The Left-Handed Gun

The Left-Handed Gun starts out like any other western - with a very traditional-sounding ballad sung in a crooning fashion. Arthur Penn (who would go on to make the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde) directs for the first time, and subverts the genre with a revisionist take on the story of Billy the Kid. Riding the rise of the method-acting fad (this film was originally to have starred James Dean), The Left-Handed Gun takes the myth of the old west and lets it pale against the sordid reality of how things really were. Gradually, as the film goes on and Billy becomes less of a mystery to us, we come to see the falsities of the romanticized west.

Billy (Paul Newman) is, initially, a quiet young wanderer looking for work. He finds work with an English cattleman who takes a liking to him and lends him a bible. However, when this cattleman is murdered by a bent sheriff and his three deputies Billy takes it upon himself to take the law into his own hands. He becomes an outlaw, and finds himself conflicted when a delicate amnesty is issued to calm the powderkeg caused by his cycle of vengeance. He is befriended by Pat Garrett (John Dehner), an older one-time outlaw who sees himself in Billy and tries to help him. But Billy is unpredictable, and his continuing quest for revenge will put the lives of everyone around him in danger.

In comparison to a lot of other westerns in the 1950s, everything in The Left-Handed Gun is more brutal, harsher, and more vivid.The film also has an anarchic sense of humour, and it doesn't shy away from the violence of the real west. For example, a man is shot in the spine and squirms around on the floor in paralysis, whilst others are shot in the back or while begging for their life. One scene memorably has a little girl laugh at a solitary boot standing in the wake of it's owner's death before being slapped by her mother and dragged away. Penn is eager to make his mark as a director, and despite some of its 1950s heavy-handedness the film shines with the promise of a fresh talent... there's a nice slow dissolve/double-exposure where Billy outlines his plan before executing it, and the scene where he faces off with a man named Joe Grant is positively electric.

Newman is also keen to make an impression in this early role inherited from James Dean. When we first meet Billy he's squinting and drawling like a man who lives in the sun, but as the film goes on Newman takes a typically 1950s rebel-character and gives him all the dimensions of a bad kid gone worse. He can't read, but he's eager to share what he knows, and he's eager to learn. Under the guidance of the English cattleman at the film's beginning he might just have come good, but injustice gives him an excuse to go to ruin. He's hot-headed, horses around with his friends, and acts dumb to disarm his enemies. One character even refers to him as a 'wild boy' when he's finally captured.

We initially see the character of Billy the Kid as a piece of western myth, but Newman is just the right person to play such a legend as a morally-grey human with realistic flaws. The film really nails it home when one of Billy's fans catches up with him towards the end and incredulously remarks, "You're not like the books... you don't stand up for glory. You're not him". It's a sad moment of abject disallusion, especially when this fan then goes to rat out Billy's location and pathetically refuses the reward on grounds that other people would just take it off him. Eventually all of Billy's mistakes catch up with him and he's forced to face the fact that his own brand of justice has its own consequences. For most of the film he refuses to acknowledge that his revenge-killings are 'murder'... in fact, for most of the film he seems to live by a contradictory set of rules that makes it very hard for anyone to stay friends with him. It's an interesting take on the 'heroic' western outlaw, and exactly the sort of boundary-blurring that would go on to make Newman a star.

DIRECTOR: Arthur Penn
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Leslie Stevens, based on a script by Gore Vidal.
KEY ACTORS: Paul Newman, John Dehner, James Best, Hurd Hatfield, Denver Pyle

RELATED TEXTS:
- This film was based on a telemovie by Gore Vidal called The Death of Billy the Kid, also starring Paul Newman and made in 1955.
- Gore Vidal remade his version of the story as Billy the Kid as a telemovie in 1989, this time starring Val Kilmer.
- There have been a lot of other films featuring or made about Billy the Kid, including but not limited to: Billy the Kid (1930), The Outlaw, Young Guns, One-Eyed Jacks, Chisum, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.