Fresh and Exciting

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Arthur Penn's debut film was scorned in 1958, but has since gained recognition as a forerunner of the Revisionist Westerns that emerged in the 1960s.The original ad calls Billy a 'teenage desperado' and Penn's film gets the manic side to young Billy the Kid, wild at heart in a 1950s delinquent style, unrestrained, juvenile, engaged freely in bad boy antics, almost a clown. Billy is really the "Kid" in Penn's version - cast off from family and home, living with a "gang", as it were, losing his father figure (here, almost as soon as he meets him), then running loose and wild. The spirit of adolescence infuses the film's initial sections, but Billy becomes disillusioned quickly, and almost invites his own downfall without fully comprehending much of anything in the world around him.Surprisingly, as quoted in the movie, the Biblical phrase "through a glass darkly" comes to accurately suit the world-view of Billy - and several later Arthur Penn figures in the 1960s.His story as presented here (from an original television treatment by Gore Vidal) contradicts the dime-novel frontier legend that an eager writer (Hurd Hatfield) fabricates as the film goes along, manufacturing "fake news" for his own profit. Ideas are introduced into the Western that no one has yet dared to think about - the possibility of a gay frontier character in Hurd Hatfield's Moultrie, the links with James Dean's kind of 'angst', the macabre, almost comic nature of the sheer act of sudden dying. As will become significant in Penn's cinema, violent deaths here are prolonged, anguished, senseless; there is no clean, quick or merciful way of dying. Perhaps the French critics who praised the film were more attuned to the visually cinematic touches - anguish accentuated by close shot, rambling episodic structure, heightened treatment of violent acts, clash of horseplay with sudden deadly gunplay, the abrupt changes in mood and tone.Without a fully realized screenplay and with alleged studio interference (particularly noticeable in the ending sections), The Left-Handed Gun leaves us only partially satisfied, but still impressed by Penn's creative disregard for established conventions.Well worth a look for its times-they-are-a-changing attitude towards both the Western genre and America's founding myths.

This Is By Far The Best Version Of A Billy The Kid Movie I Have Ever Seen ... Paul Newman Is Amazing As William Bonnie (Billy The Kid) ... He Does Bring A Sense Of Misunderstood Empathy To The Role (A Kind Of James Dean Feel) ... The Acting "All The Way Around" Was Excellent As Is The Scenery ... What I Liked Most Of All Is That I Got A Real Feeling That This Was An Accurate Outline Of The Bonnie Story And What I Believe Is A Much More Realistic Ending To The Legend "That Really Wasn't Much Of A Legend" ... The Director Arthur Penn Does A Marvelous Job Of Adding All The Little Touches That Take A Movie Out Of The Realm Of Fantasy And Makes It Just That Much More Believable ... To Fans Of The Legend, Actor Or Genre All I Can Say Is Check This One Out

Billy the Kid seeks revenge for the murder of his employer. This oft-told tale gets the psychological treatment in this account based on a play by Gore Vidal. Newman replaced first choice James Dean, and seems to be doing a Dean impression of the misunderstood youth, along the lines of "Rebel Without a Cause." Since Newman was rarely guilty of overacting, the blame here must fall on Penn, directing his first film after years of "playhouse" work on TV that encouraged exaggerated acting. Furthermore, the film is choppy and drab looking. Penn of course got better with experience. The biggest joke is that Billy the Kid was actually right handed.

Like many 1950s films, this western tended to slant on the melodramatic side although it has its share of many elements. The actors and their characters are mostly overwrought and can get on your nerves by the halfway point of the 102-minute movie. The directing, though, is very good and the photography is top-shelf. As usual, Warner Brothers has put out a very good DVD transfer of this 52-year-old movie. It was issued as part of the "Paul Newman Collection."Everyone knows about Paul Newman, who plays the lead character "Billy The Kid." However, I found Lita Milan and John Dehner the most interesting. Milan was a new face and not someone a lot of people know about and Dehner played against-type and played the most mature person in the story.Milan as "Celia" will get the males' attention, especially if they're into sultry, striking-looking females. According to the IMDb mini biography here, shortly after making this film married the son of Trujillo, a famous Dominican Republic dictator, and that was the end of her screen career. Several years later, her husband took over the country when his father was assassinated, and a few years later they had to flee the volatile Latin American country. Wow, it sounds like she led a life that wasn't far away from the violent world of "Billy the Kid," the subject of this film.It was kind of odd seeing Dehner, who played a lot of bad guys on TV westerns of the 1950s, playing good-guy "Pat Garrett," a friend of William Bonney ("Billy the Kid") for most of the movie. Whether he turned out to be "good" in the end, is your call. Actually I thought Dehner did the best job in here and played the best character, one of the few that was subdued and tolerable. Newman and his buddies in this film were all loud, immature and stupid, which is how they were supposed to be portrayed, but they are almost "cartoonish." The story has its ups and downs and isn't bad overall, but not something that I'd watch a second time.By the way, "Billy The Kid's" real life name was Henry McCarty (not "William Bonney," which was one of several alias he used. How much of this story is factual, I couldn't tell you but knowing Hollywood I wouldn't trust a lot of this to be exactly accurate. A