tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post4829568475880150306..comments2023-11-05T02:01:53.847-06:00Comments on Antagony & Ecstasy: HOW CIVILIZED MEN BEHAVETimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-8898643044813231652007-12-04T08:01:00.000-06:002007-12-04T08:01:00.000-06:00Excellent post. The casting is critical to 'Pat Ga...Excellent post. The casting is critical to 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'. Although Coburn and Kristofferson were at least a decade older than Garrett and Bonney, having them played by older men keys in to Peckinpah's career-long theme of men outliving their time. With Kristofferson more famous, at that point, as a singer, casting Bob Dylan as Alias, first seen as a print-setter at a newspaper office, introduces both singers' public personas into the film's aesthetic. Both men wrote songs of social concern. Factor in Billy's entourage (unshaven, living communally, sharing their women) as the hippies, protestors and draft-dodgers of their day, then the film becomes as much about 70s America's disaffection with Nixon and Vietnam as it is a depiction of an American outlaw hero.<BR/>Also noteworthy in the cast: R.G. Armstrong, virtually reprising his religious bigot role from Peckinpah's earlier 'Ride the High Country', and Slim Pickens, purveyor of light relief as a stagecoach driver in 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', here the subject of the most devastatingly effective death scene in all of Peckinpah's ouevre, gut shot and dying slowly as the river, patterns of light on its dark waters, drifts inexorably past.Neil Fulwoodhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14686296295535235988noreply@blogger.com