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The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid just needed Trump
I first saw the Danish Dogme 95 film Festen in 1998 when I was 30. You had to go to the cinema to see films in those days, when small boys ran barefoot on a conveyor belt to turn the reels, and it's possible I watched its depiction of a family torn apart by violence, resentment, alcoholism and sexual abuse in horror while crunching popcorn, eating hotdogs and drinking a big bucket of Fanta ™ ®. No wonder I was sick on the old Danish woman next to me. Luckily, in Denmark, being vomited on by a stranger is considered good luck, and we began a torrid affair. But I watched Festen again in my 50s and found it hilarious, laughing out loud at its grim affirmation of bleak inevitability. But the film hadn't changed. So what had the world done to me in the intervening years to make my sense of humour so black? Or had all that bacon and pastry I ate in the 00s somehow made me more sensitive to the Danish sensibility? Similarly, once I drank only Yorkshire Tea for a week and briefly became both resentful and ingenious. On Monday night, I made my once-a-decade attempt to enjoy Sam Peckinpah's flawed 1973 revisionist western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which all the women are semi-naked prostitutes or ex-prostitutes in clothes, and yet it's the morals of all the respectable and fully clothed men that are really up for sale. Get it? Screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer is asking, who are the real prostitutes? Meanwhile, Bob Dylan wanders about as a character called Alias, who doesn't seem to know where he is, who he is, or what he ought to do. The teenage me found this frustrating, but to this 57-year-old man Alias's blank-faced acceptance of fate seems like a rational response to 2025. Is it possible to get post-traumatic stress disorder by looking at a succession of internet memes of penguins complaining about tariffs? Indeed, this time around Peckinpah's mangled masterpiece made the most sense to date. Billy the Kid represents American freedoms under attack from big business, namely the cattle barons to whom people's rights and lands are dispensable. And the lawman Pat Garrett has to decide whether to do the right thing, or bend the knee to tyranny to survive, like Keir Starmer, and to get rich, like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Snoop Doggy Dogg. (Now there are no ideals or ethics in American politics, if there ever were, and everything is nakedly transactional, where once geopolitical powerplays were disguised as altruism. Here. Have these Jackson Pollock paintings. They will invalidate socialist realism. Here. Have these blankets. They contain smallpox spores and it's cold on the reservation. Sleep well.) And if, like Billy the Kid, you stand up to avaricious authoritarians, you end up dead on the porch in just some brown trousers while Rita Coolidge weeps, or detained at customs like a French intellectual. Peckinpah's once reviled film is now almost too on the nose for 2025! But The Handmaid's Tale seemed like science fiction back in the 80s, when you had to read it if you wanted to get a date with an attractive feminist. But given that Donald Trump's domestic and foreign policies seem based on the same narcissistic notions of manifest destiny that forged the old west, maybe it isn't surprising that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid suddenly speaks volumes. There's a new sheriff in town and he's working for the modern-day cattle barons, who are farming engagement on vast digital plains with great globs of porn and racism, and pushing out the people who went west to post pictures of cats and sad things about Palestine. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid at least has the edge musically on the Trump administration because it gave us Dylan's three-chord classic Knockin' On Heaven's Door, as opposed to a degraded version of YMCA, sung by an inauthentic manifestation of the Village People, still dressed as gay-friendly archetypes of the American collective subconscious, but stomping on a human ear – for ever! The central conceit of my current tour show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, is that the bullies are taking over politics and comedy and we're somehow seduced by their cruelty. World events currently approach the show head-on at such velocity that the jokes in it buffet around like ball-bearings in a pinball machine and bash into different news stories daily, while I flap the flippers like a blind idiot Brexiter. Some throwaway yuks in last week's column, and last week's live show, about Russell Brand, another of the comic flatulists currently flourishing in the court of King Donald, underwent hasty last-minute rewrites as allegations coalesced into criminal charges, inconveniencing me enormously. Playwrights write their plays only once and then walk away from the scenes of their crimes, even as their storylines are overtaken by world events. I, however, am required to retool my work nightly, while losers like William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett or Alan Ayckbourn benefit from the notion that their hastily tossed-off and then simply abandoned works are somehow 'timeless', when in fact they are just the products of lazy and careless minds. When I wrote the current standup show last autumn it seemed pessimistic. Now it seems prescient. By the time it closes next year I am worried it will seem nostalgic. Will the newly enslaved Indigenous people of Greenland look back fondly on the 2025 tariffs and the Signal scandal as they mine mobile phone parts from rapidly thawing permafrost, while YMCA booms endlessly out of a subterranean speaker system? We're doomed. Feels like I'm knocking on heaven's door. Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf until spring 2026 with a Royal Festival Hall run in July. Sign up here to be kept up with future developments for ever
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nihilistic, anarchic, repugnant: Sam Peckinpah's 10 best films – ranked!
