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The Worst Film Ever

Just what I expected

Just perfect...

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

A strange film that is alternately stiff and fluid. Johnny MacBrown is no kid--more like 30. His acting is fairly amateurish but some lines have been well-rehearsed. Outdoor scenes are impressive but the indoor scenes are pure early-talkie confinement. Beery and the subsidiary actors seem to have the talkie thing down pat. Some of the action scenes were probably more impressive in 70mm and the outdoor recording is very good considering the sound limitations. Nasty revenge storyline where Billy justifies his many killings, but he's sure a nice guy about it. There are many killings and lots of mayhem. Some of the comedy lines between Mr. Butterworth and Mr. Hatfield are incredibly corny considering the circumstances. "The Big Trail" is a much better film from the same year and is still available in its impressive 70mm version. You have to really like westerns to appreciate "Billy The Kid", but there are lots of devoted followers.

If you listen to the opening scenes from this early talkie from another room, as I did, you'll quail. The acting is broad and the dialog like spoken title cards. ("Say, he can't outgun me.") But visually, crude as it is, it's not at all painful.For one thing, limited use is made of the typical "Western" ranches and towns that we see constantly on television and in films like "High Noon." There's a town here alright, but it's just a couple of ramshackle buildings, evidently built for the purpose in Northridge, California, where you can still find dilapidated buildings. Some of the important scenes are shot on locations, including two national parks.For another, it sticks fairly closely to historical reality, at least until the ending, when the virtuous Billy the Kid (Johnny Mack Brown) gallops off into the sunset with his girl friend. I have only an elementary grasp of the Johnson County wars, but my understanding is concurrent with the plot. At least I recognized some of the important names -- McSween and Tunston, for instance.The acting is all over the place, dominated by the need to shout lines so they'll be picked up by the hidden microphones. Wallace Beery,as Pat Garett, is his usual hammy self; this time he's a sheriff determined to keep the law but he has a soft heart when it's called for. The bad guys are really BAD. Johnny Mack Brown in the principal role looks okay, I guess, although perhaps a bit older than he might be, but he can't utter a believable line. Russell Simpson does pretty well by the Scotsman McSween.But the values promoted by the film are problematic. Billy the Kid takes it upon himself to murder those who murdered his friends and employers. The most evil of the evildoers is killed in cold blood. This is a reflection of the chivalric code of the aristocratic plantation owners of the South, the Cavaliers who believed that a man settled his own problems. That's what the sociologist Max Weber called "traditional authority," not the "rational/legal authority" that civilization now lives under. Mix that element of Southern values with the greed and ruthlessness of the Northern Robber Barons and you get land wars with vengeful shoot outs.It's a curious blend, still in evidence today.

So OK this film has little to do with the real story of Billy the Kid, but director King Vidor gets the Lincoln County war (over land and cattle) pretty right. The location shooting for this talkie looks like New Mexico but not like the town of Lincoln. But Vidor captures the lawlessness and viciousness that drove the real-life events.Johnny Mack Brown (a big star at MGM) was still finding his way in talkies when he was cast here (against Vidor's wishes) as Billy. Brown was 26 years old, the veteran and more than a dozen silent films (working with MGM's top stars like Greta Garbo, Marion Davies, and Joan Crawford), and coming off one big hit talkie (COQUETTE with Mary Picford) and one flop (MONTANA MOON with Crawford). His Alabama accent would soon consign him pretty much to hundreds of westerns in film and on TV til the mid-60s.But here, Brown is a lanky, friendly, and brutally honest Billy who only kills when it's the right thing to do. His horror at the brutal murders of the unarmed McSween and Tunston drives his sense of right and honor. He's also sorta sweet on the would-be bride of Tunston (Kay Johnson).Pat Garrett (Wallace Beery) likes Billy but becomes sheriff. He knows his duty but he also knows the Billy the Kid legend is baloney. There's a terrific, long sequence when Garrett and his bunch burn out Billy and his men and pick them off one by one as they run from the burning house. It's a chilling scene but one can't doubt the honesty of it.Supporting players are an interesting mix here with Karl Dane as a cowboy who grunts a few unintelligible words, Roscoe Ates without his stutter, Russell Simpson, Frank Reicher, Chris-Pin Martin, and Blanche Frederici as the Widow McSween.But Brown and Beery take center stage and they are a terrific team. Beery is more subdued here than in many of his later talkies, and his rapport with Brown seems real. Brown is so likable as Billy it almost doesn't matter that as biography this is the bunk. Brown's dancing sequence is a highlight.

