Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid composer Bob Dylan
Post-production controversy, release and preview version
By the time that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was in the editing room, Peckinpah's relationship with the studio and his own producers had reached the breaking point. Peckinpah's first cut was 165 minutes. Aubrey, enraged by the cost and production overruns, demanded an unrealistic release date for the film. Peckinpah and his editors, given only three weeks, were forced into a desperate situation in order to finish editing on time. Furthermore, Aubrey still objected to several sequences in the film which he wanted removed, forcing Peckinpah to engage in protracted negotiations over the film's content. Adding to the problems, Bob Dylan had never done a feature film score and Peckinpah's usual composer, Jerry Fielding, was unhappy with being relegated to a minor role in the scoring process.
Peckinpah did complete a preview version of the film at 124 minutes, which was shown to critics on at least one occasion. Martin Scorsese had just made Mean Streets (1973) and was at the screening, and he praised the film as Peckinpah's greatest since The Wild Bunch. This version, however, would not see the light of day for over ten years. Peckinpah was eventually forced out of the production, and Aubrey had the film severely cut from 124 to 106 minutes, resulting in the film being released as a truncated version largely disowned by cast and crew members. This version was a box-office failure, grossing $8 million domestically, of which the studio earned only $2.7 million in theatrical rentals, against a budget of more than $4.6 million. However, the film grossed a total of $11 million worldwide.The film was also panned by most major critics, who had harbored high expectations for the director's spiritual successor to The Wild Bunch. Though she acknowledged its ambition and "amazing cast", Pauline Kael described the film as "peculiarly unrealized" and mused that "probably nobody involved was very happy about the results". Roger Ebert rated the film two stars out of four, beginning his review with: "Sam Peckinpah attempted to have his name removed from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I sympathized with him. If this wasn't entirely his work, he shouldn't have had to take the blame." Ebert went on to note, "Another alarming factor is that no less than six editors are credited. Not assistant editors, but editors; this sets a modern-day record, I think. My guess is that there was an argument over the movie's final form, and that Peckinpah and MGM platooned editors at each other during the battle. You'd think the executives would have figured out that their only chance was to release the movie as Peckinpah made it; audiences were more interested in the new Peckinpah film than in still another rehash of Billy the Kid." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded the same two-star grade and wrote that the film "appears to have been shot in emotional slow motion, and the self-inflating lethargy and mugging of all concerned reduces the enterprise to an exercise in pretension." Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film "has the manner of something written for Peckinpah by a writer who'd seen 'The Wild Bunch' and vowed to give the director an important script, something worthy of his talents. Instead, Mr. Wurlitzer has come up with what is apparently an unconscious parody of the Peckinpah concerns for fading frontiers, comradeship and machismo." Canby also found the Bob Dylan music "so oppressive that when it stops we feel giddy with relief, as if a tooth had suddenly stopped aching." Variety declared, "Whereas Peckinpah's nostalgia for a frontier world where might makes right and women were for the taking has previously been communicated via forceful acting and striking visuals, here there are few graces to camouflage the narrative banality."Not every contemporary review was negative. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Although 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' (at selected theaters) is approximately 15 minutes shorter than its director Sam Peckinpah cut it, it nevertheless emerges as a remarkable film that is perhaps Peckinpah's best, most mature work to date." Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin was also generally favorable, declaring that "for all the deliberate—and occasionally over-schematic—summation of [Peckinpah's] previous work, Pat Garrett is remarkable for its intensity of mood (and for the growling, damped-down charisma of Coburn and Kristofferson); a singularly black and poetic evocation of a no-exit life style."The film remained something of an enigma for the next decade, with rumors flying about other versions and the nature of what had been left out of the release version. Peckinpah himself was in possession of his own preview version, which he often showed to friends as his own definitive vision of the film.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 57% from 58 reviews with the consensus: "Sam Peckinpah's mournful salute to the bygone West achieves moments of ruthless poetry, but clear signs of studio-dictated cuts and oft-unintelligible dialogue will make this dirge a slog for some."
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