After making his name as a director of westerns, Sam Peckinpah was given his first shot at making a major studio film – an epic about a tyrannical cavalry officer (Charlton Heston) leading an expedition into Mexico. The production set a template for later Peckinpah films – heavy drinking, personality clashes, battles with the suits, and a final cut not matching the director's vision. Major Dundee was a victim of its chaotic ambition and it's easy to see why it flopped on release: even in the 2005 restored version, it is hopelessly unfocused, taking in Dundee's Moby-Dick-like mission to track down an Apache chief, the dynamics of the US civil war, encounters with the French army and an unconvincing romantic interlude. But it's interestingly flawed, a sort of dry run for The Wild Bunch, and Richard Harris is entertaining as Benjamin Tyreen, the Irishman who leads the Confederate prisoners in Dundee's ragtag army. Peckinpah swapped the wild west for the West Country for this still potent experiment in nastiness, later banned from home release in the UK until 2002 because of its controversial rape scene. Dustin Hoffman and Susan George play the middle-class couple who move to her old village only to be tormented by the leering locals and provoked into an orgy of bloodletting. It's a product of a very specific time, when film-makers were newly free to explore the nature of violence and question the limits of liberalism – other examples being A Clockwork Orange and Dirty Harry. While influential on action cinema and prescient in its unpicking of bourgeois unease, it is ultimately gruelling and unenlightening – and a grim caricature of Cornwall. The second of two back-to-back films Peckinpah made with Steve McQueen, this riveting thriller is very much a vehicle for its star, who had approval over the final cut and recruited Quincy Jones to provide a jazzy score to replace the work of regular Peckinpah collaborator Jerry Fielding. McQueen and Ali MacGraw – who began an affair on set and later married – play Doc and Carol McCoy, a dour latter-day Bonnie and Clyde on the run in Texas after a heist unravels. Peckinpah handles the tense action sequences with consummate professionalism but of all the films in his 1969-74 golden stretch, it's the least personal or thought-provoking. Peckinpah's talent for shooting action scenes made him a natural fit for directing a war film; his only foray into the genre, told unusually from the German perspective, had the misfortune to be released at the same time as Star Wars and has been overlooked ever since. Amid the carnage of the eastern front in 1943, contemptuous platoon leader Steiner (James Coburn) clashes with his arrogant aristocratic superior Stransky (Maximilian Schell). Nazism is little discussed and arguably downplayed (the only enthusiastic party member suffers a hideous punishment); this is essentially a searing portrait of a band of Brüder operating under the extreme duress of brutal warfare, and as such, it's less orthodox than it first seems. It proved to be his last decent film, he made just two more – the banal trucker comedy Convoy (1978) and the turgid thriller The Osterman Weekend (1983) – and then, in a curious coda, directed two music videos for Julian Lennon before his death at the age of 59. Nihilistic, anarchic, repugnant: this is Peckinpah unbound, let loose without studio interference on a low budget in Mexico, and it's not pretty. And yet this agonising ordeal of self-destruction is utterly compelling and at times pitch-black funny. Warren Oates channels Peckinpah himself as Bennie, a washed-up, shades-wearing piano player turned bounty hunter searching for the grisly proof that a man who impregnated a crime lord's daughter is dead. Bennie won't give up on his macabre quest despite his life disintegrating around him; like many Peckinpah characters, he is going down in a blaze of something, but it's not going to be glory. There are enough brilliant moments in this bewitching but sometimes bewildering western to convince you there is a masterpiece struggling to emerge from the various edits that have surfaced since MGM took the film off Peckinpah's hands at the end of a deeply