To me, this movie is perfection.

Such a frustrating disappointment

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

One of the strangest westerns ever made. Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun", adapted from a play by Gore Vidal, came right at the height of the 'teenage rebel' cycle of the fifties with Paul Newman's Billy the Kid having more in common with James Dean's Jim Stark than any Western outlaw I can think of. The film wasn't a success; it's highfalutin dialogue and over-the-top acting proving too much for a general audience who, if they looked just below the surface, would have easily detected a homosexual subplot involving Hurd Hatfield's character who acts as a kind of Greek Chorus. It marked the screen debut of Penn who didn't make another film for four years though it's now built up something of a cult reputation. It isn't really very good, and it is very self-concious, but it is also too bizarre to dismiss out of hand.

This Film has Many Interesting Elements that may Attract Viewers. Director Arthur Penn's Debut, Early Paul Newman as an Iconic Western Outlaw, and a Different Artistic Approach to the Conventional Western.However, the Movie is not the Easiest to Like. Penn's Flourishes are Welcome in a Genre so Ripe with Regularity, but Newman Overacts to the Point of Silliness and can Grate on the Nerves. In Fact, just about Every Actor Emotes to Extreme, Except Perhaps John Dehner as Pat Garrett who Strikes a Concerned Lawman's Pose Quite Well Without Words. But even He is Guilty of One Scene that is Downright Atrocious (the this is my wedding, this is my town part).Visually the Film has Many Interesting Shots and Flourishes, but Newman's Exaggeration of Body Language and Other Fanciful Displays that Misfire bring the Movie Down to just Above Average. There is Enough Curiosity here that is Worth a Watch, but Overall it is the Over Baked Acting that makes this a Disappointment.

The notorious outlaw William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, has been the subject of a number of films. Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" and Howard Hughes's "The Outlaw" are among the better-known ones. He also appears, although not as the main character, in Andrew V. McLaglen's "Chisum". Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun" is a lesser- known treatment of the story; the title refers to the belief (probably incorrect) that Billy was left handed. The film starts with Billy's involvement in the Lincoln County War, a range war which took place in New Mexico in 1878. Billy is befriended and taken on as a ranch hand by a kindly cattle boss named Tunstall, who is later murdered by rival cattlemen in league with a corrupt local sheriff. Billy swears revenge and plans to hunt down and kill all the men responsible for his friend's death. His actions, however, jeopardise the territorial amnesty proclaimed by New Mexico governor Lew Wallace, and bring him into conflict with the local population and with his former friend Pat Garrett. A sub-plot involves a journalist named Moultrie who, much to Billy's disgust, sends romanticised and highly exaggerated material back East, leading to the creation of the "Billy the Kid legend". In the film Tunstall is referred to as 'The Englishman', even though he speaks with a Scottish accent and it is stated that he comes from Ayrshire. This is presumably a mistake on the part the characters rather than a goof by the film-makers and the scriptwriter Gore Vidal; like many foreigners, Billy and the other Americans make the common mistake of confusing "English" with "British". In reality John Henry Tunstall actually was an Englishman, from London, and far from being elderly was only 25 at the time of his death. The idea of portraying him as an older father-figure to Billy may have influenced a similar treatment of the character in "Chisum". Penn, who died two years ago, is perhaps best remembered today for his "Bonnie and Clyde", the story of two other notorious outlaws. That film, made in 1967, caught the Zeitgeist of the late sixties, portraying its protagonists as misunderstood young people, essentially as hippies born before their time. Likewise, "The Left Handed Gun" portrays Billy the Kid as a psychologically troubled teenager, a "rebel without a cause" transferred from the 1950s to the 1870s. Indeed, the role was originally intended for James Dean, the original "rebel without a cause", and only went to Paul Newman after Dean's death in a car crash. The film also looks forward to the sixties in another way. It is an early example of a revisionist Western which seeks to get away from the "heroic myth" of the Old West and to present a more morally nuanced view of the period, in the same way as the makers of films noirs were bringing a note of moral ambiguity to modern crime dramas. In many earlier Westerns Billy would have been presented as a heroic avenger, but not here. The men who murder Tunstall may be evil and corrupt, but that does not mean that Billy is justified in taking the law into his own hands to seek revenge. By doing so, he only brings about tragedy for himself and others. Penn may have chosen to make the film in black-and- white, at a time when colour was increasingly the norm in the Western genre, to suggest a link with film noir. (William Wyler's "The Big Country", another Western from 1958, also seeks to blur the once-sharp distinction between heroes and villains, but Wyler's film is in full colour). In one sense, Newman was miscast as Billy; he would have been 33 in 1958, whereas his character was only 18 during the Lincoln County War and died at the age of 21. This was not Newman's best performance of his career- indeed, it was not his best performance of 1958. He gave better ones in two better films made in the same year, "The Long Hot Summer" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". Nevertheless, he shows plenty of the charisma which made him such an exciting new star in the late fifties, despite his inauspicious start to his film career in "The Silver Chalice", and is convincing enough as the troubled young man to make us overlook the discrepancy in age between actor and character. The film was a box-office flop in the United States, which is perhaps not surprising. It is rather dull and downbeat compared to many Westerns of the period, the narrative can at times be difficult to follow and few, if any, of the supporting performances have anything like the intensity of Newman's. It has occasional points of interest, but is not a film in the sane class as "Bonnie and Clyde", and certainly not in the same class as "The Big Country". 5/10

