The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Elliott Gould and Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye

Philip Marlowe: Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade: Nina van Pallandt
Roger Wade: Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine: Mark Rydell
Dr. Verringer: Henry Gibson
Harry: David Arkin
Terry Lennox: Jim Bouton
Jo Ann Eggenweiler: Jo Ann Brody

Director: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: John Williams

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's loopy take on the myth of the hardboiled private eye, holds up well today, thanks to Elliott Gould's performance as Philip Marlowe. A long way from the world-weary, cynical Marlowes of Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, Gould's version of the character is a guy who will go out in the middle of the night to buy food for his cat and will stop dead in the middle of the street for a dog that refuses to get out of the way of his car. Not that he's a softy, exactly. He's not above meting out his own brand of punishment -- a bullet to the gut -- for someone who's eluded the law. It's just that he sees the world as a messed-up place and feels sympathy for its innocents: mainly, cats and dogs. Otherwise, there are few innocents in the circles Marlowe finds himself caught up in. He smokes incessantly, even though no one else around him does, thinking nothing of lighting up -- often from the butt of a previous cigarette -- before he enters someone else's space. He smokes so much that it's surprising he has the wind to chase Eileen Wade's car on foot for several blocks. The plot, as so often in adaptations of Raymond Chandler, doesn't matter so much as the attitudes on display, Marlowe's as well as the various people who are trying to prevent him from uncovering their secrets. Altman indulges himself in his usual overlapping, improvised dialogue, especially in group scenes like the one at the L.A. police station or the ones at which Marlowe is surrounded by gangster Marty Augustine and his henchmen. (One of whom is played by the unbilled and mute but indomitably there Arnold Schwarzenegger.) There are some great set pieces, such as the horrifying scene in which Marty Augustine smashes a Coke bottle in his girlfriend's face, or the attempt of Marlowe and Eileen to rescue Roger from the crashing surf -- with the nice touch that the Wades' Weimaraner fetches Roger's cane from the waves. There's some entertaining filigree around the narrative edges, like the gaggle of nubile starlets who live next door to Marlowe. And there's some offbeat casting that, for once, works: Nina van Pallandt, whose chief claim to fame is that she was hoaxer Clifford Irving's mistress and ratted on him about his fake Howard Hughes autobiography, and Jim Bouton, the ballplayer whose behind-the-scenes book Ball Four tattled on the misbehavior of idols like Mickey Mantle. Leigh Brackett, who collaborated on the screenplay for Bogart's The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), is the credited screenwriter, and apparently did shape the plot for Altman, but the dialogue has that off-the-cuff, on-the-set character of most of the director's films. John Williams's title theme, sometimes with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, is wittily deployed throughout the movie, as doorbell chimes or supermarket Muzak, and in various arrangements, including one for the municipal band of the Mexican town of Tepotzlan.

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Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)

Tsuyoshi Kinoshita and Tetsuo Abe in Boy

Toshio Omura: Tetsuo Abe
Takeo Omura: Fumio Watanabe
Takeko Taniguchi: Akiko Koyama
Peewee: Tsuyoshi Kinoshita

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura
Cinematography: Seizo Sengen, Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

We meet the 10-year-old title character of Nagisa Oshima's Boy when he's playing hide-and-seek with imaginary friends -- the only kind he'll make in the course of the film -- around a war memorial. We don't even learn his name, Toshio, until the end of the film: His family simply refers to him as "the boy." They are on the down and out in increasingly prosperous Japan: The father, Takeo, is a disabled veteran who has married for a second time and fathered a child, known as "Peewee," with Toshio's stepmother, Takeko. They have cut off ties with their extended family, and when Toshio mentions his grandparents he's told they don't want to see them. They make a living by fraud: Takeko runs into the street to fake being hit by cars, and Takeo bullies the motorists into paying him off instead of calling the police. At a certain point, the parents realize that drivers would be even more willing to pay up if they think they've hit a child, and Toshio agrees to become the pretend victim. They travel around Japan to avoid detection -- too many incidents in one location would cause the police to get wise -- and Oshima's film takes us on this unsentimental journey, going as far as the northernmost point of the country in Hokkaido. The parents squabble constantly, especially when Takeko gets pregnant and decides not to have an abortion, all of which begins to take its toll on Toshio. He runs away several times, always to return: His stepmother gives him cash, to his father's annoyance, so once he tries to buy a ticket to where his grandparents live, but finding himself short of cash he goes only partway, then play-acts a meeting with them before returning to his family. Oshima directs this story, drawn from an actual case of an accident-faking family, with as much detachment as he can muster, but the pathos is inherent to the story, especially since the point of view is that of Toshio. A young non-professional, recruited for the film from an orphanage, Tetsuo Abe gives a remarkable performance, maintaining a precocious stoicism through the worst experiences, but also revealing that there is still a child behind that persona.

