Peckinpah!

Fairly high billing for two scenes. Dylan said she was his inspiration for "Heaven's Door."

Bob really seems to have wandered into camera range for much of his role. Seeing it really didn't improve the 'Billy' Gere portion of I'm Not There.

Fairly high billing for two scenes.

There is a Spanish channel here in town that plays Garrett a few times a year. In their bumpers, Jurado is third billed after Coburn and Kristofferson.

I love that speech she gives to Lloyd Bridges in High Noon about the shoulders.

First time watching The Getaway tonight. I've got a bottle of wine to get me through the MacGraws.

they don't make PG movies like they used to, i tell you what

Or omelets like the kind McQueen makes in the first third.

the omelette of pent-up sexual frustration

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia ending with the machine gun firing at the viewer = damn dood.

kinda his most mysanthropic/nihilist movie

Perhaps mentioned upthread, but one of my favorite lines from any critic, ever, is Ebert describing Dylan in "Pat Garrett ..." as looking "as if he's the victim of a practical joke involving itching powder."

Ugg

RG Armstrong has passed away

Richard Brody on The Getaway

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/03/dvd-of-the-week-the-getaway.html

he picks some of my favorite scenes from that film. the shotgun sequence is probably my favorite thing of peckinpah's, full stop.

new book on Pat Garrett

http://nupress.northwestern.edu/titles/authentic-death-and-contentious-afterlife-pat-garrett-and-billy-kid

lol @ Dylan reading tincan labels scene

Watched "Ride the High Country", v enjoyable as far as fairly trad westerns go. lol'd at the bit early on where Judd takes Heck's gun out of his holster while he's ogling women.

RtHC is a stone fucking classic.

Convoy (his next to last feature?) newly out on BD/DVD.

I appreciated how much was crammed into it, lots of great little fluorishes and bit parts throughout. it doesn't get intense the way the best of his later work does, though that's not a knock against it, it's tone is different.

it doesn't get intense the way the best of his later work does

Disagree. All the wedding stuff is extremely creepy and intense.

it's creepy, but it's also punctuated by grotesque/comic elements

Scott and McCrea' chemistry is beautiful, some of the best I've seen b/w two guys on film.

*McCrea's.

the bit where they meet each other at the beginning w Scott in his fake wig+mustache+beard combo is v lol

Rewatch of The Wild Bunch in 35mm today (WB no longer has a decent 70mm print, apparently)... That is some *grizzled* cast (Holden looks way older than 50).

And the villainous general is the most well-regarded Mexican film director of all time.

And his lieutenant later had some directing success himself *ducks*

I've always wanted to read Fernandez's autobiography.

Alfonso Arau is the guy with the teeth, right?

Yup.

Never heard of this before: http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/28/284081430/latin-pride-swells-for-mystery-model-behind-oscar-statuette

Guess it is not an autobiography: http://cinemexicano.mty.itesm.mx/libros/indio_pistola.html

Saw a 35mm print of The Killer Elite last night; certainly no masterwork, but i thought it was a watchable, vicious 'hangout' movie. Caan is funny. The mouthpiece for the lefty politics is, if you can believe it, Burt Young.

Just saw the 'restored' Major Dundee. If you're at all interested in him you gotta see it, but man it feels lots longer than 136 mins. Heston is better than usual (as is often the case when he plays a prick) til he gets his existential crisis (enter the breasty Mexican women), the ensemble is good, but Richard Harris frequently reminds me of Dave SCTV Thomas doing him. Of primary interest as a Wild Bunch warmup.

agree w this take, although I would add that the racial/political subtext of the gang makes for a bunch of interesting scenes. It does feel much longer than 136 minutes, at one point during Heston's Mexican Holiday I started to wonder if the plot was just going to go some totally different direction and they were *never* actually going to get their Navajo bad guy. Wouldn't have minded if it did, I could happily watch Peckinpah scenes of Mexican villages for hours. Given the length I kinda wish some of the supporting roles (Ben Johnson for ex.) had been given more to do but enjoyable on the whole.

Haven't seen it. I mentioned J. Hoberman's The Dream Life on the Trump-film thread; I think Major Dundee was another of his key LBJ films, along with The Chase and The Alamo.

I watched The Getaway last night for the first time, another chapter in the Tarantino book. Looked good (Lucien Ballard), but it just seemed to meander along. Al Lettieri is so much better in The Godfather as Sollozzo. I liked the Slim Pickens ending, though, supposedly drastically different than the novel.

The Getaway is terrific when it sticks to the double-crossing and gunplay, less good with Lettieri’s kinda bizarre side plot. Though I think he was plenty good during this era, just a great performer of genuinely evil bastards. Of course it was his *only* era, he died in 1975 (only 47!)

