Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a 1973 American revisionist Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah, written by Rudy Wurlitzer, and starring James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, Chill Wills, Barry Sullivan, Jason Robards, Slim Pickens and Bob Dylan.

The film is about an aging Pat Garrett (Coburn), hired as a lawman by a group of wealthy New Mexico cattle barons to bring down his old friend Billy the Kid (Kristofferson).

Soon after completion, the film was taken away from the director and substantially re-edited, resulting in a truncated version released to theaters and largely disowned by cast and crew members.

[5] In 1909,[b] near Las Cruces, New Mexico, Pat Garrett is riding with men working for the Santa Fe Ring, when he is ambushed and coldly killed by his associates, including one John W. Poe.

As Billy awaits his execution in the Lincoln County Jail for the killing of Buckshot Roberts, he is taunted and beaten by self-righteous Deputy Sheriff Bob Olinger while the hangman's gallows are being built nearby.

Garrett rejects the money saying they can pay him in full when Billy is brought in and warns them that he will be successful as long as another cattle war is not started.

The screenplay of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was written by Rudy Wurlitzer and was originally intended to be directed by Monte Hellman.

[6] Peckinpah believed that this was his chance to make a definitive statement on the Western genre and complete the revision that he had begun with Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969).

Working with Wurlitzer, he rewrote the script to create a more cyclical narrative, and added a prologue and epilogue depicting Garrett's own assassination at the hands of the men who hired him to kill Billy the Kid.

In the original script, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid never met onscreen until the film's conclusion, and Wurlitzer reportedly resented Peckinpah's reworking of the narrative.

Peckinpah initially considered Bo Hopkins for the part of Billy, but he eventually cast country music star Kris Kristofferson as the outlaw.

Peckinpah deliberately cast his film's supporting roles with legendary Western character actors such as Chill Wills, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Barry Sullivan (who himself had played Pat Garrett in The Tall Man (TV series) from 1960 to 1962), Dub Taylor, R.G.

Jason Robards had starred in Peckinpah's earlier films, the television production Noon Wine (1966) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and had a cameo appearance as the governor.

The large supporting cast also included Richard Jaeckel, Charles Martin Smith, Harry Dean Stanton, Matt Clark, L.Q.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer President James Aubrey, for economic reasons, refused to give Peckinpah the time or budget required, forcing the director to rely on local crew members in the Mexican state of Durango.

Aubrey objected to several scenes that he considered superfluous to the film's plot, and Peckinpah and his crew reportedly worked weekends and lunch hours to secretly complete the sequences.

Aubrey began to send telegrams to the set complaining about the number of camera setups that Peckinpah used and the time spent to shoot specific scenes.

"[9] By the time that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was in the editing room, Peckinpah's relationship with the studio and his producers had reached the breaking point.

[12] 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.

"[13] 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.

"[14] 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.

"[15] 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.

"[17] 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.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 59% from 63 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.

"[19] In 1988, Turner Home Entertainment, with distribution by MGM, released Peckinpah's preview version of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid on video and Laserdisc.

This version led to a rediscovery and reevaluation of the film, with many critics praising it as a lost masterpiece and proof of Peckinpah's vision as a filmmaker at this time.

[20] Kristofferson noted in an interview, though, that Peckinpah had felt that Dylan had been pushed on him by the studio and thus left "Knocking on Heaven's Door" out of the preview version.