3 Versions of "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" Reveal a Masterpiece in Crisis

Reviewing Criterion's recent release of Sam Peckinpah's tortured classic

I was driving to Barnes & Noble on a Friday afternoon to pick up a copy of Criterion’s new Blu-ray release of Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid when I heard the news of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I watched the film for the first time later that night, and it inevitably colored my experience of a film that is about many things, but is perhaps above all else about the intersecting ideas of ‘America’ and ‘Violence.’ There is a shot early on that stopped me right in my tracks. As Bob the Deputy steps out of a saloon, he looks up and smiles. Cut to a vast, wide shot of a brilliant blue sky, where an American flag flutters in the breeze to the left, and a group of children play on the gallows erected to kill Billy the Kid on the right, using the noose as a swing. It is one of the most loaded, powerful imagistic statements about America as I have ever seen on screen.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a film I’ve always wanted to see, especially as a lifelong Bob Dylan fan who has heard the soundtrack several times and adores “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” But for whatever reason, including the controversy and confusion over the film’s many edits and the lack of an easily accessible, universally recommended release, I never got around to it. Criterion’s new set, available in both 4K and standard Blu-ray versions, finally provides that easy access point, collecting three separate cuts in one place: The 1973 Theatrical version, cut down to 106 minutes after Peckinpah walked away from the film in frustration over studio demands; the Final Preview cut, running 122 minutes, the last edit Peckinpah himself completed before abandoning the film; and the new 50^th Anniversary version, running 117 minutes, which attempts to strike a balance between them (whether it is successful at that is another matter).

“I hope he gets away.”

“Well, he won’t. There’s too much play in him.”

“And not enough in you.”

To properly introduce myself to the film, I decided to watch all three versions in full. There are multiple ways one could do this, of course, including going in the order they were created: Peckinpah’s Final Preview, the studio’s subsequent Theatrical Cut, and then the 50^th Anniversary edition. I instead elected to go in the order the cuts were made available to the public: first the Theatrical edit, then Peckinpah’s preview (a different version of which was responsible for the film’s critical re-evaluation in the 1980s), and finally the 50^thAnniversary cut created for this set. This is definitely the order I recommend; it allows one to start from the skeleton of the film that made it to theaters, then re-experience it with all the meat returned to its bones, before finishing with the contemporary attempt to wrestle the existing material into a ‘finished’ product.

The 1973 Theatrical cut runs 106 minutes, a full 16 minutes shorter than Peckinpah’s Final Preview (more, actually, when you consider the Theatrical version has end credits while Peckinpah’s edit does not). Given this substantial difference and the Theatrical cut’s extremely negative reputation, I expected to get something interesting but obviously compromised for my first experience with the film. And yet, even in its supposedly ‘butchered’ form, I would passionately argue that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is still comfortably a great movie. Maybe even one of the great movies. It is full of indelible imagery, arresting moments, and brilliantly constructed sequences that constantly took my breath away. It is a quiet movie of simmering rage and resentment, an elegiac story about two men marching towards death on opposite sides of an arbitrary line drawn by those in power in the name of creating this thing we call ‘America.’ The film is a blistering indictment of almost every idea it comes into contact with, and it ends without absolution or catharsis. Violence keeps begetting violence, and then it’s over, bloody bricks paving over a lawless land of greed and power in the name of this illusion known as ‘society.’ It is awash in self-loathing, but also playful humor and very real human pathos. And it has the one and only Bob Dylan cooing atop it all on the soundtrack, while also appearing as the film’s most mysterious, entertaining, and perhaps even mythical character. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is one of the two or three greatest songs ever written for an American movie, and its use here, over the death of Slim Pickens’ character, is on the shortlist of all-time great movie moments. 

In short, Peckinpah’s film is a remarkable achievement even in this truncated form. It reminds me a lot of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, in that you can tell this version of the movie isn’t the fully, perfectly articulated form of itself – there are gaps, to be sure – but the pieces left standing are so titanic one still walks away bowled over. In the case of Ambersons, the fragment is all we have left, and so we’ve learned to make do accepting a movie can still be a masterpiece with large pieces of itself missing. I think the same is true of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid – except that we’re lucky enough the missing pieces are out there and accessible.

