Watch The Left Handed Gun For Free

Absolutely brilliant

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Arthur Penn's debut film was scorned in 1958, but has since gained recognition as a forerunner of the Revisionist Westerns that emerged in the 1960s.The original ad calls Billy a 'teenage desperado' and Penn's film gets the manic side to young Billy the Kid, wild at heart in a 1950s delinquent style, unrestrained, juvenile, engaged freely in bad boy antics, almost a clown. Billy is really the "Kid" in Penn's version - cast off from family and home, living with a "gang", as it were, losing his father figure (here, almost as soon as he meets him), then running loose and wild. The spirit of adolescence infuses the film's initial sections, but Billy becomes disillusioned quickly, and almost invites his own downfall without fully comprehending much of anything in the world around him.Surprisingly, as quoted in the movie, the Biblical phrase "through a glass darkly" comes to accurately suit the world-view of Billy - and several later Arthur Penn figures in the 1960s.His story as presented here (from an original television treatment by Gore Vidal) contradicts the dime-novel frontier legend that an eager writer (Hurd Hatfield) fabricates as the film goes along, manufacturing "fake news" for his own profit. Ideas are introduced into the Western that no one has yet dared to think about - the possibility of a gay frontier character in Hurd Hatfield's Moultrie, the links with James Dean's kind of 'angst', the macabre, almost comic nature of the sheer act of sudden dying. As will become significant in Penn's cinema, violent deaths here are prolonged, anguished, senseless; there is no clean, quick or merciful way of dying. Perhaps the French critics who praised the film were more attuned to the visually cinematic touches - anguish accentuated by close shot, rambling episodic structure, heightened treatment of violent acts, clash of horseplay with sudden deadly gunplay, the abrupt changes in mood and tone.Without a fully realized screenplay and with alleged studio interference (particularly noticeable in the ending sections), The Left-Handed Gun leaves us only partially satisfied, but still impressed by Penn's creative disregard for established conventions.Well worth a look for its times-they-are-a-changing attitude towards both the Western genre and America's founding myths.

The Left handed Gun (1958) ** (out of 4) William Bonney (Paul Newman) is the subject of this Western who seeks revenge for the death of a friend and becomes known as Billy the Kid. As he goes for his revenge the young gun slinger meets Pat Garrett (John Dehner) and the two strike up a friendship.THE LEFT HANDED GUN wasn't one of the first attempts by Hollywood to tell the Billy the Kid story. Countless Westerns had been done on the infamous Bonney but this one here really doesn't work all that well. Of course, if one is interested in history then it's probably best that you really stay away from this as it's yet another sugar-coated version of the story that makes Bonney out to be a troubled but good guy.I personally don't care on how historically accurate the story is. What I care about is the entertainment factor and I think that is quite low here. It's really too bad something better wasn't done with the story because you have some good elements scattered throughout but sadly, in the end, it all adds up to nothing. I thought the B&W cinematography was extremely good and I also thought we got a good score to listen to. Dehner really steals the show as Pat Garrett and I really loved the actor's outburst at the wedding.You'd think that Billy the Kid would be a good role for Newman but he seems a tad bit lost in the setting. He gives a good performance but I think he probably would have been better served in another film. The character just never fully gets explored and the actor is left without too much to do. THE LEFT HANDED GUN will be worth watching if you're a die-hard fan of Newman but others should check out a different version of the story.

When the film began, I suddenly had very low hopes for it. That's because the opening tune was simply horrible--with bad lyrics and a cheesy quality that made me cringe. However, I assumed it would get a lot better. After all, almost anything Paul Newman did is well worth seeing (other than his first film, "The Silver Chalice"--which Newman himself often mocked when asked about it). Well, while this isn't as bad as "The Silver Chalice", it is pretty bad.The biggest problem with the film is the direction. It seems that instead of making a simple western, the actors had been told to act as if they were at a workshop given by The Actor's Studio--and each of them was trying to out-emote each other. Imagine a film where EVERYONE is method acting and all trying to do it more broadly and noticeably than the last guy! Subtle, it was not--in fact, it was seriously funny at times. There were just so many scenes that were overacted horribly. I especially loved the death scenes and when folks got mad because they REALLY died spectacularly or got insanely angry! I especially loved Pat Garrett's (John Dehner) reactions in the film--they were downright funny.The other big problem is that as a historical piece, the film bore no resemblance to reality! Like a lot of bad westerns, this one purports to be about an infamous western bandit (in this case, Billy the Kid) but isn't his life in the least. And, combined with the crap acting and direction, the film is just a complete mess. So, unless you like bad films or have no taste at all, steer clear of this one. Even with Newman, it's a dog.

Like many 1950s films, this western tended to slant on the melodramatic side although it has its share of many elements. The actors and their characters are mostly overwrought and can get on your nerves by the halfway point of the 102-minute movie. The directing, though, is very good and the photography is top-shelf. As usual, Warner Brothers has put out a very good DVD transfer of this 52-year-old movie. It was issued as part of the "Paul Newman Collection."Everyone knows about Paul Newman, who plays the lead character "Billy The Kid." However, I found Lita Milan and John Dehner the most interesting. Milan was a new face and not someone a lot of people know about and Dehner played against-type and played the most mature person in the story.Milan as "Celia" will get the males' attention, especially if they're into sultry, striking-looking females. According to the IMDb mini biography here, shortly after making this film married the son of Trujillo, a famous Dominican Republic dictator, and that was the end of her screen career. Several years later, her husband took over the country when his father was assassinated, and a few years later they had to flee the volatile Latin American country. Wow, it sounds like she led a life that wasn't far away from the violent world of "Billy the Kid," the subject of this film.It was kind of odd seeing Dehner, who played a lot of bad guys on TV westerns of the 1950s, playing good-guy "Pat Garrett," a friend of William Bonney ("Billy the Kid") for most of the movie. Whether he turned out to be "good" in the end, is your call. Actually I thought Dehner did the best job in here and played the best character, one of the few that was subdued and tolerable. Newman and his buddies in this film were all loud, immature and stupid, which is how they were supposed to be portrayed, but they are almost "cartoonish." The story has its ups and downs and isn't bad overall, but not something that I'd watch a second time.By the way, "Billy The Kid's" real life name was Henry McCarty (not "William Bonney," which was one of several alias he used. How much of this story is factual, I couldn't tell you but knowing Hollywood I wouldn't trust a lot of this to be exactly accurate. A