Monday Movie: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, by Rudie Obias

Every Monday, we’ll highlight a piece of writing from our vaults. This review of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid originally ran as a home video review.

Director Sam Peckinpah is mostly known for two things: Making a lot of westerns, like The Deadly Companions, Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, and The Wild Bunch; and injecting a lot of bloody violence in his films, like Straw Dogs, The Getaway and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Peckinpah was a master filmmaker who influenced other master filmmakers, like Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, and John Woo.

For the longest time, Straw Dogs was the only one of his films in the Criterion Collection (however, you could argue more Sam Peckinpah films could be added), but now there’s another, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid — and in true Criterion Collection fashion, you get a lot of “more bang for the buck” with this release.

Written by Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop, Walker) and directed by Peckinpah, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid follows lawman Pat Garrett, played by James Coburn (The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven), who is tasked to capture outlaw Billy the Kid, played by Kris Kristofferson (A Star Is Born, Blade), by order of Governor Wallace, played by Jason Robards (Once Upon a Time in the West, Magnolia). However, before Pat Garrett became a sheriff, he was good friends with Billy the Kid — who later recruits Alias, played by Bob Dylan (Don’t Look Back), a knife-wielding stranger to help him to evade the law. The film explores themes of friendship and duty in the old west.