The Left Handed Gun
Arthur Penn (1958)
Clyde Jeavons’s introduction to the BFI screening was really excellent. He was impressively informative about the long list of actors who’ve played Billy the Kid (and Pat Garrett) on screen. He was convincing on how the outlaw William Bonney became an iconic, even heroic figure in popular culture in the years after his death in 1881. (Jeavons thought that the growth of popular reading matter – dime novels as well as newspapers – had a lot to do with it: he told us how Pat Garrett, with the help of a ghost writer, had produced a book for purposes of both self-promotion, as the man who brought the Kid to justice, and telling people about Billy’s desperately rough childhood in the Irish slums of New York City.) He was amusing and engrossing in explaining the myth of Billy the Kid’s left-handedness (a famous photograph which appears to prove this is a ‘flipped’ version of the original) and the symbolic importance of Billy’s sinister side.
This was Arthur Penn’s first feature and it’s an excellent Western, well written by Leslie Stevens (from a teleplay by Gore Vidal). The Left Handed Gun is doubly subversive in that it strips away the moral clarity of the traditional Western as well as debunking the glamorous image of Billy the Kid. (I’m assuming that the films about him which preceded this one usually presented Billy as a romantic figure.) At the same time, Penn preserves enough reminders of the heroic appeal of both the genre and the protagonist to maintain a strong tension and Paul Newman is the ideal actor for what the director wants to do. Newman completely embodies the allure and charisma of the legend of Billy the Kid; he’s also able to show us the brutal confusions inside him. There’s a fine scene early in the film, when Billy is in conversation with Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), the peaceable, Bible-reading farmer who’s taken Billy under his wing. Newman, who had an unusual ability to interpret and illuminate men of limited intelligence, is wonderful as he listens to Tunstall’s words about the religious tract he’s reading. We can see, and we see repeatedly in The Left Handed Gun, that Billy tends to feel more than he’s able to think. He’s miserably sensitive to his lack of education. He tells Tunstall that he can’t read (he knows something of the Bible from his mother’s telling him stories from it); subsequently insists more than once to others that he can; finally admits that he still can’t. Billy seduces the wife (Lita Milan) of another benign father figure, the Mexican Saval (Martin Garralaga). It’s when Saval finds out about this that Billy seems almost to decide that he (Billy) now deserves to die.
Tunstall is a Scot (from Ayrshire) but he’s known as ‘the Englishman’. According to Wikipedia, Tunstall was a real person and an important figure in the Lincoln County War between the British farmers newly arrived in the American West and longer-established local ranchers. It’s Tunstall’s death, at the hands of four men, that sets Billy on a quest to avenge his killing. The retribution scenario is a venerable tradition of Westerns yet it’s presented here as something pathological and which sows the seeds of mayhem – just as, when Pat Garrett eventually shoots Billy, it’s a hollow restoration of moral order: Garrett is mortified to discover that the Kid hadn’t drawn his gun. Billy goes on his pursuit of revenge with two other young men, named Charlie Boudre and Tom Folliard, and Arthur Penn shows how the trio’s youthful high spirits and impulsiveness bleed into hot-headedness and trigger-happiness. Newman dramatises these distinctions, or the lack of them, with great skill and he’s well supported by James Best as Tom and, especially, James Congdon as Charlie.
The impressive score by Alexander Courage is full of familiar Western film theme cadences but it’s supple enough to incorporate elements that reflect what a different treatment of goodies and baddies on horseback The Left Handed Gun must have seemed at the time. Penn uses sounds (and silence) cleverly – like the noise of water from a decorative fountain throughout a particularly tense encounter between Billy and Joe Grant (Ainslie Pryor), a friend of Pat Garrett who has been appointed to monitor the amnesty which the new territorial governor issues for all those involved in the Lincoln County War. The sound of the water, continuing after the threat of violence has – for the moment – passed, seems to underline the fragility of the amnesty, and to make us feel grateful relief at the narrow escape we’ve just experienced.
The dialogue is credible and intelligent and Penn orchestrates the acting very ably, although The Left Handed Gun is least convincing at its most consciously dramatic points – when Pat Garrett rails against the violent interruption of his wedding celebrations or a creepy, groupie-like character called Moultrie reacts to being rebuked by his hero Billy. The actors concerned, John Dehner (Garrett) and Hurd (Dorian Gray) Hatfield (Moultrie), both go over the top at these moments (although Dehner gives a strong performance whenever he’s quieter). And perhaps, by the end, there have been too many carefully composed deaths by gunshot. While some of them supply a salutary reminder that human beings are being killed and it’s not just Western fun, others seem to be asking for admiration of their technical bravura. There’s one killing, however, which is staged with such shocking originality that it’s more than enough on its own to justify Penn’s artfulness. When Billy first escapes from custody, he positions himself on the roof of the jail and calls out to the sheriff, who looks up – into a sun so bright that he can’t make out the figure on the roof. Billy shoots the man out of his boots; he falls dead but one of the boots remains upright. A mother and her little girl are passing by and the child runs giggling towards the empty boot. Her mother slaps and scolds her and they disappear from shot as J Peverell Marley’s camera stays on the boot. We hear the child whimpering as she moves away. This moment in particular anticipates Penn’s wiping-the-smile-off-our-faces approach in Bonnie and Clyde. No doubt The Left Handed Gun, in terms of historical accuracy, downplays the extent to which William Bonney was a vicious public menace. Given what it succeeds in doing to take the shine off the Kid’s legend, as well as make the moral universe of the Hollywood Western a less certain and more unstable place, it’s still a film of disquieting integrity.
7 April 2010