| Billy the Kid | |
| Director: | King Vidor |
| Producer: | King Vidor Irving Thalberg |
| Starring: | Johnny Mack Brown Wallace Beery Kay Johnson |
| Music: | Euphemia Allen Frederick Stahlberg |
| Cinematography: | Gordon Avil |
| Released: | 1930 |
| Runtime: | 98 min. |
| Language: | English |
| Internet Movie Database entry 0020693 | |
Billy the Kid (1930) is a film directed 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.
John Mack Brown ... William H. 'Billy the Kid' Bonney
Wallace Beery ... Deputy Sheriff Pat Garrett
Kay Johnson ... Claire Randall
Karl Dane ... Swenson
Wyndham Standing ... John W. 'Jack' Tunston
Russell Simpson ... Angus McSween
Blanche Friderici ... Mrs. McSween (billed as Blanche Frederici)
Roscoe Ates ... Old Stuff (as Rosco Ates)
Warner Richmond ... Bob Ballinger (as Warner P. Richmond)
James A. Marcus ... Colonel William P. Donovan (as James Marcus)
Nelson McDowell ... Frank Hatfield
Jack Carlyle ... Mr. Dick Brewer
John Beck ... Butterworth
Chris-Pin Martin ... Santiago (as Chris Martin)
Marguerita Padula ... Nicky 'Pinky' Whoosiz
Directed by King Vidor, the movie was filmed in an early widescreen process called Realife, a 70mm format similar to Fox's Grandeur 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 did not get a foothold until The Robe two decades later.
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 Billy the Kid, a lavish television version written by Gore Vidal, at the end of the '80s.