DUEL TO THE DEATH: PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

I don t know whether Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid will be a great rock’n’roll western or merely a machismo wetdream. Three days on the set wasn’t enough to tell, even about a movie which stars James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, sports in its cast Jason Robards, Barry Sullivan, Slim Pickens, Chill Wills and other veterans, even for a flick that has Bob Dylan in one minor role and Kristofferson’s girlfriend Rita Coolidge in another. Even for a movie, in fact, directed by Sam Peckinpah, the greatest maker of Westerns since John Ford.

The -situation in Durango, as most situations in mythic locales, was unhinged. Peckinpah was so sick that most mornings it was all he could do to drag himself onto the set; there were a few mornings when he couldn’t even do that. (Who knows what ailed him? At 47, with a couple decades of TV and filmmaking under your belt, along with years of drinking and whoring in the macho tradition even the scrappy Peckinpah might have been left with any manner or number of ailments.)