Kris Kristofferson stars as Billy the Kid and James Coburn as Pat Garrett, Billy's old pal who is now a sheriff sent to bring Billy to justice. Which is a tough job. Bob Dylan also stars as Alias, a young drifter who joins with Billy and his men.
Some great flourishes, such as a quick shot of kids playing on a scaffold, swinging on the rope that Billy is to be hung from. When Billy is in custody a deputy is offended that he refuses to read the Bible and sing songs of Christ, so much so that the deputy kicks Billy out of his chair and holds a shotgun in his face until he says he repents. Great scene and it's the back cover of Bob Dylan's soundtrack album. After finding a pistol in the jail's outhouse, Billy shoots the deputies and makes a break for it. What's funny is that no one in the town tries to stop him. They see him as a hero.
The point of view is that Billy is a maverick outlaw, living truly free while Pat is a compromised man, owned by the rich landowners like Mr. Chisum of New Mexico who see Billy as a threat to their prosperity. But Pat wants to grow old and live a long life and has to make the hard choices to achieve that goal and if he has to track down his friend, he will.
Slim Pickens plays Sheriff Baker, a fellow lawman helping track down Billy, and gets one of the finest scenes in the film. Riding with Pat to question some known criminals in town the shooting starts immediately. Hit and critically wounded he makes his way towards a river to die in peace while "Knocking On Heaven's Door" plays in the background. He looks at his wife/deputy with sorrow and remorse as the sun begins to set. A magnificently understated scene.
As things play out to the inevitable conclusion, we get glimpses into Pat Garrett's singular methods of detection and police work, namely finding a saloon whore that he knows Billy is a regular for and having an orgy with her and three or four more girls. That was just how they did things back then.
Eventually Pat finds Billy hiding out on a ranch and ambushes him in the night. Since this is a Peckinpah film, it's highly stylized and not exactly keeping with recorded history. But that's why it's a film. The implied friendship between Pat & Billy is also considered not a fact but all the weight of the story comes from it. If they had changed the names of the characters and said this was outright fiction it'd be the same thing just without attention grabbing names attached.
As I've read up on the making of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid it sounds like one of the most intense sets ever. Final cut was taken away from Peckinpah and the film was not a great success. In 1988 Turner Entertainment released Peckinpah's director's cut which is what I assume I saw since this was recorded from TCM.
For Peckinpah's reputation as an action-only director, this film seemed like it had been directed by Robert Altman since the attention to peripheral characters was so great and the dialogue was just as biting and real to the era as it was in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
Great film. Proving once again that in the case of Westerns, I certainly fall on the revisionist/anti-Western and Spaghetti Western side.
Another good revisionist Western starring Lee Marvin as the title character and Jack Palance as his good friend and fellow longtime cowboy, Chet. It's a good little film about how the West was done. Monte comes to grips with the fact that he's getting a little long in the tooth for cattle rustling and in fact, the world might no longer have much need for his ilk anymore.
Chet retires from the cowboy life and marries a widower who owns a hardware store. But tragedy strikes when their friend Shorty robs the store and kills Chet in cold blood. Monte eventually finds Shorty and avenges Chet's death.
Monte aims to settle down with longtime lady-friend, French call girl Martine Bernard (Jeanne Moreau) only to find that she has died, succumbing to tuberculosis. The film ends with Monte realizing that his way of life is soon to be extinct.
Bittersweet and well done. There are some excellent scenes involving the cowhands living on the ranch, eating the cook's terrible food and how they try to get revenge on him and how he gives it right back to them. Lee Marvin is great as Monte, all hangdog eyes and trying to find hope in a changing world.
The pace: glacial. The outcome of the film: obvious if you have seen Seven Samurai. The Mexicans: all speak with Professional Actor accents. Which is the most distracting thing ever. When Eli Wallach plays a more believable Mexican than real Mexicans...that's not good. These guys sound like they just got done doing cameos on Bewitched or The Beverly Hillbillies.
Even better are the attempts to explain away Yul Brynner's Russian accent by claiming his character Chris is a Cajun (what?!). I guess the hard part about watching this was that I've seen Seven Samurai and while that tips the scales at 3 hours, The Magnificent Seven felt even longer somehow.
Again I know this heresy is really just a matter of taste and I am squarely not a fan of most traditional Westerns. And the fact that this film is 50 years old and was meant for a different standard of audience expectation.
The cast are quite good. Brynner is Brynner no matter what he does. Steve McQueen is great, if kept to the sides sometimes (because Bryner was also a producer on the film and didn't want to be overshadowed). Charles Bronson is good, if a little too flat as the dude who teaches the villagers how to fight and befriends the kids as a gentle giant. James Coburn does his thing. Brad Dexter is really great as Harry Luck who dies saving Chris. Robert Vaughn is great as Lee, the one member of the seven who suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and wrestles with his feelings that he is a coward.