“I do hope you enjoy these rainy New Mexican evenings. They have a fabulous melancholy to them. They bring us close to some greater design. At least I hope so.”

Case in point: the 122-minute Final Preview Cut, housed on the second disc of Criterion’s Blu-ray set, is the last edit Sam Peckinpah completed before walking off the film, and is therefore the closest we’ll ever come to a “director’s cut” – though that shouldn’t be taken to mean it is ‘the’ complete, definitive version, because nobody walked away satisfied that they’d actually ‘finished’ the movie. This edit is without question a fuller, richer, better version of the film than what made it to in theaters in 1973, one that, above all else, clarifies the stakes for Pat Garrett’s soul, and more fully articulates the elegiac energy that undergirds the film in any form. There are, indeed, additions and differences here so significant it becomes impossible to imagine the film without them. All that being said, I don’t think the difference is quite as stark as the film’s reputation would suggest; seeing this version does not make me retroactively think that theatrical cut is a ‘bad’ film – the movie is simply too good to have its brilliance cut out of it – and I would argue that while the theatrical version is indeed inferior to Peckinpah’s final preview, it does score at least a few points against the edit Peckinpah abandoned.

Almost all the major differences surround Pat Garrett; Billy doesn’t have much, if any, material removed in the theatrical cut, at least not that I could spot from one viewing of each. That makes sense, though; Peckinpah’s presentation of Billy is far from one-note, but he is the simpler, larger, more romantic and mythical character here, the last vestige of a folkloric West that Garrett has been tasked with excising, from the world and from his own soul. But Garrett was clearly the character Peckinpah felt closer to, put more of himself into depicting, and it stands to reason that once Peckinpah walked away, Garrett is the character who would suffer in anyone else’s hands.

That’s apparent from literally the opening seconds of Peckinpah’s cut, which begins with a radically different introduction. I actually found the first scene of the Theatrical version striking on its own terms, with the movie opening on images of roosters having their heads blown off for target practice; that in itself is a powerful cinematic thesis statement. Peckinpah’s intended thesis, though, was many magnitudes more potent: intercutting the ambush and murder of an old, bitter Pat Garrett in 1909 with the rooster target practice in 1881, each shot of the gun cutting between victims, tying the mangled bodies of Garrett and the chickens together, their fates the same. Where the opening credits play out over still images suggesting a bygone Old West heyday in the theatrical cut – an effective framing device in its own right – Peckinpah takes the far more radical step of distributing the titles over the intercut present and future, an extra layer of impositions that make our introduction to the movie all the more jarring. It frames the story on much bleaker, more violent terms; where the opening credits of the theatrical are about juxtaposing a bygone mythical West with the end of the era we are about to see, Peckinpah’s credits tell us we’re watching a film about violence, death, and killing – the mythical old West not gradually fading away, but being slaughtered, actively, by the hands of men. All westerns are about the dying of the Old West, to some extent; Pat Garrett may be unique in that it’s about the killing of the west, its hero knowing he’s out to douse the torch.

“It feels like times have changed.”

“Times, maybe. Not me.”

In Peckinpah’s edit, Pat Garrett is more obviously a self-destructive sellout, a man unable to hold onto the freedom Billy has maintained, but also unable to enjoy the fruits of the civilization he’s tied himself to. He is damned wherever he walks. The biggest contributor to this sensibility is the scene about 30 minutes in where Garrett goes home to his wife, and the audience gets a sense of his home life; but it’s also there in longer versions of existing scenes and shots that heighten the elegiac qualities, of a man who is, in some sense, already dead. Since Peckinpah’s cut opens with his death, we are encouraged to see Garrett, in some sense, as a ghost, a specter haunting these places, haunting Billy. Bob Dylan’s Alias is often interpreted as a death figure, a sort of sly grim reaper whose fascination with Billy not coincidentally begins at the moment Billy publicly murders two lawmen, but Garrett too is an aspect of death. Billy does more killing across these two hours, but he also does quite a bit more living; Pat can only seem to live to kill, to struggle. I found myself thinking about how long the gap is between the story’s main events in 1881 and Garrett’s death in 1909. The way Coburn plays him, Garrett doesn’t look like he’s got 28 years left (although in an eerie coincidence nobody could have known at the time, Coburn would live exactly 29 more years after the release of the film). Maybe that’s part of Pat Garrett’s curse. He has a long time left to drift through this world, after he has killed Billy and helped cement the grip of oligarchic capitalism on this world. He has so much more time left to haunt these spaces.