troubled production. Coburn gives a career-best performance as Pat Garrett, the sheriff hired by Big Cattle to bring down his old buddy, unrepentant outlaw Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson). Peckinpah assembled a fantastic ensemble cast of western legends but there are just too many characters, many of whom are gunned down quickly. Bob Dylan is distracting as Billy's sidekick Alias, but he also provides the spellbinding soundtrack (featuring Knockin' on Heaven's Door) that helps create the film's lyrical mood. This nuanced, understated family drama demonstrates how versatile 'Bloody Sam' could be: there's nothing more violent here than a comic bar-room brawl. A wistful Steve McQueen plays Junior 'JR' Bonner, an ageing rodeo rider unable or unwilling to move with the times – a classic western archetype in a contemporary setting – unlike his vulgar entrepreneur brother Curly (Joe Don Baker). Ida Lupino gives an outstandingly intelligent performance as Junior's mother, and the film provides a documentary-like snapshot of Prescott, Arizona, in the summer of 1971. It's a great shame it flopped, and that Peckinpah didn't make more films like it. As the director himself put it: 'I made a film where nobody got shot and nobody went to see it.' Jason Robards, so often a fine supporting actor, takes centre stage in an inventive, eccentric and unpredictable tale of a man left for dead in the Arizona desert, only to strike water and set up a successful way station. Robards makes magnificent sense of Cable Hogue's contradictions, there's touching support from Stella Stevens as the obligatory golden-hearted sex worker, and David Warner's randy preacher is funny, alarming and sometimes profound. Not everything works – the Benny Hill-style fast motion sequences haven't aged well – but at its best this is a wise and humane film that comes to a strange but quietly astonishing conclusion. After working in TV and making a solid debut with The Deadly Companions (1961), Peckinpah really hit his stride with his second film, a supremely assured western that tapped into the elegiac strain that became his hallmark in the genre. Veteran icons Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are the uneasily paired old friends tasked with transporting gold down from a rough mining town, scene of a disturbingly riotous wedding. 'All I want is to enter my house justified,' intones McCrea's Steve Judd, laying down a marker for all those Peckinpah protagonists trying to make it through a broken world with a modicum of integrity. There is vivid cinematography by Lucien Ballard, in his first of five collaborations with Peckinpah. After failing with Major Dundee and then getting fired from The Cincinnati Kid, Peckinpah found himself in the wilderness, his reputation partly restored by the deeply moving TV drama Noon Wine. But the zeitgeist of the late 1960s – the war in Vietnam, political assassinations and the collapse of screen censorship – suited Peckinpah's temperament and appetite for pushing boundaries. When he got his chance to return to a big screen project, he produced his masterpiece, a western that called time on the genre while inaugurating a new era of cinema. The Wild Bunch became notorious for the unprecedentedly bloody gun battles that bookend the film; viewed today, the violence hardly seems excessive or gratuitous, more of a corrective to the hundreds of films that had airbrushed the harsh realities of the west. It is also superbly choreographed, thanks to Lou Lombardo's pioneering and hugely influential editing techniques: rapid cutting and varied frame rates, including those slow-motion death spasms that became a Peckinpah staple. What is just as striking is how unpleasant so many of the characters are: the eponymous bunch are reprehensible outlaws, indifferent to the collateral damage their exploits cause, trailed by a loutish posse and locked in a fatal embrace with a brutish Mexican general. Yet somehow we root for the ruthless, brooding Pike Bishop (a sensationally good William Holden) and his comrades as their options narrow and they search for some kind of morality and meaning in the dying days of the old west.
