Billy the Kid

Cattle baron William Donovan prepares to use violence to drive off settlers in Lincoln County, New Mexico. The new arrivals find an ally in young gunman Billy the Kid, who shoots one of Donovan’s gang. The settlers’ leader is on his way to marry his fiancée Claire, who has just arrived from the East, when he is murdered by Donovan’s henchmen. Billy swears vengeance on the entire gang. Neither Claire nor sheriff Pat Garrett, who both secretly approve of Billy’s plan, can stave off a bloody feud, which costs 28 men their lives. “You’ve made life here liveable”, Claire says to Billy after the gun battle … In keeping with the hagiography of the titular famed outlaw, King Vidor has stripped most of the factual history from the story of the 1878 Lincoln County cattle war. Instead, the director turned the camera’s lens to the vast, open country, where he sets the wheels of vengeance so precisely and ruthlessly in motion that it might have been the story of Chicago’s gang wars of the era. The film was originally shot in both 70mm Reallife and 35mm. An alternative tragic ending edited specifically for the European market has been lost to posterity.