“I’m gonna tell you this once. I don’t want to have to say it again. This country’s gettin’ old, and I aim to get old with it. The kid don’t want it that way. Might be a better man for it. I ain’t judgin’. But I don’t want you explainin’ nothin’ to me and I don’t want you sayin’ nothin’ about the kid or nobody else in my goddamn county.”

There are scenes with Garrett that play out identically in the two cuts that land harder in Peckinpah’s edit from this additional context. Pat turning down the upfront reward money in his meeting with the Governor makes more sense and lands harder after sequence with Garrett’s wife, where you can see Garrett is trying to tell himself he’s not doing this just for the money, is offended to be presented with cold hard evidence of the way he’s sold himself out. Similarly, Garrett’s ghostly qualities make the climactic moment where he shoots his reflection in the mirror after killing Billy all the more astonishing; the way Coburn plays it, it is as if he sees himself as an apparition, and fires in sheer terror.

“My people don’t talk to me. They say you are getting to be too much of a gringo since you been sheriff. That you make deals with Chisum. You don’t touch me. You are dead inside. I wish you’d never put on that badge.”

Shortly after the shooting comes another indelible moment that only fully reveals itself in Peckinpah’s edit. In both versions, Garrett walks out onto the porch to examine Billy’s body, shaken, and then lashes out at Deputy Poe when he tries to sever Billy’s trigger finger as a prize. In the theatrical cut, they remove two lines from Garrett present in Peckinpah’s cut: The first, a brief moment of Garrett telling himself “I shot him. I killed The Kid;” and the second, a close-up on Garrett as he furiously stares down Poe, and tells him “What you want, and what you get, are two different things.” It is the final spoken line of dialogue in Peckinpah’s cut, and Coburn delivers it with a truly disarming amount of venom. It is astonishing, and essential. It ties the entire film together. I cannot imagine the logic for cutting it, except that it is such a raw and confrontational moment of fury and self-loathing that I wonder if the studio simply balked at the intensity of it.

All that being said, the theatrical cut does score a few points against Peckinpah’s longer edit. For one, Peckinpah’s cut ends with another flash forward to Garrett’s death, over which a final expository text crawl explains the intricate history of everything leading up to Garrett’s assassination, and its connection to Billy’s killing. It feels beside the point, a last-minute digression that overloads the audience with extra-diegetic information in non-cinematic form. One can see why Peckinpah might experiment with this in the editing room, but it’s hard to imagine he would have kept it had he continued working, and if he’d gotten to a place where he felt confident the message had been delivered within the body of the film itself. Because that’s the thing: Garrett riding away as the kid (not Billy the Kid, just a kid, any kid) throws rocks at him is the perfect conclusion, and the right ending. The theatrical cut unambiguously made the right call here.

Points also go to the shorter edit for its version of Slim Pickens’ death. It is an outstanding scene in Peckinpah’s edit, essentially identical in terms of the images and cutting. But it is a transcendent all-timer of a scene in the theatrical for its full use of Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” which plays out only as an instrumental in Peckinpah’s version. Dylan’s vocals, and the full flowering of the song over Pickens’ death, is the element that ties that scene together and pushes it to the next level. Kris Kristofferson has said as much too, arguing Peckinpah had a blind spot there. Again, had Peckinpah finished editing the film, it’s hard to imagine he would have looked this gift horse in the mouth all the way to theaters.

“One of these days when I get my boat built, I’m gonna drift outta this damn territory. This town’s got no hat size no how.”

