Billy the Kid (1930 film)

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Billy the Kid
Directed by	King Vidor
Produced by	King Vidor Irving Thalberg
Written by	Walter Noble Burns (book, The Saga of Billy the Kid) Wanda Tuchock (continuity) Laurence Stallings (dialogue) Charles MacArthur (additional dialogue)
Starring	Johnny Mack Brown Wallace Beery Kay Johnson
Music by	Euphemia Allen Frederick Stahlberg
Cinematography	Gordon Avil
Release date(s)	1930
Running time	98 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
IMDb profile

Billy the Kid (1930) is a film about the relationship between frontier outlaw Billy the Kid (Johnny Mack Brown, billed as "John Mack Brown") and Pat Garrett (Wallace Beery), the man who later killed him. Directed by King Vidor, the movie was filmed in an early widescreen process, also used for the lavish The Big Trail the same year. While The Big Trail has been restored so that the 1930 widescreen process can be evaluated by modern viewers, no widescreen prints of Billy the Kid are known to currently exist and the movie can only be viewed in a standard-width version that was filmed simultaneously. Widescreen didn't get a foothold until The Robe two decades later.

[edit] Remakes

The film was remade in color in 1941 as Billy the Kid with Robert Taylor as Billy and Brian Donlevy as a fictionalized version of Pat Garrett. The Howard Hughes version two years later, called The Outlaw and mainly serving as an introductory vehicle for Jane Russell, owes at least as much to the 1930 film, particularly in the casting of Thomas Mitchell, a superb actor who physically resembles Wallace Beery, as Garrett. Films and television revisited the Pat Garrett-Billy the Kid relationship almost continuously in subsequent decades. Paul Newman played Billy in the 50s in The Left-Handed Gun; a television series was filmed in 1960 with the same theme called The Tall Men, with Barry Sullivan as Garrett and Clu Gulager as Billy; Sam Peckinpah directed a movie version in the 70s with James Coburn as Garrett; and Val Kilmer played Billy in Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid, a lavish television version, in the 90s.