Sam Peckinpah’s typically nihilistic and violent Western showcases a landmark work from Bob Dylan. The singer not only appears in the movie as killer Alias but also fashions the classic ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, used during a famous death scene and subsequently covered by a wide variety of artists – Writer and Season curator Sean Wilson

In his final Western, Peckinpah casts the killing of Billy the Kid as one of the defining death knells of the mythic Old West James Coburn stars as the grizzled outlaw-turned-lawman Pat Garrett, hired by a group of wealthy cattle barons to track down his former friend – the boyish bandit Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson).

Gorgeously shot in muted, dust-caked tones, the film is a sombre, slow-burn elegy for the pre-capitalistic freedom of the American frontier and one of the defining revisionist Westerns of the 1970s.

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