Finally, there is one excision the theatrical cut makes that I actually think is really smart. In Peckinpah’s cut, there is a scene where Garrett and Poe visit John Chisum’s ranch. It is a fine scene, but Chisum – a cattle baron whose capitalistic machinations are the engine on which the action of the film moves – is more potent to me as a present absence, someone we hear a lot about but never see. The lack of Chisum in physical form in the theatrical cut felt intentional to me; I was surprised when he showed up in Peckinpah’s edit. There is something even more brutally honest about Chisum being someone we must imagine but never meet, a giant of commerce whose hand moves all these bodies and sparks all this violence, but who is elevated and invisible – a symbol of America gradually instilling its own landed gentry, who the small people this film concerns itself with will never actually encounter.

There is one difference between the two versions that is more irresolvable. There are two completely different ways Garrett learns Billy is at Fort Sumner between the two edits, based on pieces of footage that cannot coexist because they are mutually exclusive. In the theatrical edit, Garrett gets the information by interrogating Ruthie Lee, a prostitute Billy had slept with at the brothel; this casts that whole scene as an essentially mercenary action from Garrett, a subterfuge of debauchery that is actually him doing detective work. In Peckinpah’s cut, it’s Deputy Poe who gets that information, in a tremendous little scene at an abandoned church where he ingratiates himself with three ruffians; the brothel scene, meanwhile, is an extended sequence of Garrett drinking and whoring, with nary a drop of detective work in sight. The theatrical version is more conventionally satisfying in the sense that Garrett is the one who puts it all together, is a more active force in the progression of the narrative, and the line about him insisting on Billy’s favorite prostitute coming to his room makes more sense in that context. But Peckinpah’s cut, again, clarifies the condition of Garrett’s soul, giving himself one last night of free-wheeling fun – the footage here is much more explicit – before Poe arrives with the information that seals everyone’s fate, and sets Garrett up to go play Judas.

“I’m tired. Tired of looking for yellow rocks. Tired of trying to not to look at your ugly face. Tired of seeing the land get crowded up. Tired of being snapped at and sunstruck, waiting to be killed.”

Dylan’s music (and especially Dylan’s singing voice) is less prominent in this version, but my second viewing got me thinking about how Dylan really only wrote lyrics for Billy (depending on how you interpret “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which is on the most literal level about Slim Pickens’ character, but is also obviously reflecting on Garrett’s soul). That Dylan the songwriter identifies more with Billy the Kid, the more romantic and mythical figure of the two leads, is no surprise. He’s easier to write a song about, for one. And it mirrors Alias’ own fascination with Billy, this outlaw who catches Alias’ eye when he murders two Deputies in broad daylight, and then becomes something of a Billy the Kid fanboy. But it also underlines the idea of the criminal as the folk hero. The fact that all the Billy songs are a bit vestigial, sounding like snippets of larger folk songs we don’t get to hear, underlines the sensibility of Billy the Kid as a dying breed, a storybook figure who knows he’s on the verge of surviving only in oral tradition. “Remember me to whoever rides by,” he says to Alias and the others when he leaves Fort Sumner. It sounds a lot like “Remember me to one who lives there,” a lyric from “Scarborough Fair,” which Dylan borrowed, along with that song’s melody, for “Girl From the North Country” in 1963, a full decade before Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Peckinpah claimed he didn’t know who Dylan was until Kris Kristofferson recommended him for the film, but I don’t think anyone believes him – putting Dylan’s immense cultural footprint aside, his and Peckinpah’s brains simply work too similarly for there not to be affinity there).

“You’re in poor company, Pat.”

“Yeah. I’m alive though.”

“So am I.”

Peckinpah’s final preview only survives as a 35mm print Peckinpah’s friends smuggled out of MGM during production, preserved at the Academy Film Archive, and Criterion presents it in a 2K scan “unrestored and minimally color-corrected … intended to convey the feeling of watching the raw, rough-edged, and unfinished film” (as explained in the accompanying booklet). For a 50-year-old unrestored print, we are incredibly lucky it looks as good as it does – which is to say, faded, especially on highlights, with some crushed contrast that makes nighttime scenes particularly murky, and a lot of scratches and dirt and other print damage throughout. But it’s also got good density and a rich, pleasing grain structure, there’s a lot of detail in the image, and the colors are often richer than one might expect. It looks, in short, very much like the bevy of 35mm fan scans we’ve seen online in recent years: not a replacement for a good restoration from original negative elements, as one sees on the other discs in Criterion’s set, but pleasing in its own way and for its own qualities, and to make one nostalgic for a good film print. It is perfectly watchable, even if a full reconstruction from the negative elements would be preferable.

