BILLY THE KID (1930)

Billy the Kid is a 1930 American pre-Code Western film directed in widescreen by King Vidor about the relationship between frontier outlaw Billy the Kid (Johnny Mack Brown, billed as "John Mack Brown" during his brief career peak) and lawman Pat Garrett (Wallace Beery). In February 2020, the film was shown at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, as part of a retrospective dedicated to King Vidor's career.[1]

Plot
Billy, after shooting down land baron William Donovan's henchmen for killing Billy's boss, is hunted down and captured by his friend, Sheriff Pat Garrett. He escapes and is on his way to Mexico when Garrett, recapturing him, must decide whether to bring him in or to let him go.

Cast
John Mack Brown as Billy the Kid
Wallace Beery as Deputy Sheriff Pat Garrett
Kay Johnson as Claire Randall
Karl Dane as Swenson
Wyndham Standing as Jack Tunston
Russell Simpson as Angus McSween
Blanche Friderici as Mrs McSween (as Blanche Frederici)
Roscoe Ates as Old Stuff
Warner Richmond as Bob Ballinger
James A. Marcus as Colonel William P. Donovan
Nelson McDowell as Track Hatfield
Jack Carlyle as Dick Brewer
John Beck as Butterworth
Chris-Pin Martin as Don Esteban Santiago
Aggie Herring as Emily Hatfield
Production
Directed by King Vidor, the movie was filmed in an early widescreen process called Realife, a 70mm format similar to Fox Film Corporation's Grandeur used for the lavish The Big Trail the same year.[2]

While The Big Trail, starring John Wayne, has been restored so that the 1930 widescreen process can be evaluated by modern viewers, no widescreen prints of Billy the Kid are known to currently exist and the movie can be viewed only in a standard-width version that was filmed simultaneously with the widescreen version. The widescreen format did not get a commercial foothold with movie-going audiences until The Robe two decades later, largely because the Depression was under way by 1930 and few theatres could afford to upgrade their equipment after just converting to sound.

In some newspaper ads, the more familiar Beery, a major star and frequent supporting player since the teens during the silent era, was accorded top billing over young Brown but not in the main posters. Within two years Beery had contractually become MGM's highest-paid actor while John Mack Brown was rechristened "Johnny Mack Brown" and demoted into B-Westerns after the studio reshot a film called Laughing Sinners with Brown originally cast as the leading man, replacing him with Clark Gable. There are assertions that Brown's degradation to B-Westerns and his firing from MGM was as a result of Brown showing an interest in Marion Davies, who turned out to be the mistress of Louis B. Mayer, who was jealous of Brown and the head of MGM studio.