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Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

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Director Sam Peckinpah's films have been called a "hemoglobin hit parade", and his version of the Billy the Kid story is high on that list. New Mexico Territory in 1880 was "when all God's gunslingers became aware they were out of synch with the times, that the industrial revolution was revolting without them." The late film critic Gene Siskel wrote that in 1973, "it was no sweat to establish the spiritual worth of the cowboy-murderer when one places him alongside avaricious cattle barons" or the seductive technologies beginning to undercut rugged individualism. Billy is turned into "a martyr for Basic American Values, making him the victim of 'every g@#damn landlord that's trying to put a fence around the country.'" Meanwhile Sheriff Pat Garrett is depicted as an agent of the era's new capitalism, hired to rid the region of a relic of the past.

Singer-actor Kris Kristofferson accurately registers the anti-establishment feelings of 1970s youth culture, as does singer-actor(?) Bob Dylan, who not only wrote and performs the film's theme but plays an enigmatic hanger-on called "Alias". Critics were less than impressed, giving the film a mediocre 57% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but movie-going young people responded positively (87%) to the movie's message, however muddled it may have been.

The quotes are from https://www.newspapers.com/clip/103772954/pat-garrett-and-billy-the-kid/.
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