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Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Peter Chatel in Fox and His Friends

Franz Biberkopf: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Eugen Thiess: Peter Chatel
Max: Karlheinz Böhm
Philip: Harry Baer
Hedwig: Christiane Maybach
Wolf Thiess: Adrian Hoven
Eugen's Mother: Ulla Jacobsson

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Hohoff
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

I have a feeling that Fox and His Friends seems much less exotic or sensational to viewers today than it did in the mid-1970s, given the steady movement of depictions of gay men into mainstream entertainment culture. At the time it created outrage, not just from defenders of the heterosexual norm but also from the gay community, which found much of it distorted and unflattering. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder's story is not about being gay, it's about being exploited, about mistaking predation for love. Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf, known as "Fox" from his gig as "Fox the Talking Head" in a sleazy carnival act, is a classic naïf who is taken for all he's worth -- which is the 500,000 Deutschmarks (a bit under $125,000 in the day) he won in the lottery. Fassbinder the director doesn't make it clear that the well-dressed guys Franz meets after one of them, Max, picks him up outside a public lavatory, are intentionally trying to fleece him, until Eugen, whose father's printing business is in financial trouble, sees a way to persuade Franz to rescue the company with a sizable investment and promises of part ownership of the firm. It could be, of course, that Eugen just gets a kick out of sleeping with the working class Franz. But he throws over his current lover, Philip, and takes the rough-hewn, slightly homely Franz into his home and bed. Is Eugen telling the truth when he tells Franz that he's being kicked out of his apartment for being gay? It would be entirely plausible in the day and time. Or is it a lie that gives Eugen an opportunity to persuade Franz to buy a posh new apartment, and to furnish it with opulent antiques from Max's shop. And to go along with Franz's new image as a haute bourgeois businessman, he of course needs new clothes from Philip's fashionable shop. None of this exploitation feels premeditated except in hindsight, as Franz becomes Eliza Doolittle to Eugen's Henry Higgins -- though with less overt success. The resulting film is a superb tragicomedy, one of Fassbinder's best films, I think. Fassbinder turns out to be as good an actor as he is a writer and director, giving Franz just the right blend of naïveté and street smarts. I think the ending of the film is a shade heavy-handed, but the rest of it is full of extraordinary satiric moments: The horrifying scene in which Eugen brings Franz to dinner with his parents. The vacation in Morocco, where the man* Eugen and Franz pick up on the streets is refused entrance to the Holiday Inn Marrakech -- though wouldn't a pretentious bourgeois like Eugen have chosen a tonier hotel? -- because it doesn't admit Arabs. (The employee refusing the entrance, himself an Arab, suggests that if they want boys, he could provide some from the hotel staff.) And the moment of truth in which Franz realizes he's been conned is shattering. Michael Ballhaus's vivid color cinematography is complemented by Kurt Raab's production design, especially in the garishly overdressed apartment which includes a chandelier hanging so low that guests have to walk around it, that Eugen puts together with the most expensive pieces from Max's antique shop. Only after Eugen and Franz break up does Eugen reveal that he hates the place: He has clearly condescended to what he thinks an uncouth working class guy would think is the height of fashion.

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*Played by El Hedi ben Salem, the star of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), who had been deported to Morocco after a bar fight in Germany. Brigitte Mira, ben Salem's co-star in that film, also has a cameo as the shopkeeper who originally denies Franz admittance to her store to validate his lottery ticket until the suave Max flatters her into it.

Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Yusuke Kawazu and Miyuki Kuwano in Cruel Story of Youth

Makoto: Miyuki Kuwano
Kiyoshi: Yusuke Kawazu
Yuki: Yoshiko Kuga
Dr. Akimoto: Fumio Watanabe
Horio: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Music: Riichiro Manabe

In addition to the shamelessly exploitative title Naked Youth, Cruel Story of Youth has also been released as A Story of the Cruelties of Youth. So is it the story that's cruel or the youth in it? Those who know Japanese can probably tell me which is closer to the original title, Seishun Zankoku Monogotari, but I suspect the ambiguity is intentional. It's a cruel story about cruel young people, with the usual implication that society -- postwar, consumerist, America-influenced Japan -- is to blame for the cruelties inflicted upon and by them. With its hot pops of color and unsparing widescreen closeups, the film puts us uncomfortably close to its young protagonists, Makoto and Kiyoshi. Makoto is just barely out of adolescence -- Miyuki Kuwano was 18 when the film was made -- but carelessly determined to grow up fast. She hangs out in bars and cadges rides with middle-aged salarymen until the night when one of them decides to take her to a hotel instead of her home. When she refuses, he tries to rape her. But a young passerby intervenes and beats the man, threatening to take him to the police until the man hands over a walletful of money. The next day, Makoto and her rescuer, Kiyoshi, meet up to spend the money together. He's just a bit older -- Yusuke Kawazu was 25, three years younger than the film's director, Nagisa Oshima -- and over the course of their day together on a river he slaps her around, pushes her into the water and taunts her when she can't swim, and seduces her with his mockery of her inquisitiveness about sex. When he doesn't call her again, she seeks him out and they become lovers. They also become criminals: She goes back to her game of hooking rides with salarymen and he follows them, choosing a moment when the men start to get handsy with Makoto -- sometimes she provokes them to do so -- to beat and rob them. Naturally, things don't get better from here on out, especially after Makoto gets pregnant. We can object to the film's sentimental attempt to redeem Kiyoshi, who starts out as an abusive young thug but is transformed by love, and there's some awkward coincidence plotting, like an abortionist who turns out to be Makoto's sister's old boyfriend. But Oshima's portrait of a lost generation has some of the power of the American films that inspired it, Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), as well as the French New Wave films about the anomie of the young by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. It was only Oshima's second feature, but it signaled the start of a major career.

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A Royal Scandal (Otto Preminger, 1946)

Charles Coburn, William Eythe, and Tallulah Bankhead in A Royal Scandal

Catherine the Great: Tallulah Bankhead
Chancellor Nicolai Ilyitch: Charles Coburn
Lt. Alexei Chernoff: William Eythe
Countess Anna Jaschikoff: Anne Baxter
Marquis de Fleury: Vincent Price
Capt. Sukov: Mischa Auer
Gen. Ronsky: Sig Ruman

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Bruno Frank
Based on a play by Lajos Biró and Melchior Lengyel
Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller
Costume design: René Hubert

Sometimes it's better not to know too much about a movie, for example the fact that A Royal Scandal was to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Greta Garbo almost made one of her many rumored comebacks as Catherine the Great. Might have been tends to distract us from what was: a more-than-passable comedy about the goings-on in the court of the Empress of all the Russias. It was a notorious flop, however, and essentially ended any hopes Tallulah Bankhead might have had for screen stardom after her much-praised performance in Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944). The film was savaged by the often unreliable but enormously influential Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: He called it "oddly dull and generally witless," though he faulted the script rather than Bankhead and the cast. I still think that if you go into A Royal Scandal with diminished expectations, you can find some fun in it. True, the script drags a little, and the central palace intrigue -- a plot to overthrow the empress -- is rather muddled in the setup. But it has some clever lines, and it has Bankhead and Charles Coburn to deliver them. William Eythe, a kind of second-string Tyrone Power, handles well his role as the naive soldier captivated by the empress, showing some shrewd comic timing, and Anne Baxter, as his fiancee and Catherine's lady-in-waiting, represses her tendency to overact. The faults in the film are generally more due to the director than the script. In Lubitsch's hands the romance might have been wittier and the comic-opera complications of the plot more effervescent. Otto Preminger, who took over after Lubitsch suffered a heart attack, was not the man for the job. As he showed with his first big hit, Laura (1944), Preminger was greatly gifted at handling scheming nasties and noirish perversities, but he was never one for costume-drama frivolities. What success he has with A Royal Scandal comes from giving a capable cast the reins.