MacGraw isn’t as bad here as people suggest, but she’s not really right for the part.

Mighty brutal and sexual for a PG film but it sure was a different era.

Kael used to be brutal with MacGraw--John Simon-level mean--so I was encouraged by the first 20-30 minutes where I thought she was pretty good. The longer the film went on, though, she started to lapse into that smirk that marked Goodbye, Columbus and Love Story. Tarantino's background on the making of the film is interesting--Bogdanovich as director?! And because of that, Cybill Shepherd instead of MacGraw.

Not quite the bloodbath of The Wild Bunch, but yeah, PG is crazy.

MacGraw’s too much of an innocent for the role, part of the plot really hinges on her winning back Doc’s trust when she’s clearly eminently trustworthy, and was pushed into a spot where she shouldn’t have been w/Ben Johnson’s character. Of course her character was also therefore easily pushed around, in this characterization, so maybe that was the peckinpah preference. To have a woman more easily put in her place. This flick doesn’t have the best sexual politics obv, the less said about Sally Struthers here the better.

Didn't have the film career she should have. She was good (or at least suited the role) in All in the Family; in The Getaway and, even more so, Five Easy Pieces, anyone could have filled those roles.

Have you seen The Outfit, omar? I posted about it in the Duvall thread--thought it was sneaky good.

I watched The Outfit about a month ago. That was a very fucked-up movie, and man, when Robert Duvall is the best-looking man in the cast you're talking about some serious Early Seventies Ugly.

https://www.criterion.com/films/29028-pat-garrett-and-billy-the-kid

THREE CUTS!

I miss James Coburn, one of a kind

The “Turner” preview is all you really need. Just perfection. Saw it in 35mm with Charles Martin Smith and others who worked on it

The only problems with that one is the lack of lead vocal on the "Heaven's Door" scene and failure to include the bit with Garrett's wife.

The 2005 (?) redux fails right of the gate by not using the opening with Garrett's murder. Supposedly those were Peckinpah's wishes. If true, he was more far gone than we thought. Hopefully the new version fixes that.

From FB:

The preview cut that will be available on The Criterion Collection's upcoming release of PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID is not Turner's, but Sam Peckinpah's final and never before seen preview cut, recovered and restored specifically for this release -- the closest we have to a director's cut of the film that we will ever get. Its 2k restoration will be included in the blu-ray, along with a 4k (and tweaked) 50th-anniversary restoration of the final cut and the theatrical cut.

Here's the story: A "heist" was engineered to get Peckinpah's final preview print out of the projection room where it was screened for MGM execs. Sam was walking off the picture, and a Watergate-esque "break-in" was orchestrated by those who felt that Sam's preview needed to be preserved. Unfortunately, the clean up crew didn't realize that it was an interlock print. Sound and picture were separate, so they grabbed the picture and left the sound behind whose retrieval required a second heist. But all missions were ultimately successful. When Sam was presented with the print, he was so paranoid that MGM was going to come after it that he put a fake title ("The Racquet Club;" pictured) on the cans and leader. It's never been released until now, because it was among Sam's personal prints, not in the studio vaults.

When Michael Chaiken reached out to me on behalf of Criterion about their restoration and upcoming release of PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID, I got him in contact with Sam's friend and archivist Don Hyde, who pointed them in the right direction to locate and restore Sam's preview cut. I also encouraged them to contact Mike Siegel, who ended up making a documentary for this release, and connected Michael with Jeff Slater, who contributed from his abundance of archival material for the special features and provided additional contacts for supplemental material.

In short, this was a team effort -- and we are so grateful for Criterion's collaborative spirit to ensure that we did right both by Sam and all of his fans who have waited so patiently for its release. Now it's up to us to honor their work and procure our copies, which releases on 7/2/24 and can be pre-ordered here: https://www.criterion.com/films/29028-pat-garrett-and-billy-the-kid

only seen it once, can't remember the version it was. hopefully one of those cuts features an extended scene of bob dylan's character just reciting canned goods.

Walter Chaw on the Garrett Variations: https://www.rogerebert.com/features/pat-garrett-and-billy-the-kid-criterion-blu-ray-4k

The Masses Demanded It, So Imprint Delivers...Convoy on 4K

https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=35077

One treasured item I was able to rescue from my mom's house was this photo from the Birmingham News, May 1940

https://live.staticflickr.com/8110/8530608120_e69e10042e_h.jpg

On the left R.G. Armstrong. On the right, my dad.

Centennial Today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MMPfFExul4

Watched Pat Garrett yesterday (second time, I think) for a Zoom on Dylan films. No idea which of the 17 versions it was--a two-disc reissue on DVD from 10 or 20 years ago.

Quite liked it--perfect film for the moment.