By Theresa Rodewald.
An unflinching depiction of the dying West and the violence inherent to the frontier….”
Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) is a film shaped and defined by its past. Shot more than 50 years ago, its production was infamously fraught. Director Sam Peckinpah and James Aubrey, then president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, continuously fought over everything – from budget to schedule. Scenes that Aubrey considered unnecessary were secretly shot during weekends and lunch hours; technical problems, an influenza outbreak and Peckinpah’s alcoholism added strain on an already troubled production.
Studio Interference and a Box Office Flop
Eventually, Peckinpah and editor Roger Spottiswoode cut the footage first to 165 minutes and later to a 121 minute preview cut. James Aubrey and MGM were still unhappy with the result and forced Peckinpah out of the production. The studio-supervised theatrical cut ran for a truncated 106 minutes, was disowned by cast and crew and flopped at the box office.
It’s a story as old as the movies (and even older): directorial vision vs. studio calculation, art vs. commerce. In the case of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the story is made all the more compelling by the fact that the 1988 release of Peckinpah’s original preview cut paved the way for rediscovery and reappraisal. And with this reappraisal, the film slowly garnered a new following. Today, it is hailed as a modern classic – revered for its unflinching depiction of the dying West and the violence inherent to the frontier; the last film in Peckinpah’s revisionist Western trilogy that began with Ride the High Country (1962) and was followed by The Wild Bunch (1969). Peckinpah, however, never experienced the transformation from flop to master piece. He died in 1984 – only four years before the release of his preview cut.
Editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid meanwhile has taken on a busy afterlife. The film has been re-released and re-edited in an effort to get as close to Peckinpah’s artistic vision as possible. The result is confusing: there is the theatrical cut, Peckinpah’s preview version, a 2005 special edition that combines elements of the two and a television cut.
Now, Criterion has released what might be a definitive box set (at least for now). It includes – among other things – a restoration of the theatrical release, Peckinpah’s preview cut and a 50th anniversary release with additional scenes that was supervised by the film’s editor Roger Spottiswoode and Peckinpah expert Paul Seydor.
50th Anniversary Release vs. Preview Cut
Prologue
There are some interesting differences between the preview cut and the 50th anniversary release that Roger Spottiswoode explained at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna this summer.
First of all, the 50th anniversary release opens with a prologue which intercuts the sepia-tinged assassination of Pat Garrett at the hands of the Santa Fe Ring with Billy the Kid and his gang shooting chickens. It’s as though Billy’s bullets travel through time to shoot the man who once killed him; his former friend, accomplice and nemesis. The prologue changes the structure of the film completely: the death of Pat Garrett becomes the present, turning the rest of the film into one long flashback – as if Pat Garrett’s life flashes before his eyes as he is about to die.
The prologue also establishes one of the film’s major themes: fate. “Everyone is going to end up a piece of history here,” says Roger Spottiswoode. This is a film about the inevitability of time, about aging and about friendship in past tense. Here, the West is not glorious, it is bloody, fuelled by greed and inherently unjust. Pat’s hunt for Billy is not an act of justice but of selfishness. A desperate attempt to adapt and stay relevant.
Bath Scene
The 50th anniversary release also removed a scene that Spottiswoode refers to as „that weird sex scene.” Here, Pat Garrett takes a bath with a couple of sex workers. „That was Sam’s worst side, his chaotic sexuality, coming out,” says Spottiswoode. „There are almost not women in the film, but women built the west while the men were off fighting. So, portraying them as sex objects was beneath him [Peckinpah].”
It is indeed an odd scene that clashes tonally with the rest of the film. Like many of Peckinpah’s Westerns and war films, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid revolves around the unspoken, unacknowledged and therefore devastating affection between men. The need for an intermediate, a reason for closeness or preoccupation with each other runs through the film and makes the bath scene read like a strained effort to establish heterosexuality and masculine sexual prowess – it is not only sexist but superfluous.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
A scene that still proves contentious is the death of Sheriff Baker and the use of Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” The preview cut had the lyrics of the song removed, the 50th anniversary release puts them back in. According to a note by Peckinpah, he did toy with the idea of adding lyrics to the scene. Editor Roger Spottiswoode still thinks that the Sheriff’s death would be more powerful without them: “The lyrics are a bit on the nose. Also, the whole film is covered with Dylan now which it didn’t use to be.” And it’s true, Bob Dylan’s soundtrack and his role as the character Alias have indeed taken on a life of their own.
Luckily, the Criterion boxset includes both versions of the scene – and this is what makes it so interesting, not just for Peckinpah completists. Watching the different cuts and the different scenes is like a lecture on the power of editing. The subtle (and not so subtle) shifts in tone, meaning and flow are brought to the fore – like a conversation between the film and its audience. A conversation that is ongoing, even more than 50 years after the first foiled release of the film. Times are a-changing and within this change lies the possibility of re-discovery, re-assessment and re-acknowledgement.
Theresa Rodewald, MA, studied Cinema Studies at Stockholm University in Sweden and Cultural Studies in Germany and Ireland. She writes for a number of independent film magazines, including L-MAG and Berliner Filmfestivals, and has written about critiques of capitalism in current gangster films, images of masculinity in Scarface (1932) and the representation of queer women in mainstream cinema. She is a contributor to David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press).