Criterion instead elected to work with original editor Roger Spottiswoode and Peckinpah scholar Paul Seydor on the new 50^th Anniversary cut, which is the third and final version in this set. I wish I could say it was a successful reconciliation of these two different cuts, one that threaded the needle between them and created a version we could comfortably call ‘definitive.’ Unfortunately, it is instead a muddle, unclear in its intentions and less effective on its own terms than either of the other two versions.  

This new edit can best be described as an extended version of the Theatrical Cut; most of the full scenes that exist in the Final Preview but were cut for the theatrical release are re-instated, but for the scenes that exist in both Peckinpah’s edit and the studio’s cut, the 50^th Anniversary version almost always defaults to the theatrical cut’s editing, and as a result excises many of Peckinpah’s most characteristic, idiosyncratic, and furiously self-loathing moments. It therefore doesn’t play like a restored or reconstructed version of Peckinpah’s edit, but like the film released to theaters in 1973 with a few extra scenes. The result is a version that inherits certain strengths from both versions, but fails to create any of its own, and introduces some real weaknesses along the way that are not present in either existing cut.

“I understand you been ridin’ for Chisum. I’d rather be on the outside of the law than packin’ the bags for that town of Lincoln and them thats a-runnin’ it.”

“It’s a job. Comes an age in a man’s life when you want to spend time figurin’ what comes next.”

One can feel the 50^th Anniversary cut being pulled in two directions from the opening moments, where it attempts to do both Peckinpah’s opening and the studio’s opening at the same time. It maintains the intercutting of Garrett’s murder in 1909 with the shooting of the roosters in 1881, but speeds it all up, with a brief explosion of interplay between present and future before landing firmly in 1881 and continuing identically to the theatrical cut, including playing the opening titles over a montage of stills after Billy, asked why he doesn’t kill Garrett, earnest responds “Why? He’s my friend.” The resulting opening is neither fish nor fowl; it does not give the audience nearly enough time to sit with the intercutting to truly contemplate Peckinpah’s provocative editorial gesture, nor does it feel as focused on the idea of Pat and Billy’s friendship, which is the idea the opening of the theatrical edit organizes itself around. While I think Peckinpah’s introduction is clearly the best, there is a real punch to the theatrical version that works on its own terms; the 50^th Anniversary cut’s opening feels lesser than either of them.

From there, the 50^th Anniversary cut includes almost all the major scenes from the Final Preview that were excised from the theatrical edit, including Garrett’s conversation with his wife, Garrett and Poe meeting Chisum at his ranch, and Poe learning that Billy is at Fort Sumner from the bums in the church. From the theatrical cut, it retains the use of Dylan’s vocal version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” over Slim Pickens’ death, and uses the theatrical cut’s ending verbatim, with no cut to Garrett’s future death or Peckinpah’s closing text crawl, both of which are, as noted earlier, the stronger versions of these scenes.

Elsewhere, though, problems emerge from the half-hearted way this edit merges Peckinpah’s cut with the studio’s. For instance, while I noted earlier that I liked how we never see Chisum in the Theatrical cut, there is one clear piece of character-building Peckinpah gives us by juxtaposing the scene at Chisum’s ranch with Garrett at visiting a run-down general store he apparently frequents. The owner, Lemuel (played to great dirtbag effect by Chill Wills) has a breathtakingly filthy monologue in Peckinpah’s edit that goes like this:

“You want yourself a woman? One come in here from Albuquerque, run a cathouse over there. Name is Bertha. Got an ass on her like a forty-dollar cow. And a tit, I’d like to see that thing filled full of tequila. Hey, you know what she always said about the cowboys? She always wished they had a pair of loose boots. She wanted to strap them with a little tight pussy and give them a warm place to shit for two dollars. You know something? You can’t beat that, can you?”

