LeonLouisRicci
Western Movie Fans are not Likely to be Disappointed in this Rowdy Shoot em' Up from 1930. It is a Big Production all around and there is Plenty of Gunplay and Wide Open Spaces, a Large and Scruffy Cast, and a Substantial Running Time.Holding it Back from Greatness are some Stiff Dialog Scenes and a Meandering Script Peppered with Down Home Humor and an Awkward Love Story. But there are Dozens of Deaths by Gunpowder and there are a Few Striking Set Pieces. Billy and the Gang Hold Up and Surrounded in a Cabin, Billy's Capture and Escape from the Lincoln County Jail, and a Cave Dwelling, Starving Billy the Kid forced into the Open by a Pan of Frying Bacon, Among Others.Overall it is a Rip Roaring Western that Helped Johnny Mack Brown stay a Star and it also didn't Hurt Wallace Berry's Career as He Plays a Rather Subdued Pat Garrett.
Ron Oliver
British homesteaders in Lincoln County, New Mexico, find that their best protection against the local murderous sheriff is a shy young cowboy called BILLY THE KID.Director King Vidor produced for MGM one of the first epic talkie Westerns, with plenty of action and violence and frequent musical forays to explore the new medium of sound. The acting is good and the authentic outdoor locations are expansive & eye-catching.In one of his best roles, Johnny Mack Brown portrays Billy as a quiet, dependable fellow, deadly with a gun but reluctant to boast or brag, attractive to the ladies and a determined seeker for justice over evil. Everything one could want in a Cowboy Hero. He's also just a little bit dull. This allows Wallace Beery, as Billy's friendly nemesis Pat Garrett, to steal the film, using his doughy face and shapeless body to great effect. Beery was right on the edge of becoming a major movie star and it was roles like this that would push him over the edge.Lovely Kay Johnson is on hand as the wife of unfortunate Russell Simpson, one of the men Billy initially defends, but the demands of her role are few and she gets to do little besides look worried. Silent comic star Karl Dane & champion stutterer Roscoe Ates portray friends of Simpson & Billy, and they are both welcome additions to the film. Dane, however, is given very little screen time, his thick accent obviously a problem for MGM.Silent screen cowboy William S. Hart acted as creative consultant on the film, but his only contribution seems to have been the loan to Johnny Mack Brown of a pistol which had once belonged to Billy.BILLY THE KID was originally filmed in the 70 mm widescreen Realife process (no copies are known to remain) with two very different endings - one for American theaters in which Billy eludes capture and one in which he is shot dead, for European audiences.***********************************In the film's written prologue, New Mexico's Governor R. C. Dillon admits to the movie's ‘liberties' with the truth. Indeed, there are few true facts in the film. Most radically altered is the character of Billy himself, who in reality seems to have been a particularly loathsome human specimen, unsavory & disagreeable in almost every way. But early in production MGM's Irving Thalberg realized the studio would have a hard time promoting a film about a disgusting murderer and he ordered a radical rewrite on Billy's biography, turning him into a pleasant, noble hombre. Good entertainment, bad history.There are a lot of ambiguities about Billy. We know he was born in New York City on 23 November, but both 1859 & 1860 have been cited for the year. We don't even know the guy's real name. Was it William H. Bonney, Jr., or Henry McCarty? (For awhile he muddied the waters further by calling himself Kid Antrim.) Billy's family had moved West, and after the death of his father Billy had travelled with his mother's new husband to the territory of New Mexico, ending up at Silver City in 1873.We may never know what toxic mixture of heredity & environment stained Billy's soul, but we do know that he became a hellion young. He claimed to have committed his first murder at the age of 12 - he would kill at least 27 men during his lifetime. Billy became involved in an outlaw gang that created havoc on both sides of the Mexican border, with robbery, murder & cattle rustling all part of the routine. At the end of the decade, Billy became a gun for hire in the so-called Lincoln County War, that particularly nasty confrontation between cattlemen, townsfolk & corrupt law officers.Billy ran a gang that killed a sheriff and a deputy, for which he was arrested by Pat Garrett in December of 1880. Billy was sentenced to hang, but during a daring escape on 28 April 1881, Billy murdered two more deputies before hightailing it out of town. After weeks on his trail, Garrett finally tracked Billy to a ranch house near Fort Sumner, N.M. and on 14 July Garrett killed him there. The punk was dead, but the legend was born.Patrick Floyd Garrett (born 5 June 1850) had been a cowboy & buffalo hunter in his youth and moved to Lincoln County in 1879, where he became deputy and then sheriff. After he killed Billy, Garrett became a rancher near Roswell, N.M. from 1882 until 1896. Returning to law enforcement, he became first the deputy and then the sheriff of Dona Ana County from 1896 until 1902. He was the collector of customs in El Paso, Texas from 1902-1906. Garrett then bought a horse ranch near Las Cruces, N.M., but a violent dispute over a lease left him gunned down in the road on 29 February 1908. A fellow named Wayne Brazel claimed Garrett drew on him first, a witness agreed it was self defense, and Brazel was let go. Garrett was 57 years old. It was a nasty way to die for the man who got Billy the Kid.
rduchmann
King Vidor's 1930 adaptation of Walter Noble Burns' SAGA OF BILLY THE KID plays fairly fast and loose with the facts. Johnny Mack Brown, even in 1930, was a bit old for the lead, and Wallace Beery considerably too old for Pat Garrett. The romance between Kay Johnson's character and Billy is unknown to history, and the ending is a jaw-dropper as well.Against this, though, the film looks *terrific*, almost as if previously unknown contemporary documentary footage of the Lincoln County War had suddenly been found in some New Mexican attic. The sets are realistic, and realistically grubby, and the supporting cast are absolutely the scruffiest, most realistic-looking set of pre-Peckinpah westerners you'll ever see anywhere. (I think there may be more bald heads than average for the old west, but who knows? Those guys always kept their hats on.)Turner Classic Movies dusts this one off every few years (it's scheduled for 6/15/2000), and despite every justified quibble about the casting and the script, it is worth watching just to correct the visual impression you may have received from all the slicker and glossier versions of this story made since 1930.
