Billy the Kid (1930 film)

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	John Mack Brown Wallace Beery Kay Johnson
Music by	Euphemia Allen Frederick Stahlberg
Cinematography	Gordon Avil
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release dates	October 18, 1930 (1930-10-18)
Running time	98 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Billy the Kid is a 1930 American Pre-Code film directed in widescreen by King Vidor 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.

Cast

• John Mack Brown as Billy the Kid
• Wallace Beery as Deputy Sheriff Pat Garrett
• Kay Johnson as Claire Randall
• Karl Dane as Swenson
• Wyndham Standing as Jack Tunston
• Russell Simpson as Angus McSween
• Blanche Friderici as Mrs McSween (as Blanche Frederici)
• Roscoe Ates as Old Stuff
• Warner Richmond as Bob Ballinger
• James A. Marcus as Colonel William P. Donovan
• Nelson McDowell as Track Hatfield
• Jack Carlyle as Dick Brewer
• John Beck as Butterworth
• Chris-Pin Martin as Don Esteban Santiago
• Aggie Herring as Emily Hatfield

Production

Directed by King Vidor, the movie was filmed in an early widescreen process called Realife, a 70mm format similar to Fox Film Corporation's Grandeur used for the lavish The Big Trail the same year.

While The Big Trail, starring John Wayne, 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 did not get a commercial foothold until The Robe two decades later.

In some newspaper ads, the more familiar Beery, a major star and frequent supporting player since the teens during the silent era, was accorded top billing over young Brown but not in the main posters. Within two years Beery had contractually become MGM's highest paid actor while John Mack Brown was rechristened "Johnny Mack Brown" and demoted into B-Westerns.

Remakes

File:Pat Garrett2.jpg

The real Pat Garrett

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 Man, 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 written by Gore Vidal and televised in 1989.

See also

• List of American films of 1930

External links

• Billy the Kid at IMDb