DUEL TO THE DEATH: PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

I don t know whether Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid will be a great rock’n’roll western or merely a machismo wetdream. Three days on the set wasn’t enough to tell, even about a movie which stars James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, sports in its cast Jason Robards, Barry Sullivan, Slim Pickens, Chill Wills and other veterans, even for a flick that has Bob Dylan in one minor role and Kristofferson’s girlfriend Rita Coolidge in another. Even for a movie, in fact, directed by Sam Peckinpah, the greatest maker of Westerns since John Ford.

The -situation in Durango, as most situations in mythic locales, was unhinged. Peckinpah was so sick that most mornings it was all he could do to drag himself onto the set; there were a few mornings when he couldn’t even do that. (Who knows what ailed him? At 47, with a couple decades of TV and filmmaking under your belt, along with years of drinking and whoring in the macho tradition even the scrappy Peckinpah might have been left with any manner or number of ailments.)

There were also studio problems. The project was both over schedule and over budget and MGM head James Aubrey is not known for his tolerance of auterist excesses, especially when they cost money ...

In addition, there was the rock and roll situation, an awkward but apt description of a cast which includes not only Dylan, Kristofferson and Coolidge but also Kris’ entire band.

The weekend before I arrived, Dylan and the rock’n’roll members of the cast headed for Mexico City to try to record the title song. With them went Coburn, screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, editor Roger Spottiswoode and a number of others. This intrusion on Peckinpah’s domain wouldn’t have been welcome under any circumstances, but it was an especial insult on this occasion: Sam had scheduled Saturday evening for a screening of his latest, The Getaway. Peckinpah wasn’t happy with the film anyway — McQueen had edited it heavily . — and since nothing productive came out of the Mexico City session, the kind of brouhaha that has made Peckinpah famous seemed to be brewing. Peckinpah wasn’t on the set until noon Monday. That was his way of getting back, someone said, “for picking their movie over his.”

On set, Billy the Kid (Kristofferson) and his gang are getting ready for a shoot-out sequence that encompasses Dylan’s initiation into the gang. The initiation goes like this:

Mike Mikler, on horseback: “What’s yer name, boy?”

Dylan, in ill-fitting clothes, sitting on a stump, twirling a pair of throwing knives: “Ali-uhs .. ”

“What’s yer name boy?”

“Ali-uhs, sir.”

v ’S that awlV

“Ali-uhs Whatever You Please, sir.” In some ways, this is a perfect scene for Dylan. He doesn’t seem certain of his identity, either. Maybe he never was.

Dylan’s other big move in the scene is to throw a knife into the neck of a twitching enemy (who’s already been shot a couple times). This so endears Alias to Billy’s gang that they do not shoot him, even though he is a stranger.

Dylan got flustered and blew the scene a couple times; finally, he cracked, “Ali-uhs Smith . which broke everyone up, and he did his bit all right after that.

Nevertheless, we were going to see this sequence repeated for two and one half days. It would only occupy five minutes, at most, on the screen.

There were innumerable takes and long stretches of inactivity, sometimes because of noise — the Mexican police insisted they could not block traffic effectively beyond the old Pancho Villa fort where the shooting took place — and sometimes because of Peckinpah perfectionism. “See,” said Luke Askew, a young veteran who plays another of Billy’s gang, “that’s why Sam makes better shoot outs than anyone else. He’s shooting two masters for this one, and then he’ll go in for closeups with everyone, and special effects ... He does all that seperately, which most directors won’t. It takes a long time, and it’s expensive, but it’s worth it. It’s not like working with any other director.”

Peckinpah is not so universally admired around the set.

By the time the production takes a break, I have been reduced to nearinsensibility, partially because of a cognac drinking spree with two Mexican veterans, Emilio Fernandez and Jorge Russek. Fernandez is a Mexican culture hero, having won a Cannes award for his version of Steinbeck’s The Pearl in the ’50s. He also helped Steinbeck work on the script of Viva Zapata and he says he fought with Pancho Villa’s army himself, as a young man. (It is claimed that Emilio has shot between five and 25 civilians, including at least one film critic.)

Russek, a somewhat younger Mexican actor and director, has acted with Fernandez and Peckinpah before: in The Wild Bunch, Sam’s outlaw epic. Both of these men are similar to Peckinpah. All three are tough relics of the Era of True Grit.

One afternoon, Russek looked at me from behind his beard, his eyes glinted and he said, “You know, after I was in The Wild Bunch, I never wanted to do another western. After that one, they all seemed ... small. ”

Peckinpah has returned to the genre and the locale (Mexico) of his greatest success; The Wild Bunch set out to attempt to demystify the Western and became the bloodiest film ever made. It also established a new form for the Western. These days, even the hero is tragically flawed, doomed like everyone else. Every Western made since The Wild Bunch has been forced to define itself on new terms, and is in some way a variation of Peckinpah’s theme, bW none has ever captured Sam’s love and respect for the era. Some say this is because The Wild Bunch was also Sam Peckinpah demystifying himself.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is The Wild Bunch made more personal. It might approach self-parody, in the hands of a director less skilled, for the metaphor runs deep. Just as Robert Ryan and his gang chased William Holden and his gang half way across Mexico in The Wild Bunch, in this one, Coburn chases Kristofferson through New Mexico — mostly alone, though each has allies. Coburn and Ryan’s characters share the same fears: the betrayal of an old friend, the ambivalence of being on the side of the Law they once opposed. Finally, each renders himself expendable through a combination of ambivalence and the Law’s own incompetence. Ryan looks haunted, ghostly, defeated; Coburn seems to portray Garrett in the same way.

