast Emilio Fernandez – are a little redundant but it’s full of marvellous moments which cohere because there’s a strong overarching vision in the film which reaches beyond the production and studio problems. ...

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ch00bar (2015-04-14)

Hi, could someone reseed this for me? thx for the share