I recently picked up and flipped through my copy of William K. Everson's classic A Pictorial History of the Western Film, as one does when escaping the heat of an Alabama summer day. What did I find but a couple of stills and some discussion of Johnny Mack Brown's role as William Bonney in the 1930 film Billy the Kid. Let's investigate.
I've already written about the Dothan native, University of Alabama football star and actor in several pieces on this blog. Early in his career MGM tried to turn him into a romantic lead, such as the 1928 silent film Our Dancing Daughters in which he starred with Joan Crawford and fellow Alabama native Dorothy Sebastian. That same year major star Norma Shearer and Brown appeared in A Lady of Chance. I've devoted five posts to that film, since much of it is set in Alabama.
In 1930 he was teamed with Crawford again in Montana Moon, which also co-starred Dorothy Sebastian. A third pairing with Crawford did not work out. Audiences failed to respond to early showings and MGM ordered the film Complete Surrender reshot with Clark Gable opposite Crawford.
Brown soon left MGM and moved into westerns. I've posted about one of those, the 1945 "Flame of the West" in which he plays a new physician in town. Now it's time to look at another.
Billy the Kid was one of four films Brown made in 1930 and was directed by King Vidor [1894-1982], whose career in the movies began in 1913 and lasted until 1980. The film also stars Wallace Beery as Pat Garrett, the lawman who tracked down and shot Billy on July 14, 1881. The outlaw had been sentenced to hang, escaped and killed two deputies in the process. As it happens, Garrett was born in Chambers County, so there's a second Alabama connection in this film.
Today Henry McCarty aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid is an iconic character with many appearances in popular culture, ranging from films and television episodes to comics and video games. But in 1930 he was just beginning his rise in the pantheon of western outlaws.
A folk song "Billy the Kid" appeared at some point in the west; the Sons of the Pioneers recorded it in 1937. A play "Billy the Kid" ran on Broadway in 1906. Two silent films about Billy were released in 1911; both starred women impersonating the male outlaw. Brown & Vidor's 1930 film was the first sound movie devoted to the Kid, and the first in which a male starred in the role!
This film was one of two released in 1930 that a used 70mm widescreen process; the other was The Big Trail starring John Wayne. Unfortunately, the Great Depression prevented cinemas from upgrading to widescreen and only a few such movies were made at the time. The process would lie dormant until The Robe filmed in Cinemascope and released in 1953. Wayne's widescreen version has been restored, but the only known version of Brown's film is standard-width.
Billy the Kid runs 95 minutes and was release on October 18, 1930. The film was shot on various locations such as Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, San Fernando Valley, and Gallup, New Mexico. As the IMDB notes, the great silent film star of Westerns William S. Hart was an uncredited technical advisor. He owned some of Billy the Kid's "six shooters" and was friends with such legends of the West as Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.
Images two through six below are taken from Everson's book and offer some interesting details about the film. Hart is shown in the first photo offering one of Billy's guns to Brown. The second photo is a scene with a confrontation between Garrett and Billy. In the the text shown from the book, Everson discusses the dominance of long shots and lack of closeups and the effect of that in the standard-width version. The film is available from Warner Archive; a preview can be seen on YouTube.
By the mid-1930s Brown began a long series of western films for several studios, including Republic, Universal and Monogram. In the 1950s his likeness appeared in a series of comic books published by Dell. He is an inductee of the College Football Hall of Fame [1957] and the first class of the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame [1969]. He died November 14, 1974. Brown was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers in 2008.