British homesteaders in Lincoln County, New Mexico, find that their best protection against the local murderous sheriff is a shy young cowboy called BILLY THE KID.Director King Vidor produced for MGM one of the first epic talkie Westerns, with plenty of action and violence and frequent musical forays to explore the new medium of sound. The acting is good and the authentic outdoor locations are expansive & eye-catching.In one of his best roles, Johnny Mack Brown portrays Billy as a quiet, dependable fellow, deadly with a gun but reluctant to boast or brag, attractive to the ladies and a determined seeker for justice over evil. Everything one could want in a Cowboy Hero. He's also just a little bit dull. This allows Wallace Beery, as Billy's friendly nemesis Pat Garrett, to steal the film, using his doughy face and shapeless body to great effect. Beery was right on the edge of becoming a major movie star and it was roles like this that would push him over the edge.Lovely Kay Johnson is on hand as the wife of unfortunate Russell Simpson, one of the men Billy initially defends, but the demands of her role are few and she gets to do little besides look worried. Silent comic star Karl Dane & champion stutterer Roscoe Ates portray friends of Simpson & Billy, and they are both welcome additions to the film. Dane, however, is given very little screen time, his thick accent obviously a problem for MGM.Silent screen cowboy William S. Hart acted as creative consultant on the film, but his only contribution seems to have been the loan to Johnny Mack Brown of a pistol which had once belonged to Billy.BILLY THE KID was originally filmed in the 70 mm widescreen Realife process (no copies are known to remain) with two very different endings - one for American theaters in which Billy eludes capture and one in which he is shot dead, for European audiences.***********************************In the film's written prologue, New Mexico's Governor R. C. Dillon admits to the movie's ‘liberties' with the truth. Indeed, there are few true facts in the film. Most radically altered is the character of Billy himself, who in reality seems to have been a particularly loathsome human specimen, unsavory & disagreeable in almost every way. But early in production MGM's Irving Thalberg realized the studio would have a hard time promoting a film about a disgusting murderer and he ordered a radical rewrite on Billy's biography, turning him into a pleasant, noble hombre. Good entertainment, bad history.There are a lot of ambiguities about Billy. We know he was born in New York City on 23 November, but both 1859 & 1860 have been cited for the year. We don't even know the guy's real name. Was it William H. Bonney, Jr., or Henry McCarty? (For awhile he muddied the waters further by calling himself Kid Antrim.) Billy's family had moved West, and after the death of his father Billy had travelled with his mother's new husband to the territory of New Mexico, ending up at Silver City in 1873.We may never know what toxic mixture of heredity & environment stained Billy's soul, but we do know that he became a hellion young. He claimed to have committed his first murder at the age of 12 - he would kill at least 27 men during his lifetime. Billy became involved in an outlaw gang that created havoc on both sides of the Mexican border, with robbery, murder & cattle rustling all part of the routine. At the end of the decade, Billy became a gun for hire in the so-called Lincoln County War, that particularly nasty confrontation between cattlemen, townsfolk & corrupt law officers.Billy ran a gang that killed a sheriff and a deputy, for which he was arrested by Pat Garrett in December of 1880. Billy was sentenced to hang, but during a daring escape on 28 April 1881, Billy murdered two more deputies before hightailing it out of town. After weeks on his trail, Garrett finally tracked Billy to a ranch house near Fort Sumner, N.M. and on 14 July Garrett killed him there. The punk was dead, but the legend was born.Patrick Floyd Garrett (born 5 June 1850) had been a cowboy & buffalo hunter in his youth and moved to Lincoln County in 1879, where he became deputy and then sheriff. After he killed Billy, Garrett became a rancher near Roswell, N.M. from 1882 until 1896. Returning to law enforcement, he became first the deputy and then the sheriff of Dona Ana County from 1896 until 1902. He was the collector of customs in El Paso, Texas from 1902-1906. Garrett then bought a horse ranch near Las Cruces, N.M., but a violent dispute over a lease left him gunned down in the road on 29 February 1908. A fellow named Wayne Brazel claimed Garrett drew on him first, a witness agreed it was self defense, and Brazel was let go. Garrett was 57 years old. It was a nasty way to die for the man who got Billy the Kid.