Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Pat Garrett is hired as a lawman on behalf of a group of wealthy New Mexico cattle barons to bring down his old friend Billy the Kid.
Peckinpah's elegiac Western is elevated by James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson's weathered performances and Gordon Willis's sun-bleached, melancholy cinematography. The plot is deliberately loose and episodic — less a tight narrative than a series of farewell vignettes charting the death of the old West — which gives it a mournful poetry but can feel shapeless. The ending, with Garrett's quiet complicity in his own doom mirroring Billy's, is genuinely haunting. Novelty is solid but not exceptional; the revisionist elegy mode was well-trodden by 1973, though Peckinpah's execution is distinctly his own. Bob Dylan's score adds further singular texture.