And then we have Horst Buchholz taking us back to Outrageous Accent Landia again as his German accent doesn't really work for a character named "Chico". And he's not a very good actor either. They might as well have gone for it and got Sal Mineo if they wanted him.
Now this is more like it. The fourth and final film in the "Magnificent Seven..." franchise has little in common with its progenitor other than the character of "Chris" this time played by the great Lee Van Cleef must collect six other dudes to help a town in danger.
This is a different animal for sure and more to my liking than the original. With Van Cleef in the lead it's more like a Spaghetti Western crossed with The Dirty Dozen.
At this stage in the Magnificent Seven Mythos, Chris is now a Sheriff of a town and married. But not for long. Asked to help rid another town of a bad hombre named Juan De Toro (played by a dude named Ron Stein of course). Along the way his wife is brutally murdered so Chris decides to enlist five convicts and the journalist who has been following him around writing his life's story to defeat De Toro. Playing some of the seven are Young Gary Busey, Ed Lauter, and Luke Askew, the hitchhiker from the hippie commune in Easy Rider.
In the town, De Toro has killed nearly all of the men, simple farmers who couldn't defend themselves. Only the women are left. Upon arriving, Chris makes the unique decision that each one of his men should take on three women to defend. And stuff. To cheer him up over his wife's death, Chris takes the hottest of the widows, Laurie, played by Stefanie Powers, for himself. The old dog. Long story short, obviously they kill De Toro and his men and save the day. And Chris runs off with Laurie, even though his wife was only raped and murdered days ago. That's just how they did things in those days.
It's all a bit more violent and haphazard than the original ...Seven but that's not a bad thing. Definitely flawed but in a charming way. It stands in stark contrast to the overly polished original film.
Now this is more like it. A straight up Spaghetti Western that is epic and over the top. Lee Van Cleef stars as the ruthless gunslinger and anti-hero Sabata who comes to a small town that is being clandestinely sold out by it's ruling elite. He teams up with fat drunken Civil War vet Carrincha (Pedro Sanchez) and his acrobat (!) friend Alley Cat. Sabata also receives help from the shady Banjo, a man he knows from the past who is living in town making a living as a musician but is really a gunslinger for hire. Pulling the stings is Stengel, the blonde and effeminate mastermind behind the plot to rob the town.
That's the bare bones of the story but there are a lot of double crosses to be had as well as a lot of memorable set pieces. As soon as you see some dudes tumbling and leaping 30 feet in the air you know you have left reality and are now firmly in the land of Spaghetti Western. And there are lots of disguised guns and weapons. The great things about Spaghetti Westerns are how over the top they go. They just go for broke.
It's cool to see Van Cleef play the Clint Eastwood-type lead role and he does it with great style. But you knew that already, right? Lee Van Cleef is the patron saint of Spaghetti Westerns. His angular face, squinting beady eyes, and take no shit attitude were made for the screen.
Sabata director Gianfranco Parolini had begun work on a new film about another gunslinger named Indio Black, played by Yul Brynner, but during that time Sabata had become a great success. So they just changed a few lines of dialogue and they instantly had a sequel to Sabata ready to go. The only difference being who was playing Sabata.
This time Sabata comes to a town in Mexico while it is under the rule of Maximilian I of Austria. Pedro Sanchez is back as the fat loudmouth sidekick character. Instead of Alley Cat doing leaps and bounds, we have a dude who uses a hacky-sack-like ball that he kicks with such force that he can take people out with it. I'm not kidding.
Sabata and crew are hired to steal Austrian Colonel Skimmel's gold and free the town from Austrian rule. Lots of plot twist ensue and hidden or disguised weapons are used. Very similar to the plot of Sabata but that's not a bad thing. Brynner is actually quite good in this. His monotone voice works in his favor as he's supposed to be mysterious and hard for his opponents to get a read on.
So that's it for now. I've never been much of a Western fan but all of these films had their moments. I'm certainly more of a fan of the Spaghetti and 70's Anti-Westerns and that probably has more to do with my age (32) since Westerns were pretty much dead when I was young. THE WEST was nothing reverent to me as it would have been to other generations so take all opinions here with a grain of salt pardner and don't take no wooden nickels neither.
All of this said, I would LOVE to see a Magnificent Seven film done by Robert Rodriguez where it's seven Mexican gunslingers coming to the aid of a Texas or Arizona town over-run by opportunistic and racist white men. It writes itself. Obviously Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin would be in it. Maybe Tommy Chong could be the wisecracking comedy sidekick. Throw Antonio Banderas in too, even though he's actually a Spanyard. He was great in Desperado.
I was going to try and watch The Wild Bunch and Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia too, but that'd set things back by another two weeks at least. I'll save those for a Warren Oates Fest and pair it all up with Cockfighter and Dilinger.
