PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID
US, 1973,104 minutes, Colour.
James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Richard Jaeckel.
Directed by Sam Peckinpah.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid comes after a long series of Peckinpah westerns. Unfortunately (as with Major Dundee) the studios cut over a quarter of an hour from the film. However, the resulting film is still very interesting. Peckinpah's westerns include - Ride the High Country; Major Dundee; The Wild Bunch; the Ballad of Cable Hogue; and the modern westerns - Junior Bonner; The Getaway; Straw Dogs.
The present film takes legend and explores the legend and the west it represents, especially a violent and lawless west. The style of the film is ballad-like. Bob Dylan's music fits into this pattern. James Coburn gives a good performance as Pat Garrett and Kris Kristofferson gives his easy-going film personality to Billy the Kid. The film centres on death and is quite fatalistic. This gives foreboding to Billy the Kid's death. Robert Taylor, Paul Newman and others have played Billy the Kid.
1. How did the title correspond to the central interest of the film? Was this an anti-western?
2. Comment on the use of birds and children in the film. Were they symbolic of the themes of the film?
3. Has the structure of the film effective - the meeting at the beginning and end and the chase?
4. How did Peckinpah explore the themes of law, order, frontier life and styles, violence, death, the fatalism of the cowboys, land and land-ownership?
5. Pat and Billy - the nature of their friendship, bonds of the past, experiences shared? Pat said that times were changing and they would have to change. How important was this theme? Why did Pat change and not Billy?
6. The impression of violence at the beginning of the film and the desperate nature of Pat chasing Billy? The deaths?
7. Billy - as a person, an outlaw, a killer, a typical man of the west in the 1880s? Did he have charm, was he likeable? His love for the Mexicans and horror at their death - decision to return? Realisation he would be shot? Billy in prison, being persecuted by his religious keeper? His friendship with Bell but shooting him? His escape - the people seemed to be sympathetic in some way, was the audience?
8. Why did Pat Garrett pursue Billy so relentlessly? Was it his job, convictions?
9. Mc Kinney as Garrett's deputy? What hold did Garrett have over Mc Kinney? Why did he help him in pursuing Billy?
10. Garrett - his attitudes to law and order, relationship to his friends, other cowboys, toughness, typical man of the west? Was he admirable?
11. Was Alias an important character in the film? what was his significance, his name? why was he fascinated by Billy? Why did he join him?
12. The nature of Billy's associates - typical western gunfighters? What values did they have?
13. The themes of the west - as a bleak picture, as the basis of modern America? The themes of betrayal, friendship, bleakness - do these give further insight into the nature of Americans?
14. How typical a Peckinpah film was this - use of colour, violence, music, artistic presentation? Has it entertaining? e.g. prologue, shooting competition, birds in the mounds, cock-fights, boy throwing rocks at Garrett; the old man, shot, dying fatalistically but with dignity?