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Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)

Monsieur Hulot: Jacques Tati
Martine: Natalie Pascaud
The Aunt: Micheline Rolla
Englishwoman: Valentine Camax
Hotel Proprietor: Lucien Frégis
Waiter: Raymond Carl

Director: Jacques Tati
Screenplay: Pierre Aubert, Jacques Lagrange, Henri Marquet, Jacques Tati
Cinematography: Jacques Mercanton, Jean Mousselle
Music: Alain Romans

One of the delights of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is that Hulot himself is part of an ensemble. It's not just a showcase for Jacques Tati's gifts as a physical comedian. While Hulot is the presumed focus of the movie, with his stiff-legged bouncing gait and his pipe-forward ambling, the world around him is as sweetly eccentric as he is. From the opening scenes with the holiday-bound crowds rushing from one railway platform to the other, confused by the comically garbled announcements, to the sardine-packed bus whose driver discovers a small boy thrusting his head up between the spokes of the steering wheel, Tati the director swiftly establishes the satiric thrust of the film: the bourgeoisie determined to have fun even if it kills them. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is not gut-bustingly funny. Instead it's an assemblage of drolleries: slapstick moments like Hulot getting shut up in a folding canoe and being mistaken for a shark, mixed with smile-inducing bits like the strolling couple, she cheerfully leading him on excursions he clearly doesn't enjoy, as when she delightedly picks up shells, cooing over their beauty, which he tosses away once her back is turned. All of it is sweetened by a skillfully crafted soundtrack, from Hulot's wheezing and rattling auto to the irruptions of radio broadcasts in the hotel to the poink of the swinging door at the entrance to the dining room. I happen to think that the restored 114-minute version, assembled by Tati before his death, may be a bit too long, but there are many who can't get too much Hulot.

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Coup de Grâce (Volker Schlöndorff, 1976)

Margarethe von Trotta in Coup de Grâce

Erich von Lhomond:  Matthias Habich
Sophie de Reval: Margarethe von Trotta
Conrad de Reval: Rüdiger Kirschstein
Aunt Praskovia: Valeska Gert
Dr. Paul Rugen: Marc Eyraud
Michel: Hannes Kaetner
Grigori Loew: Franz Morak
Franz von Aland: Frederik von Zischy
Volkmar: Mathieu Carrière

Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Screenplay: Geneviève Dormann, Margarethe von Trotta, Jutta Brückner
Based on a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar
Cinematography: Igor Luther
Music: Stanley Myers
Film editing: Jane Seitz

Coup de Grâce is a film as chilly as its setting: a castle in Latvia in the bleak winter of 1919-1920, as the Bolsheviks begin to overwhelm their opponents in the Baltic states, many of whom are Germans determined to defeat the communists. The castle belongs to Conrad de Reval, who has gathered there some of the remnants of his forces, including his friend Erich von Lhomond. It becomes apparent very early, especially from the glances between Conrad and Erich, that they may be more than just friends. It's not so apparent to Conrad's sister, Sophie, who is still living in the castle along with her aged aunt. Sophie makes a play for Conrad, but it's only partially successful. To spite and to tantalize him, she begins to have affairs with some of the other men staying at the castle. Meanwhile, the castle comes under attack from the Bolsheviks, some of whom are also Sophie's friends. Margarethe von Trotta gives a complex portrayal of Sophie, but is somewhat undermined by the intricacies of the relationships among the various characters and the difficulty of sorting out their several backstories. We don't know enough about her, or Erich or Conrad, to get a full sense of why any of them behave as they do, other than the moral fatigue of having fought the war for so long. In the end, the film becomes most memorable for the performance of Valeska Gert, whose grotesque and macabre Aunt Praskovia steals every scene in which she appears. In the 1920s, Gert had been a silent film actress and a cabaret performer -- she would have fit right in with the "divine decadence" of the Kit Kat Kub in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972). Although Coup de Grâce has a strong final scene, the slackness of the narrative thread in the film deprives it of some of its impact. Still, good performances, an effective recreation of the historical period,  and the impressive black and white cinematography by Igor Luther make it worth seeing.

