The Image of Billy the Kid

The Left-Handed Gun, currently calling a fast draw in the nation’s second-run movie houses, is a cinematic sarcoma so full of symptomatic interest for anyone curious about, say, America, mythology, sex, emblematic character, acting, Hollywood, etc., that if I were teaching a course called “Who Are We?” I think I’d have it run for the class and then use it as a take-off point for a whole semester. At the very least, I un-frivolously suggest that whoever is planning the time capsule to be sealed into the cornerstone of the next Madison Avenue skyscraper, should consider including a print of its eighty minutes. My old hero, Buck Rogers, could learn a lot about us if he were to look at it in the twenty-fifth century.

Based on a television script by Gore Vidal, it has to do with the last year or two in the life of Billy the Kid, easily the hottest national myth we have; and is concerned not so much with Billy’s adventures as with his character—the mixture of larky charm, boyish innocence, homoerotic aplomb and cold brutality which made it possible for him, at twenty, to gun down the four men who had ambushed his best friend, and at the same time to keep half the population of Lincoln County, including Governor Lew Wallace, fascinated by him. The night I saw it, everyone else in my party went out for coffee when it was half over, and indignantly berated me for staying on. Time magazine agreed with them. But my instincts warn me that I’ll probably see it again, for in spite of its faults, I am still thinking about it.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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The Left-Handed Gun, currently calling a fast draw in the nation’s second-run movie houses, is a cinematic sarcoma so full of symptomatic interest for anyone curious about, say, America, mythology, sex, emblematic character, acting, Hollywood, etc., that if I were teaching a course called “Who Are We?” I think I’d have it run for the class and then use it as a take-off point for a whole semester. At the very least, I un-frivolously suggest that whoever is planning the time capsule to be sealed into the cornerstone of the next Madison Avenue skyscraper, should consider including a print of its eighty minutes. My old hero, Buck Rogers, could learn a lot about us if he were to look at it in the twenty-fifth century.

Based on a television script by Gore Vidal, it has to do with the last year or two in the life of Billy the Kid, easily the hottest national myth we have; and is concerned not so much with Billy’s adventures as with his character—the mixture of larky charm, boyish innocence, homoerotic aplomb and cold brutality which made it possible for him, at twenty, to gun down the four men who had ambushed his best friend, and at the same time to keep half the population of Lincoln County, including Governor Lew Wallace, fascinated by him. The night I saw it, everyone else in my party went out for coffee when it was half over, and indignantly berated me for staying on. Time magazine agreed with them. But my instincts warn me that I’ll probably see it again, for in spite of its faults, I am still thinking about it.