The Left-Handed Gun

Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun (1958) repackages the Billy the Kid legend as a typical '50s "psychological Western." Based on a play by Gore Vidal (!), it presents Penn's usual hobby horse, as perfected in Bonnie and Clyde: criminals are just misunderstood outcasts. Add in a weakly-plotted story and a weird performance by Paul Newman, and you've got a very problematic film.

William Bonney (Paul Newman) is a young drifter in New Mexico Territory, hired by kindly English cattle baron Tunstall (Colin Keith-Jackson). When Tunstall is murdered by rival Morton (Robert Griffin), the crooked Sheriff Brady (Robert Foulk) and two others, Billy and his confederates Tom Folliard (James Best) and Charlie Bowdre (James Congdon) , seek revenge, making them wanted men. Tracking them down is Pat Garrett (John Dehner), a former friend of Billy's turned reluctant Marshal.

Most Westerns are guilty of grafting modern sensibilities into the Old West, but few more egregiously than The Left-Handed Gun. It portrays Billy and his gang as very '50s juvenile delinquents, misunderstood, misanthropic misfits who seemed to have wandered in from Rebel Without a Cause, scuffling with soldiers and breaking up Garrett's wedding. Their primary crime, the film implies, is being young and from the wrong side of the tracks. It wouldn't occur to Penn that maybe their killing people is the real problem.

Billy embodies most of the genre tropes: confused, looking for a father figure, illiterate, uncomprehending, aimlessly violent. Billy even "rocks out" to The Battle Cry of Freedom, much to the consternation of older patrons. Billy strikes a Christ-like pose when surrendering to Pat's posse, and like Plato in Rebel, he's gunned down while unarmed: a martyr for teen rebellion. It's not as offensive as Robert Redford's similar fate in Penn's The Chase, but it is rather jarring in a Western context.

The movie has other problems than anachronism. The story is pretty aimless: there's something of a plot, but the narrative development is frequently short-changed in favor of the "psychological" angle, with lots of time devoted to carousing and sidetracks. The Billy-Pat friendship, a keystone of this film, is left curiously underdeveloped, and a romance between Billy and Mexican girl Celsa (Lita Milan) is poorly-handled. Paul Newman's odd performance doesn't help either: he's much more Method-heavy than his later, better works. A boring supporting cast doesn't help much, either.

The movie's biggest saving grace is Arthur Penn's solid direction. He makes excellent use of J. Peverell Marley's foreboding black-and-white photography, and there are many strong individual set-pieces, including Billy's escape from jail. Sam Peckinpah would recycle key scenes wholesale in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: the jailbreak in particular is almost shot-for-shot.

The Left-Handed Gun is a confused, curious Western, heavy on the "psychology" and often short on the Western. If the psychology were more interesting it might be better, but treating Billy like the James Dean of the 1880s isn't very fruitful.