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Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)

George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis in Solaris

Chris Kelvin: George Clooney
Rheya: Natascha McElhone
Gordon: Viola Davis
Snow: Jeremy Davies
Gibarian: Ulrich Tukur

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Steven Soderbergh
Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
Cinematography: Steven Soderberg (as Peter Andrews)
Production design: Philip Messina
Music: Cliff Martinez
Film editing: Steven Soderbergh (as Mary Ann Bernard)

The self -- or the soul, if you will -- is made of memories. Which is why disorders of memory, like Alzheimer's, terrify us so: Who are we if we don't have our memories? Relationships, too, are made by memories -- or marred by the absence of shared ones, as Andrew Haigh demonstrated recently in 45 Years (2015). But what are you if you are made of someone else's memories? That's the provocative premise explored in this version of Stanslaw Lem's novel Solaris, directed, written, photographed, and edited by Steven Soderbergh. When it was released, it was widely regarded by some prestigious critics as too slow, as "ponderous and dreadful," as "opaque, self-indulgent, and just plain goofy." I don't know if the critical reaction has shifted over the past 15 years, but I think Soderbergh's Solaris is a worthy companion to the more critically lauded Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972). They attempt different things: Soderbergh a meditation on love, loss, and identity framed in the conventions of the sci-fi film, Tarkovsky a personal exploration of humankind's alienation from nature. If, as I tend to do, you prefer deeply personal filmmaking to Hollywood glossiness, you may prefer Tarkovsky, but I honor what Soderbergh -- a personal filmmaker working with Hollywood stars and conventions -- has achieved. The presence of George Clooney does tend to skew the film a bit, partly because Clooney, like all movie stars, has a fixed persona, and when he works against his type -- the handsome, wisecracking, invincible leading man -- people tend to feel their expectations have been frustrated and become dismissive. Would Soderbergh's Solaris have been critically better received if he had been able to cast his original choice for the role, the chameleonic Daniel Day-Lewis? Perhaps, but Clooney gives the role of Kelvin his considerable all, and I think it's one of his best performances. He's well supported by Natascha McElhone as Rheya, whose increasing horror at discovering she's not human but instead a being crafted out of Kelvin's memories of his dead wife is touchingly presented, and by Viola Davis as Gordon, who masks her terrors with a facade of toughness. We've seen Jeremy Davies do twitchy perhaps once too often, but it works here against the more controlled personae presented by Clooney and Davis's characters. Soderbergh also wisely keeps the identification of what (or who) Solaris is -- a planet or some kind of galactic sentient entity? -- one of the film's unsolved mysteries. To go too far into explanations would have sent the film into routine science-fiction territory. Cliff Martinez's musical score neatly supports the otherworldliness of the film.

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Les Misérables (Raymond Bernard, 1934)

Harry Baur in Les Misérables

Jean Valjean/Champmathieu: Harry Baur
Javert: Charles Vanel
Fantine: Florelle
Cosette: Josseline Gaël
Cosette as a child: Gaby Triquet
Marius: Jean Servais
Éponine: Orane Demazis
Éponine as a child: Gilberte Savary
Thénardier: Charles Dullin
Mme. Thénardier: Marguerite Moreno
Gavroche: Émile Genevois
Enjolras: Robert Vidalin
Grantaire: Paul Azaïs
M. Gillenormand: Max Dearly
Monseigneur Myriel: Henry Krauss

Director: Raymond Bernard
Screenplay: Raymond Bernard, André Lang
Based on a novel by Victor Hugo
Cinematography: Jules Kruger
Production design: Lucien Carré, Jean Perrier
Music: Arthur Honegger

