Strongly recommended. The title of this ground-breaking Western, according its director, Arthur Penn, comes from a 1920’s postcard of a famous tintype of William Bonney, Billy the Kid, awkwardly holding a rifle. The picture was carelessly reversed on the postcard making the right-handed Bonney (Paul Newman) into his own ambidexterous body double. And so Penn began riffing on a still-true theme, taking him through Bonnie And Clyde and Little Big Man - - that the bedlam of entertainment, like a senseless child, inevitably shatters the fact. Now that Penn is gone we still have this remarkable first movement, a true claster of icons, to remember him by. Newman and the cast are wonderful, particularly Hurd Hatfield as a recently homaged (Unforgiven), Wild West journalist and lawman Denver Pyle, also soon to reprise himself for Penn in Bonnie And Clyde. Wade in Alexander Courage’s big wet score, which eventual lofted him to TV’s Final Frontier.
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