As Lemuel drones on, Peckinpah continually cuts back to Garrett listening, drinking, and clearly hating himself. In the earlier scene, Chisum had offered him a place to stay the night, but instead, Garrett chooses to bed here, with this reprobate. It tells us something about who Garrett is and how he sees himself, that while he will work for Chisum, he prefers – perhaps as a way to deaden or punish himself – to hang around sleazebags like Lemuel. The 50^th Anniversary cut keeps the Chisum scene, but cuts Lemuel’s monologue off early, after the line about a tit filled with tequila. It plays awkwardly, as though the scene is ending mid-stream (which it is), but it also lessens this contrast between Chisum’s ranch and Lemuel’s store, and gives us less of Coburn’s exquisite wallowing. The Theatrical cut did it better, excising both Lemuel’s monologue and the Chisum scene, which at least offers some consistency, in addition to the advantage of leaving Chisum a more abstract presence. Again, both existing cuts are better than what Seydor and Spottiswoode compromised on here.

The brothel scene is similarly confused. The edit is more or less identical to the theatrical cut, where Garrett interrogates the prostitute Ruthie Lee to learn Billy is at Fort Sumner, and all the scenes of his self-deadening debauchery from Peckinpah’s cut are removed. But because the 50^th Anniversary edit also includes the scene of Poe learning Billy’s location from the bums, we now have a strange repetition: Each man learns Billy’s location independently, and we don’t get any of the real character-focused material with Garrett at the brothel. The Theatrical Cut’s version of this scene works because we don’t see Poe learn about Fort Sumner on his own; it can be a purely expository trip to a brothel because that’s the only place in the movie where we in the audience see a character learn Billy’s location. Peckinpah’s edit let Poe’s scene carry the expository weight, while making Garrett’s trip to the brothel a purely character-focused sequence, a wanton last hurrah before the Sherriff has to go play Judas, a scene of decadent self-destruction. The 50^th Anniversary cut, again, achieves neither the clean exposition of the studio’s edit or the evocative character-building of Peckinpah’s. It is a noticeably weaker sequencing of these events than either pre-existing version.

There are two more cuts the 50^th Anniversary version makes from Peckinpah’s Final Preview that frankly broke my heart. First, it uses the Theatrical Cut’s version of Billy’s death, excising Garrett’s extraordinary line “What you want and what you get are two different things,” the moment that so powerfully ties Peckinpah’s cut together. Instead, the scene plays out wordlessly. Second, there is an extended dialogue in Peckinpah’s edit between Garrett and Will, a coffin maker, just before Garrett enters Pete Maxwell’s house to kill Billy. In the Theatrical Cut and the 50^th Anniversary version, this is a basic expository check-in, with Will encouraging Garrett to go “get it over with.” In Peckinpah’s edit, though, it is another moment of venomous self-loathing aimed at Garrett (and, by extension, Peckinpah himself), with Will monologuing over his child-sized coffin:

“You know what I’m gonna do? Put everything I own right here. And I’m gonna bury it. In this ground. And I’m gonna leave the territory. When are you gonna learn you can’t trust anybody, not even yourself, Garrett? You chicken-shit badge-wearing son of a bitch.”

I cannot comprehend the mind of anyone who would look at either of these moments and think they require cutting. I simply can’t.

There are other differences between the versions less worthy of attention. For instance, Peckinpah placed the sequence where Garrett and a man on a river barge exchange fire late in the film, after Billy’s killing of Alamosa Bill and just before Billy discovers Paco and his wife under attack. The Theatrical and 50^thAnniversary cuts place this scene earlier, just before Poe joins up with Garrett over the campfire in the middle of the night. On a continuity level, the latter version probably makes more sense, as these are two scenes of Garrett out camping, but on a character level, I like the implication in Peckinpah’s cut that Garrett is idly biding his time, and even playfully risking his life, while Poe is out doing the detective work. It matches up with Peckinpah’s version of the brothel scene, of a man who knows his confrontation with Billy – and the concomitant ransoming of his own soul – is on the horizon, and is seeing if he can misbehave himself into an early grave before he gets there. Can he still live hard and die young, or is he doomed to be the old man filled with bitterness and regret?

