Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) Criterion 50th Anniversary 1080p BluRay x265 HEVC FLAC-SARTRE
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Sam Peckinpah’s cycle of genre-redefining westerns came to a close with this blood and dust-caked elegy for the American West, which marries his renegade style with a fatalistic sense of finality. As newly minted lawman Pat Garrett (James Coburn) stalks the outlaw Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) across the plains, their old friendship is twisted into rivalry, and mythic ideals of freedom come up against an emerging ruling-class order—all to the strains of a haunting soundtrack by Bob Dylan (who also appears as the mercurial Alias). Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid - presented here for the first time in three separate versions - stands as perhaps the maverick auteur’s richest, most mature work, a world-weary ballad that bears the solemn weight of history passing into legend.
In the early 2000’s, Peckinpah scholar Paul Seydor, who had seen Peckinpah’s private cut of the film, attempted to assemble a version of the film that would resemble the “best of both worlds,” using the higher-quality footage from the negative and the cut scenes included in the Turner Cut, as well as several scenes included in neither. Having known Peckinpah personally (Seydor even dated his daughter!), he wanted to create a version that would most accurately resemble Peckinpah’s original vision. However, this 115-minute-long cut was rushed and underfunded. As a result, Seydor was able to rearrange the structure of the film to fit Peckinpah’s version, but used a number of cuts that had been taken from the theatrical version and had never been meant for release; there were also issues with the audio. Seydor has for almost twenty years expressed a desire to retry this experiment with better funding, finally resulting in... the 2023 50th Anniversary Edition. Produced by the Criterion Collection with the collaboration of Seydor and Spottiswoode, this version is an attempt to combine the editing from Peckinpah's preview cuts with the original materials and what Seydor and Spottiswoode believe to have been Peckinpah's ultimate intentions. It is 117 minutes long, longer than the 2005 Special Edition but shorter than either preview version.
- Hogfather@Criterion Forum
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