The Left Handed Gun (1958)

Fantastic!

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Arthur Penn's debut film was scorned in 1958, but has since gained recognition as a forerunner of the Revisionist Westerns that emerged in the 1960s.The original ad calls Billy a 'teenage desperado' and Penn's film gets the manic side to young Billy the Kid, wild at heart in a 1950s delinquent style, unrestrained, juvenile, engaged freely in bad boy antics, almost a clown. Billy is really the "Kid" in Penn's version - cast off from family and home, living with a "gang", as it were, losing his father figure (here, almost as soon as he meets him), then running loose and wild. The spirit of adolescence infuses the film's initial sections, but Billy becomes disillusioned quickly, and almost invites his own downfall without fully comprehending much of anything in the world around him.Surprisingly, as quoted in the movie, the Biblical phrase "through a glass darkly" comes to accurately suit the world-view of Billy - and several later Arthur Penn figures in the 1960s.His story as presented here (from an original television treatment by Gore Vidal) contradicts the dime-novel frontier legend that an eager writer (Hurd Hatfield) fabricates as the film goes along, manufacturing "fake news" for his own profit. Ideas are introduced into the Western that no one has yet dared to think about - the possibility of a gay frontier character in Hurd Hatfield's Moultrie, the links with James Dean's kind of 'angst', the macabre, almost comic nature of the sheer act of sudden dying. As will become significant in Penn's cinema, violent deaths here are prolonged, anguished, senseless; there is no clean, quick or merciful way of dying. Perhaps the French critics who praised the film were more attuned to the visually cinematic touches - anguish accentuated by close shot, rambling episodic structure, heightened treatment of violent acts, clash of horseplay with sudden deadly gunplay, the abrupt changes in mood and tone.Without a fully realized screenplay and with alleged studio interference (particularly noticeable in the ending sections), The Left-Handed Gun leaves us only partially satisfied, but still impressed by Penn's creative disregard for established conventions.Well worth a look for its times-they-are-a-changing attitude towards both the Western genre and America's founding myths.

While wandering in a desert area with the saddle of his deceased horse on his back, the drifter William "Billy the Kid" Bonney (Paul Newman) stumbles with the cattle owner John "The Englishman" Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston) that asks him what he wants and William asks for a job. Tunstall hires him to help to bring his cattle to Lincoln to sell the herd to the army and William befriends him. However, the local Sheriff Brady (Robert Foulk) ambushes Tunstal with the rancher Morton (Robert Griffin), his Deputy Moon (Wally Brown) and Hill (Bob Anderson) and kill the cattleman to avoid the business and steal his herd. Billy the Kid promises revenge against the men and together with his friends Charlie Boudre (James Congdon) and Tom Folliard (James Best), he kills Brady and Morton. Billy hides at McSween's house that is burnt down to ashes and Billy is assumed dead by the population. He flees to Madeiro where he meets his friends Pat Garret (John Dehner), Saval (Martin Garralaga) and his daughter Celsa (Lita Milan) that loves Billy. Soon Governor Lew Wallace proclaims amnesty in the New Mexico Territory and Billy is free from any charge. However Moon and Hill are still alive and Billy still wants to revenge his friend."The Left Handed Gun" is a western that tells one version of the Billy the Kid story. Directed by Arthur Penn, the film is uneven, alternating good with silly moments. However, it is mandatory for fans of Paul Newman, Arthur Penn and westerns in general. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Um de Nós Morrerá" ("One of Us Will Die")

The Left Handed Gun (1958)You have to be curious what director Arthur Penn did before his famous "Bonnie and Clyde" from almost a decade later. And with Paul Newman as the leading man, charming and funny and not totally unlike Warren Beatty in the later film as a lovable outlaw, it works.But it's also a kind of routine affair, mixing funny or violent scenes (often led by the incomparable Newman) with more ordinary ones that keep the movie in line. It's pretty interesting and well enough done stuff, for sure, but relatively routine. Not much different than other Westerns in the 1950s.There is some history built in here--Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. And Newman makes a creditable Billy, and a sympathetic one, a kind of victim of a terrible childhood, good hearted and with a simple morality that doesn't quite match what the law demands.The clichés are not all in play here, which is nice. Check it out.

Billy the Kid seeks revenge for the murder of his employer. This oft-told tale gets the psychological treatment in this account based on a play by Gore Vidal. Newman replaced first choice James Dean, and seems to be doing a Dean impression of the misunderstood youth, along the lines of "Rebel Without a Cause." Since Newman was rarely guilty of overacting, the blame here must fall on Penn, directing his first film after years of "playhouse" work on TV that encouraged exaggerated acting. Furthermore, the film is choppy and drab looking. Penn of course got better with experience. The biggest joke is that Billy the Kid was actually right handed.