Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid - Written by Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop, Walker), Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid’s not your typical story of good versus evil, Rather, it’s the tale of friends destroyed by circumstance and the US legal system. Like all Sam Peckinpah’s westerns, PGABTK mourns the passing of the old ways but since it takes place in the 1880s, it proves that the golden days William Holden and Co. reminisce about in The Wild Bunch were just as hard, corrupt and without honour. Kris Kristofferson is excellent, if a little old, as Billy, the most wanted man in New Mexico. James Coburn, at the top of his game, plays The Kid’s former best friend Pat Garrett. When Garrett rides into Billy’s Fort Sumter stronghold, it’s to tell his ex-ally that, in five days, it will be his job to bring The Kid to justice. With the time up, Garrett ambushes The Kid’s bunkhouse hideout and throws him in Lincoln Jail, from which Billy escapes. While The Kid spends the film looking for freedom, the world-weary Pat reluctantly gives chase, killing most of Billy’s gang before returning to Fort Sumter where he does what the law demands he must do. A film whose power exists in its moments - Garrett blasting a hole in a mirror, the savage bunkhouse shootout, the Kid’s flight from Lincoln - PGABTK’s at its most moving when Pat’s deputy Slim Pickens bites the bullet. Wounded by one of Billy’s lieutenants, Pickens hobbles over to the banks of the Rio Bravo, looks one last time at his wife and then stares deep into the dying world. A million miles from his savage, visceral Wild Bunch, it’s this air of poetic melancholy that makes Pat Garrett Sam Peckinpah’s most devastating pictures.
High Plains Drifter - Written as a straightforward revenge drama, Clint Eastwood’s first western as director is nothing of the kind - something which becomes apparent the moment Clint’s Stranger rides from out of nowhere into Lago, a cursed town that whipped its sheriff to death. Although he borrows Don Siegel's cinematographer and lifts certain themes from Sergio Leone’s themes, Eastwood has more on his mind than homage. In Clint’s hands, the Stranger isn’t a crusader - in the script, he was the late sheriff’s brother - but the Devil himself. Once he is through literally painting the town red and rechristening it ‘Hell’, he wipes out the guilty men and rides off into thin air, leaving Lago and the genre changed forever.
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