Wilson’s review published on Letterboxd:
The Western as a cinematic artform has been with us since the very beginning. As if film was created, and cinemas built, to capture Westward expansion in the way literature and art could not. The visual splendour of the desolate land, the inherent lyricism of nature combined better on screen than in any other medium. Perhaps even better than in life itself. What makes the greatest Western of all time? It would have to be inclusive, if not restricted, to encompass all of the major sub-genres that proliferate the main subject as a whole. The greatest Western ever made would have to have elements of manifest destiny, following the American Dream in this most American of artform, the darkness of the nightmarish murderous plains and at least one good shoot-out. The Western, as a genre, was one of the first action genres. It made action heroes of many actors, not least John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. A great Western encapsulates not only the best of cinema; expansive visuals, deep and complex themes, exciting motion, but also the best and worst of America. It is a forum used to discuss racism, religion, genocide, politics and death. The best examples of the genre do not shy away from these heady topics but tackle them straight on. The Western is defined by America, in the same way American is defined by a Western mentality.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was made by one of the great Western directors Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah, along with John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, changed the whole genre in the 1950s and 1960s. They took something that was once as wholesome as apple pie and soured the edges. No longer were the good guys in white hats and the bad guys in black hats. Everyone seemed to wear a black hat in the end. Anthony Mann’s cycle of films with James Stewart and John Ford’s The Searchers made in the 1950s changed the genre for good. These films had racist murderers as the heroes. Audiences no longer felt comfortable in the West, it had become a scarier place to be, a place where no chivalry or honour exists. With this darkness, a sense of loss and elegy for the past also was produced. Thus revisionism was born. Into the 1960s it took some foreign filmmakers to see the potential of this new violent and melancholic American form and the Spaghetti Western was created, when this new sub-genre filtered back to American filmmakers it created a new dynamic movement in genre development. This movement was not honed by any better director than the wild and maverick Sam Peckinpah.
Peckinpah, by the time he came to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, had made four Western’s all pushing the genre’s boundaries. He had made the elegiac Ride the High Country, the epic Major Dundee, the apocalyptically violent Vietnam allegory The Wild Bunch and the gently comedic The Ballad of Cable Hogue. But Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is something as startling as all those other films combined. It is about something fundamental to all humans, it is about Dying. This is a film created to investigate death. No other Western before or since has ever been so bold to tackle such a simple, yet profound topic. This is perhaps the most compelling argument to why Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the finest Western of all, its ambition. This investigation of death is filtered through a Christian parable, instead of following Jesus, as is the norm, we follow James Coburn’s Judas ostensibly called Pat Garrett. A man who must betray and kill his friend for money. The themes of this film run very deep, as is common with the best of Sam Peckinpah’s work.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid opens with what could well be the single greatest opening of any film. Pat Garrett as an old man being gunned down by his former deputies while the Bob Dylan music plays and the scene is intercut with a young Billy and friends shooting a chickens. It is as if Billy is shooting at the older Pat. The bullet has travelled full circle. The opening tells you everything you need to know about the film, it is about both human death and death of an era. The Wild Bunch may be about killing but Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is about dying. The plot can almost be condensed to such an extent that it can be considered to be just a series of death scenes. Yet every death scene has resonance and is filled with sadness, as if each death brings the whole world that much closer to destruction. The tone of the film is gentle regret but inevitable destruction.
Another major part of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid's success is Bob Dylan, not only the greatest soundtrack attached to a film but also his performance as Alias, who is Chaplinesque in his simplicity and guile. The soundtrack in the Western genre is something that is as important as the action or the direction. Think of all of the great Westerns and you will inevitably think of a great piece music, in the Western the music is usually transcendent. The soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a thing of wonder: the themes written for Billy as a character, the haunting score which accompanies Pat and Knockin on Heavens Door which gives Slim Pickens the greatest death scene captured on film. This is a scene that captures the final death of the Old West in one moment, this is where America lost its innocence for good, this is no country for old men. The plot has depth and takes a few detours but ends where all know it must with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And what a final reel. Is there a better scene in film history than Billy's final demise? This preceded The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by 35 years and yet captures much of the same magic. Garrett by pulling the trigger has killed not only Billy but also himself; he just has to wait for the bullet much like young Robert Ford. We all know that the bullet with his name on it will find him; in fact we have already seen it.
James Coburn was never better than when he played Pat Garrett, he brings a lean grittiness to the character. He also subverts his natural charm into something all the more dangerous. Coburn's Pat Garrett hunts and kills his best friend. He is a despicable character. One of the truly despicable characters of the Western genre, there is very little hero in this man. Kris Kristofferson brings an easy going, witty and playful charm to Billy; he makes him the ultimate counter point to the tiring Pat Garrett. These men are two sides of the same coin, they are friends. This only adds to the melancholy of the film. Yet the film even filled with all this darkness has a wild beauty, the script is one of the most quotable ever committed to celluloid, every sentence reverberates off the screen with a dirty poetry and grace, it is funny and sad at the same time.
A final theme which runs through Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, another theme that is prevalent in a lot of Westerns is industrialisation versus the frontier spirit. This film again shows how America was divided and bought and sold by industrialist’s forever pushing individuals away from what they could have called home. It shows how America may be the land of the brave but it was never the land of the free, but rather the land of money and greed. Billy is the antithesis to this way of thinking ''things may of changed. Not me.'' and Pat is seduced by his greed and ultimately pays a spiritual, emotional and eventually physical death for it. Anyone who quotes the popular Gordon Gecko adage ''greed is good'' should be immediately tied to a chair and made to watch this film.
In the end it is just the finest Western ever made.
"For not killing at over at rosewater, for gettin' you this job, and not seein' run you outta this territory, for pullin' you outta that snow drift up at Shamus, and for cold cockin' you over at Stillwater Saloon last fall, and savin' you from Rabbit Owens from bitin' off your ear, and from just puttin' up with you for a hell of a lot longer than I oughta..."