BILLY THE KID

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 137, 6 February 1942, Page 14

BILLY THE KID

| (M-G-M)

‘THEY should have tacked the words ". . . Rides Again" on to the title of this film, for I distinctly remember seeing at least one earlier instalment

(circa 1930), of Billy’s bloodstained banditry. It starred Johnny Mack Brown, and I know I was much more excited about it than I am about thisbut then, of course, I was much nearer the Saturday-m>tinee-villain-

booing-hero-clapping age than I am now. Anyway, this time it’s Robert Taylor who does his. best to look hard-boiled as well as handsome, and goes about shooting people with his left hand, but Never In The Back. And because it’s Robert Taylor, and because he never shoots people In The Back-and only shoots them at all because somebody shot his father-and because he is kind to a _ guitar-playing Mexican called Pedro, you know that Billyboy is really Good At Heart, if only the right person could touch it. Which happens when he meets Eric Keating (lan Hunter), a four-square English rancher whose cattle Billy had previously been helping to rustle for a Really Bad Man named Hickey (Gene Lockhart), who does shoot people In The Back. But Mr. Keating Never Shoots Anybody, because he just won’t carry a gun. And because Billy has a Nice Boyhood Friend (Brian Donlevy), who works for Mr. Keating as foreman, and’ because Mr. Keating is so Four-Square and has a Pretty Sister (Mary Howard), Billy goes to work for him, too. But then one of Hickey’s gang shoots Mr. Keating In The Back, whereupon, Billy’s heart almost breaks and Goes Bad again, and he shoots four of Hickey’s gang, and then he shoots Hickey himself. Worst of all, oh very sad! he shoots him In The Back. And then you know that Billy is past redemption; and so, because Law and Order Have Come to the West at last and men must no longer take Justice Into Their Own Hands, his Boyhood Friend has to shoot Billy. In The Stomach. All this is in Technicolor, with which I have no complaint — but please, Messrs. M-G-M, as a matter of interest, tell us why you make a Western in colour and leave Ziegfeld Girl in plain black and white. There actually was a bandit named Billy the Kid, one William H. Bonney, born in New York in 1859, whose bloodstained career ended when he was shot by a sheriff 21 years later, but there was little in his brief but lurid history even approximating to the sentimental fairy tales which Hollywood is so fond of retelling, Anyway, Billy’s had a fair spin, and I think it’s now high time he got off his horse and let himself be finally buried. [Even this hope is likely to be frustrated. Howatd Hughes is reported by "News Review" to be planning a sequel in which the Kid does not die, but fakes a tombstone to bury his past, and goes off with his girl friend for a new life.]