This is material Sam Peckinpah can work with as no one else has ever been able to do. It is full circle in more than one way, for Peckinpah began his career writing and directing “Gunsmoke” and “Rawhide.” They say when he’s in a pinch, he sometimes reverts to TV technique. It works. “You know,” a friend who was wounded in Viet Nam said to me, “I don’t like that Peckinpah much, not his fans or what he has to say. But, and I know what I’m talking about ... he knows what it’s like to get shot.”

.Even if you are smart-mouthed enough to say, as I did, that the only interesting thing for a journalist to do with Bob Dylan in 1973 is get in a fistfight with him, when he’s around, you are still held with some kind of interest. Lots of writers -become obsessed with speaking to him. I decided I only wanted to watch.

Dylan clearly felt awkward and out of place. He looked so uncomfortable you began to wonder what all the fuss had been about. This big-nosed, oatmeal-voiced pipsqueak? His eyes are still blue but they don’t gleam anymore. He shuffles along in his costume which is somehow historically appropriate for Dylan more than-Alias: baggy maroon pants and shirt, greasy pearl-grey vest, filthy; dusty top hat, mushy boots, scuzzy white gloves, holster drooping half way to his knees, holding a pair of knives, no gun.

The costume, as the role, was designed to make Dylan look ludicrously young. It was as though he’d listened to “My Back Pages” and decided to acquiesce. His body had co-operated with the physical diminuation of the abdicated king. So he shrank in all ways, on the road from heavyweight rock’n’roll champ to everybody’s next one.

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Weirdest of all, the cast and crew were engaged in a continual act* of denial of this diminuation. Even had Dylan looked so deranged only because he was playing a teenage psycho-path (which was part of it) there was something in the role that seemed to fit him personally. Kristofferson was playing a killer and HE didn’t look the Prince of Scuzz.

Peckinpah, perhaps because he is dealing with a rank amateur, maybe for other reasons, paid more attention to “Bobby” than to any other actor. The rest of the cast’s attitude is summed up in this: Reports from the set have said that Dylan learned to throw the knives with great accuracy and skill after only a couple hours practice. I watched him throw them a dozen times. They never stuck in anything. (Not that they needed to; the scene is a special effect, anyway.) But it is symptomatic that people felt the need to say Dylan was a genius with the knives.

Even in private no one would say Dylan was a has-been, reduced to playing bit parts on his friends’ records, and now, appearing in their movies in minot roles. As a result, even if one knew better, there was nothing to do but go along. The man who laughs has not heard the terrible news, perhaps. So you listened while people said that Sam Peckinpah didn’t know who Dylan was, and you knew they were wrong. Sam knew just who he was dealing with: an unskilled actor.

Tuesday afternoon, I spent lunch time with Kris and Rita. I am not a great fan of either’s music, though I think Kristofferson has written good songs and I loved him in Cisco Pike, his previous movie. I was surprised to find myself liking both of these people very much.

Did Kris want to give up touring to make movies, as he’d suggested? “Well, I wouldn’t be interested in doin’ anything like ... a lot of Elvis movies. I always thought, when I grow up, I can be a writer and director. And given the opportunity to get paid for it, I thought it was a pretty good deal.

“That’s why Bob came down this time. He wanted to learn about movies, even though he wasn’t too wild about acting — which he still isn’t. Anyway, he said, yeah, he’d do it. Cause he was also interested in Sam. He screened The Wild Bunch and got so jazzed-between that and the script that he wrote that song.”

Kris and Rita raved about the song Dylan had written for the film. I asked whether Kris had recorded anything in Mexico City.

“No, he said, screwing up his face, “and Bob didn’t cut anything either. But it’s a great song, they just haven’t got it right yet. It has the feel of the movie.”

“Does Sam know who Bob is?”

“Well, he really dug the song,” Kris says. “Remember,” he says to Rita and Rudy Wurlitzer, who’s just come in, “how when we were down here before, we got the feelin’ that he’d just as soon have Roger Miller down here or something. In fact, he said that.”

“He said that,” Rita agrees.

“He said it,” Rudy nods.

“But he has no ide^ who Bob is. The first or second night, Bob laid that song on him and Sam says, ‘Well, there’s my movie.’ He just used that cassette when anyone wanted to know what the picture was about. He loved that part where he sings, ‘Billy don’t you turn your back on me.’”

He and Rita sing one of the verse, in their mis-matched voices:

There’s guns across the river pointin’ atcha

Lawmen on your trail try in ’ to getcha

Bounty hunters too they ’re try in ’ to catch ya

Billy, they don’t like you to be so free

Peckinpah, naturally, has made certain adjustments in the script. Rudy and Kris are concerned because (you guessed it) there’s not enough Dylan. “Rudy came in here one day and asked me could I help him with (the new Dylan scene). He said, ‘You got to help me. My mind is blown, I feel like a TV hack. I been rewriting these scenes and nobody knows what we want.’ So we wrote one and Sam liked it. Dylan hasn’t had anything to say and I wanted to get into some close relating things with him. Usually we’re on a horse or something and he’s so worried about hitting a mark, he’s not even looking up at me. Bob’s so down by now, he’ll do anything.

“Sam is a controller. A lot of times you’ll see him talk people through whole scenes. Which really disturbs me.”

Yes, I agree, he does that a lot. Especially with Dylan.

“Well, he does that with Bob because Bob wants it. Bob was havin’ a lot of trouble at first, not knowin’ what was goin’ on. I said, ‘Hey, ya gotta tell him what to do.’ I didn’t mean step by step like he’s doin’ but I guess he does that with a lot of people. I guess he doesn’t do it with me because he knows it puts me uptight.”

Or. . . I think, but don’t say anything.

You can go to see Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for any number of reasons, including because B6b Dylan is in it. If that’s all you go for, I suppose that’s all you’ll get. But there should be a lot more there. Peckinpah makes great movies, almost always, and Billy the Kid might be his best in a long while. ^