Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
This week the From Below Microcinema presents *Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid *(1973) on Thursday, October 10, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
In honor of the passing of Kris Kristofferson–one of our great songwriters, and one of the best craggy-faced actors of his generation– we are dipping our toes into both the western genre and Sam Peckinpah’s oeuvre for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Perhaps most memorable for the soundtrack provided by Bob Dylan, who also appears as an actor in the film, Pat Garrett was one of many Peckinpah films that was left extremely mutilated by the studio system. That soundtrack is one such example; the filmmaking team intended for Bob Dylan to score the film with instrumental versions of the songs, which were then replace by the studio with the songs that had vocals added. Peckinpah, an irascible, ornery auteur if there ever was one, certainly didn’t take too kindly to his films being messed with, even if he equally certainly didn’t make them easy to make, either. It took several years after the initial release, which bombed, before a version closer to the intended film came to light and the critical tide turned towards Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid*.*
The film as we can now view it is a bleak masterpiece of anti-western genre conventions. Thoroughly undoing the mythopoetic hero narratives that the US nation holds dear, it follows several years in the life of the titular characters as they move from friendship to antagonism, as Garrett is tasked with the capture and assassination of Billy the Kid. In doing so, it portrays an American landscape as more desolate and cruel than basically any film I can think of: an incredible way to pay homage to a man with his own complex, antithetical relationship to the American project.