Harry Baur gives one of the great film performances in Les Misérables, beginning with a tour de force in the first installment, subtitled Tempest in a Skull, in which he plays not only the brutish convict Jean Valjean and his first assumed identity, the benevolent mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, M. Madeleine, but also the addle-brained Champmathieu, wrongly fingered as the fugitive Valjean. Baur's Valjean is not the dashing, younger heroic figure embodied by Fredric March in Richard Boleslawski's 1935 Hollywood version or Hugh Jackman in Tom Hooper's 2012 film of the musical. March and Jackman had to work hard to suggest Valjean's hardened convict past, but Baur looks the part. He cleans up nicely, though. Raymond Bernard's version is closer to the epic Victor Hugo novel than the later adaptations, which necessitates its miniseries length: a 281-minute total run time, divided into three films. Trilogies typically sag in the middle: In Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, for example, The Two Towers (2002) is weaker than The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003). But Bernard manages to give each part fairly equal heft, concentrating on Valjean's transformation in Tempest in a Skull, on the thwarted manipulations of the titular couple in The Thénardiers, and on the fight on the barricades in Freedom, Dear Freedom. This is not to say that there isn't some slackness within each installment: Bernard, like many directors who mastered their skills making silent films, doesn't seem fully at home with sound even yet; there are scenes in which the actors seem to be holding a pose a beat or two longer than necessary. And despite Arthur Honegger's distinguished score, Bernard allows some scenes that could use the "sweetening" of background music to go without it. In The Thénardiers, for example, the plot to ensnare Valjean and the ensuing fight scene could have used some tension-and-release music, but the score only begins, rather abruptly, when the lovers, Marius and Cosette, meet. But as a totality, Les Misérables is a triumph, and apparently a little-known one, to judge by the fact that it doesn't come up as one of the top results in an IMDb search. Jules Kruger's cinematography gives an expressionist tilt to some of its scenes, and the production design, from the slummy haunts of the Thénardiers to the opulence of Gillenormand's mansion, is superb. But most of all it has Baur and a tremendous supporting cast, particularly Florelle* as a very touching Fantine, and Émile Genevois as a memorable Gavroche. Charles Vanel's Javert is not humanized sufficiently in the script, I think, so that his suicide comes as something of an anticlimax, but he gives it all the implacable menace the role allows him. But it's Baur who carries the film as impressively as he carries Jean Servais's Marius through the sewers in the climax.

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*Her full name was Odette Elisa Joséphine Marguerite Rousseau, and she was occasionally billed as Odette Florelle. It's too bad that today her screen name sounds like that of an air freshener.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett: James Coburn
Billy the Kid: Kris Kristofferson
Alias: Bob Dylan
Sheriff Kip McKinney: Richard Jaeckel
Sheriff Baker: Slim Pickens
Mrs. Baker: Katy Jurado
Lemuel: Chill Wills
Chisum: Barry Sullivan
Gov. Lew Wallace: Jason Robards
Ollinger: R.G. Armstrong
Eno: Luke Askew
Poe: John Beck
Alamosa Bill: Jack Elam
Maria: Rita Coolidge
Bowdre: Charles Martin Smith
Luke: Harry Dean Stanton

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Screenplay: Rudy Wurlitzer
Cinematography: John Coquillon
Music: Bob Dylan

With its laid-back pace punctuated by moments of violence, not to mention its soundtrack by Bob Dylan, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid may be the ultimate stoner Western. After being mutilated by MGM -- the credits list six film editors -- it was savaged by critics on its first release, but the release on video of Sam Peckinpah's original preview version in 1988 caused a reevaluation of the film, with some now calling it a masterpiece. I wouldn't go that far: To my mind the narrative is still too elliptical and the inspiration -- rewriting a myth -- too commonplace. But it has moments of brilliance that transcend its flaws, such as the beautiful sequence of the death of Sheriff Baker, with its fine use of the iconic performers Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado and the underscoring with Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." James Coburn, always an underrated actor in his prime, is wonderful as Pat Garrett, and while Kris Kristofferson was never much of an actor, he and Coburn play well against each other. Dylan was no actor, either, but he's used well here as the enigmatic figure who lets himself be known as "Alias," and the scene in which Garrett forces him to read the labels of canned goods while he toys with other members of Billy's gang is nicely done. The gallery of character actors both old (Chill Wills, Jack Elam) and new (Charles Martin Smith, Harry Dean Stanton) is welcome. Its post-censorship era's exploitation of women -- there are an awful lot of bared breasts, though we also get a fleeting butt-shot of Kristofferson -- is overdone, and it certainly wouldn't earn any seal of approval from the American Humane Society after the scene in which live chickens are used for target practice.

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