The problem with the 50^th Anniversary cut is an obvious lack of vision. It lacks Peckinpah’s searing authorial touch, but it also lacks the mercenary focus of the Theatrical version, which, while a diminishment of Peckinpah’s intentions, does genuinely work on its own terms as a shorter, tighter, and simpler movie. After watching this newest cut, I am unsure of Seydor and Spottiswoode’s overriding goal; if they wanted to create something closer to Peckinpah’s vision, there are too many profound variations from his final completed cut to pass the smell test. If they wanted to follow their own taste and attempt to meaningfully improve on the existing versions as they saw fit, it doesn’t offer anything clearly superior enough to the other versions to be worth the effort. As it stands, this is a version I am unlikely to return to in the future, as each of the other edits included in Criterion’s set stand taller on their own two legs.

It's a shame. Were I in charge of producing a new edit of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, I would probably use the Final Preview as the basis, reconstructing as much of it as possible from the original camera negatives (as both the Theatrical Cut and 50^th Anniversary versions are), and then making two changes: Reinstating Bob Dylan’s vocals for “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” and cutting the closing text crawl so that the film ends with Garrett riding off while the boy throws rocks. It seems possible Peckinpah himself would have come around to both of these changes had he continued working on the film; the magic of Dylan’s vocals in that scene are just too obvious to resist (and there were other collaborators in his ear, like Kris Kristofferson, who we know were vocally supporting it), and the text crawl ending feels like a failed experiment stemming from lack of faith in the strength of his own work. This version, if it existed (and it would be fairly easy to cobble together using the three cuts in this set – I might take a crack at it myself), would not be ‘definitive’ – without Peckinpah around to finish it himself, there never will be a ‘definitive’ finished version – but it would, I think, come the closest. Of the three cuts in this set, I feel it is fairly obvious that Peckinpah’s Final Preview, despite a couple of notable flaws, is the best and most fully articulated version of the film, the one that most powerfully expresses the director’s voice and lands on the viewer with the greatest impact. Polish it up a bit by reconstructing the video and sound from the best available elements, make those two (fairly obvious) adjustments, and I think we would have a more-or-less ‘complete’-feeling version of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

To be clear, I would still recommend Criterion’s set for anyone interested in the film, as it presents Peckinpah’s own edit in better quality than has been available before, and the 4K restoration for the Theatrical and 50^thAnniversary cuts is exquisite. There is also the requisite assortment of extras and pack-in essay, all of which makes it a very respectable package. I myself saved some money and just bought the standard Blu-ray version, since only the shorter cuts are available in 4K on the UHD edition; as Peckinpah’s Final Preview is the best of the three cuts, and is only included on Blu-ray, I feel fine skipping over the 4K set.

No matter what, though, I am so, so glad I finally took the time to fully experience Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. While I am not enthused by the tinkering on the 50^th Anniversary cut, the film in any form is a true masterpiece, and having three versions to compare is an extremely instructive lesson in the art of film editing and how relatively small additions and subtractions can so heavily change the overall valance of a movie. I watched this film three full times in relatively quick succession, and not only never got tired of it, but found myself more and more invested with each viewing. It is a film I am overjoyed to finally have in my life and on my shelf, even if I would happily pay more money for a future release that properly reconstructed Peckinpah’s cut from the best-available elements.

But as Garrett himself tells us, “what you want and what you get are two different things.” Perhaps it’s only appropriate that, even after a major effort by Criterion, a ‘complete’ version of Peckinpah’s film remains elusive.

“I will tell you about a house that I want to build now. No, not here. For us, amigo. It will be on the other side. In Old Mex. I will sell my sheep, and I will build the adobe bridge myself. You know, Billy, I put a vine, a grapevine, around the veranda. And I will have three chairs and I will sit in the middle one. Anyone who doesn’t do right according to nature and my mother, I will blow his head off.”

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