DIRECTOR: Sam Peckinpah
PRODUCER: Gordon Carroll
PRODUCTION CO: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
​SCREENPLAY: Rudy Wurlitzer
PHOTOGRAPHY: John Coquillon
EDITORS: David Berlatsky, Garth Craven, Tony De Zarraga, Richard Halsey, Roger Spottiswoode, Robert L Wolfe
MUSIC: Bob Dylan
WITH:  James Coburn (Pat Garrett), Kris Kristofferson (Billy the Kid), Richard Jaeckel (Kip McKinney), Jason Robards (Lew Wallace), Bob Dylan (Alias), Rita Coolidge (Maria), Chill Wills (Lemuel)

REVIEWS

“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 in a new 4K digital restoration of the 50th Anniversary release — 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.”

– Criterion 

“Set to a haunting soundtrack by co-star Bob Dylan, Sam Peckinpah’s final western is an elegiac and haunting meditation on integrity, survival and freedom. James Coburn’s renegade-turned-lawman Pat Garrett hunts down his former friend, Kris Kristofferson’s Billy the Kid, with both men chilled by the winds of change. Shot through with a melancholy verging on fatalism, the film ranks among the director’s very finest works.”

– BFI Southbank

“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid would be Peckinpah’s final  ‘proper’ western… Its quiet notes of fatalism are the fullest development of the more caustic revisionism that Peckinpah’s earlier work displayed, replacing grisly ultraviolence for its own sake with a meditative study of its aftermath.”

– Jake Cole, Slant 

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Dunedin
Wednesday, 26 February, 7.30pm

Timaru
​Tuesday, 18 March, 6.30pm

Canterbury
Monday, 07 April, 7.00pm

New Plymouth   
Wednesday, 28 May, 6.00pm​

Whanganui   
Monday, 09 June, 7.00pm

Wellington   
Monday, 23 June, 6.15pm​

Wellington   
Monday, 23 June, 8.30pm​​

​Hamilton   
Monday, 07 July, 6.30pm​

Auckland  
Monday, 14 July, 6.15pm

​​Palmerston North
Wednesday, 30 July, 6.00pm

Nelson  
Wednesday, 20 August, 6.00pm​

Tauranga
Wednesday, 01 October, 6.00pm
PECKINPAH'S WEST >> ​