Dreamscape Desperado
Who remembers Billy the Kid?
By: Paul Andrew Hutton 04/01/2007
Celluloid Billy
While the highbrows studied the nuances of the ballet, the less sophisticated followed the race between MGM and Howard Hughes to get two competing Billy the Kid films into America’s theaters first.
MGM’s glossy remake of the King Vidor epic, starring Robert Taylor, won the race because Hughes’ film deeply offended the Hays production code office with its attempt to exploit the amazing anatomical attributes of starlet Jane Russell to their maximum potential. Hughes’ The Outlaw, starring Russell, Walter Huston (as Doc Holliday), Thomas Mitchell (as Garrett), and Jack Beutel (as Billy), remains one of the most bizarre Western films ever made.
The censorship battle—centering on the fact that Billy in the film is not killed as punishment for his crimes (as he was in the MGM film) and on the heterosexual and homosexual themes—delayed The Outlaw’s release until a limited run in 1943 and the general release in 1946.
The subject of Billy the Kid seems to invite such cinematic excess. Other movies on the same controversial plane as The Outlaw include Dennis Hopper’s 1971 The Last Movie (the actor playing the Kid in this film-within-a-film gets killed), Marlon Brando’s 1961 One-Eyed Jacks (the Kid’s life was grafted into a tale of vengeance) and E. Kutlug Ataman’s 1999 Lola and Billy the Kid (a Turkish-language film about the romance between a teenage boy and a Berlin transvestite).
Thank publicist Russell Birdwell (promoter for Gone with the Wind and John Wayne’s The Alamo), and not Hughes, for cutting through the controversy surrounding The Outlaw by exploiting Russell’s sensual potential. Photos of a pouting Russell reclining in a haystack with a pistol in her hand, accompanied by slogans such as “Mean, moody, and magnificent” and “Two good reasons for seeing The Outlaw,” blanketed the country. Hughes, who had fired director Howard Hawks and taken control of the production, had a hit on his hands. Despite the mocking reviews and censorship battles, people flocked to the film. Billy the Kid was more famous than ever, but it was sex, not history, that sold his story.
One casualty of Hughes’ battle with the censors was the B-western “Billy the Kid” series. Roy Rogers had just starred as a cowboy, mistaken for the recently deceased Billy, who cleans up Lincoln County with a guitar and six-gun in Republic’s successful 1938 film. The responsive public encouraged Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) to begin a series of films about the outlaw youth. Producer Sigmund Neufeld and his brother, director Sam Neufeld (usually credited as Sam Newfield), made 19 Billy the Kid Westerns between 1940-43. Bob Steele first starred as Billy, aided by sidekick Al “Fuzzy” St. John, in six films before heading to greener pastures at Republic Studios. Buster Crabbe, of Flash Gordon fame, replaced Steele for the rest of the series.
In 1943, the main character’s name was changed to Billy Carson when censorship groups objected to the glorification of an outlaw in films for children (responding to the negative publicity fallout from The Outlaw). Crabbe would star in 23 more Billy films, but not as Billy. Each film, even though they had nothing to do with the real Billy, further enhanced the Kid’s image as an American hero.
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