USA,
1972, 100 min
Shown in 1972
CREDITS
- dir
-
Stan Dragoti
- prod
-
Jack L. Warner
- cam
-
Ralph Woolsey
- cast
-
Michael J. Pollard, Lee Purcell, Richard Evans, Charles Aidman, Willard Stage, Dran Hamilton
- source
-
Columbia Pictures
OTHER
The heroic legends of the Old West have gradually begun to fall into the modern glare of historic researches, particularly among new directors. After the surge of psychological Westerns, audiences were exposed to unrelentingly gory sagas of the prairies, either in praise of Mr. Eastwood, via Sergio Leone, or the equally bloody rediscovery of the American Indian, past (Little Big Man), or present (When the Legends Die). Today, American directors, with a firm grip of historical perspective, are attempting to recreate an image of the Western’s past as realistically as possible and, so far, several works have been creative successes: Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller; Dick Richards’ The Culpepper Cattle Company and Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Now, another new artist has approached the legend of William Bonney, the 19th-century West’s deadliest adolescent gunslinger, in as irreverent and truthful a manner as possible. This director, Stan Dragoti, in his first feature, explodes the screen image of the misunderstood heroics of Billy the Kid. After such stalwarts as Johnny Mack Brown, Roy Rogers, Jack Beutel, Robert Taylor, Audie Murphy, Don Barry, Scott Brady and Paul Newman, the figure that the ancient Marksman might have been grows confused indeed, but these worthy actors all somehow conveyed the attractive view of Billy. One might excuse a deranged moment in film history in calling attention to Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), on the grounds that at that point in the last decade, we were all a bit mad. Dirty Little Billy is a masterpiece of verisimilitude: the West is, in every sense, the uncomfortable, hot, disease-ridden, hopeless environment we can sense in the great old photographs of the last century—American plains and vistas seen through cinder-stung eyes. Dragoti’s quest for reality is astonishingly successful, and when the actor, Michael J. Pollard, moves before us as Billy, an immediate conviction is evoked within the spectator. The history of the film falls into perspective, for here is a biographical Western that subtly establishes an emotional response—a somber regret and sympathy for those who could even the survive the Hell of the Old West, and a sense of tragic irony for Billy the Kid, a murderous wastrel who stumbled into immortality by chance.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #12
In our occasional film series, The Unvanquished, we showcased the work of filmmakers who continued to make their art despite suffering artistic repression. Those honored include directors Paul Carpita (1996), Paul Meyer (1996), Abraham Polonsky (1996) and John Berry (1998) and actors Karen Morley (1999) and Behrouz Vossoughi (2001).
