Reeling Back

On this day (April 13) in 1881, New Mexico supreme court Judge Warren Bristol sentenced the 21-year-old William Bonney (aka Billy the Kid) to death. Already nationally known, Bonney was convicted of the murder of Lincoln County sheriff William Brady. The kid broke jail 17 days later, missing his May 13 date with the hangman. Tracked down by Sheriff Pat Garrett, he was shot to death shortly after midnight on July 14. Bonney’s obituary ran in newspapers across the country. According to social historians Robert N. Mullen and Charles E. Welch Jr., he is the most written-about gunslinger in Western folklore, with hundreds of books perpetuating his (brief) life and legend. In the process, his story became part of frontier folklore, a tale that has been skewed to support a variety of cultural narratives. It was first adapted for the screen in 1911 as the silent romance Billy the Kid. In 1930, it received major movie recognition in director King Vidor’s pioneering widescreen feature Billy the Kid, the film that established the standard version of the story. In 1938, America’s cultural elite embraced Billy the Kid the ballet, along with its rousing score by Aaron Copland. A lot more pictures followed. Today, Reeling Back adds four Billy the Kid titles to its archive (with links to each following the Afterword to this posting). Among the best of them is director Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 meditation on violence in American society, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.