Billy The Kid has been played on screen by many actors, of whom Paul Newman may have been the most justly famous. So why is his Billy such a drip?Newman was 33 years old and had managed to make the most of his second chance at screen fame with a solid turn in "Somebody Up There Likes Me," playing a rebellious young boxer. As Billy, though, Newman seems lost as a similar character of sudden impulse. "All I know is how I feel," he says, and that's true whether he's brooding Brando-like over the death of a rancher he just met or dancing up a storm three minutes later. For every scene he plays with his trademark cool, there must be four or five he exaggerates to strange effect.It's a strange movie with or without him. Celebrated by some as a psychological western, it presents Billy as neither evil nor a sociopath, but rather as tied up by an understandable if extreme need for revenge. There was this guy, you see, who gave Billy a job and then got shot by some corrupt peace officers, and he promised to teach poor Billy to read.Never mind that Billy doesn't know this guy when the movie starts and he's already dead ten minutes in. Nor that Billy's two partners-in-crime, Tom (James Best) and Charley (James Congdon), have no clear reason for siding with their hot-tempered friend. "The Left-Handed Gun" is a film in a hurry, mainly to give Newman as much opportunity to emote as possible. Boy, does Newman emote!Compositionally, "The Left-Handed Gun" does some interesting things. We see Billy's first gunfight through a steamed-up window taking place while Billy simultaneously maps it out, a terrific effect. Director Arthur Penn and cinematographer J. Peverell Marley (not a harmonious team, as Penn reveals in a DVD commentary) continually find unique details to capture the eye, like one man's face pressed against a window glass after taking a fatal bullet. In his movie blog "Nothing Is Written," Groggy Dundee points out just how much of Penn's big escape scene made it into the later Sam Peckinpah movie "Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid," to the point of identical blocking and camera angles.This is a better film that that one, which is overlong and cattywampus. Penn makes a point in his DVD commentary about the film being taken away from him in the editing room, and there's much sloppiness in evidence in the final cut, like Tom taking the same bullet in two consecutive scenes. But Penn must take the blame for a cast that overplays way too much, as if Newman's Method acting style was the swine flu. Best either whacks his hat or giggles constantly, while John Dehner as Pat Garrett has an atrocious scene where he whines at Billy for shooting a guy during his wedding reception."This wall, this street, this town, I married all of it," Dehner screams. I shudder to imagine the honeymoon.Best's future "Dukes Of Hazzard" castmate Denver Pyle sticks out in a better way as the ornery Ollinger, while Hurd Hatfield coos over Billy as an overly florid Southern writer who wants to make his fortune writing up Billy's career. Considering this was based on a play by Gore Vidal, there may be a subtext there, though Hatfield works his few scenes more in the direction of a creepier Vincent Price. I liked him, even if I don't think he got across anything more than a hint of an idea about our exploitative celebrity culture.That's the problem with "Left-Handed Gun," aiming too high and not getting what it shoots for. That and Newman, who shows some star power here but not much acting skill. Unlike Billy, he had time to get better.