I think “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” is an excellent film, but I was unconvinced by Dylan’s music there, the knife-wielding character he played, and a too-old Kristofferson playing a 22-year-old. The late-80s TV movie “Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid” featured a young Val Kilmer as Billy. He seemed to me to portray Billy as I pictured him after reading Frederick Nolan’s books and others. That movie also had a wider scope, starting just before John Tunstall’s murder triggered the Lincoln County War-- the event which made Billy who he was. Peckinpah, of course, had a different focus. And his film [edit: at least included] Billy’s very best friends Tom O’Folliard and … Charlie Bowdre [seen in the siege at the stone house at Stinking Spring, the foundation of which is still visible] and is a classic. Just my two cents.
Sorry to partypoop gentlemen but, whilst I’m all in favour of the organic flow of conversation, we’re straying quite far from the thread topic which, lest we forget, was Companeros. There are threads elsewhere on-site dedicated to Sam Peckinpah, to The Wild Bunch and to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and we’d be hugely appreciative if you could post on those threads should you wish to continue this conversation.
Thanks, amigos. 
I love that scene. It’s a good call-back to Django and I always laugh at The Penguin’s example of violence being necessary.
Screenshot comparison of DVD (top) vs Blue Underground blu-ray (middle) vs Unknown supposed blu ray with French & Italian dubs, English subs.
I grabbed this last one off the net due to lack of availability in blu ray options. The BU disc is OOP and prices are retarded. It looks like its maybe just an upscale of the French Seven7 DVD? Not sure… I don’t see any blu ray releases with these audio options… its not very good looking anyway.
Anyone have the more recent German blu rays?
Several German DVDs were released, but so far none from Koch.
Ah, my mistake. I must have been confusing it with Bullet For The General which I bought from Koch many years ago in the Rainbow set… I had ripped the Companeros DVD off to my computer because I was planning on buying the blu ray, which I didn’t do before it went OOP and for some reason I had assumed it was a Koch release
Actually I would like Companeros to be released by Koch …
A new Companeros blu from Koch would be pretty great
I just wish they would start making their releases region-free… my player bit the dust and not sure I can splurge on a new region-free player any time soon
I think they are not allowed too.
Especially not with English audio options.
I wonder why though? Is it something with German laws? Seems every other company releasing these genre blu rays are region free releases now days
So after a long number of years, I revisited the movie
https://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Retrospective_review_of_Companeros_on_BluRay
First of all, I hesitate to describe war films set in 20th century Mexico as “westerns”. (Unlike The Wild Bunch, which is still recognisably a western despite the Mexican Revolutionary backdrop). But Companeros and its ilk are clearly part of the Spaghetti Western canon, so…
I haven’t watched this or A Professional Gun/Il Mercenario for a while, so caught up with them both on YouTube. A Professional Gun is in HD and looking as good as I’ve ever seen it. I think now it’s Corbucci’s most spectacular and accomplished film, with a decent budget which is all up there on the screen - airplane and all.
I think Companeros suffers by comparison. Oddly, considering the success of Corbucci’s previous films and the fact that it has funding from three countries, it seems to have a smaller budget than its predecessor. The main shortcoming is easily explained: the scriptwriters are not as good. Whereas A Professional Gun has a well-structured and fast-moving story, Companeros is slow to get going and too often feels baggy and rambling. And I’m surprised that no-one else seems to have a problem with the ending, which I find completely unconvincing. Why does super-cynical Yod suddenly decide to ride back and join the revolutionaries’ suicidal last stand? Absolutely nothing in the film has prepared the ground for this. (I also can’t help thinking that its original English-speaking audiences would have greeted the bellowed last line with a collective “What??”)
It’s still an enjoyable film in all sorts of ways - Nero’s charm, Milian’s oafishness, Palance being completely bonkers - and some of the political discussions are food for thought amid the general mayhem. There’s a lot that can be read into Xantos’ fate, for example. Corbucci has obviously just seen The Wild Bunch - hence the bridge being blown up with horsemen on it and the frenetic final battle - but his direction seems less assured than in A Professional Gun, just as The Great Silence is less well-directed than Django. Morricone’s cacaphonous theme song works will in itself but is applied to the action like a blunt instrument. This is a film that I very much enjoyed when I first saw it as a student (though I thought it took a while to get going even then) but have become less keen on since - though I’ll always watch it through to the end.
"Why does super-cynical Yod suddenly decide to ride back and join the revolutionaries’ suicidal last stand? " - I asked myself or at least reacted against the same sort of joining the revolutionaries that Steffen’s character did in the end of Killer Kid - which contributed to my dismissal of another zapata-influenced SW.
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Sorry if this has been answered before but what is the extra 5m or so of footage in the uncut version Vs the international version? Anything of significance?
Thank you
I thought we had this somewhere, but if I remember correctly it was a combination of violence and politics that was cut in a few moments. I need to try and dig out the exact comparison somewhere…
I wondered about this when I watched it recently. The only part that wasn’t English dubbed was the introduction, which felt like it went on longer? But other than than that I didn’t notice anything obvious.
Funnily enough I noticed that the trailer has a bunch of different and unused shots. Most of them are minor (like Nero’s reaction face on the train), but the weirdest is the tower exploding. In the film it collapses from the top down, and is shot from a completely different angle.
Trailers often were already made before a film’s editing and mixing was finished. That’s why it happens often enough that they contain alternative shots or even parts of scenes which were not used in the final cut.
Nero has extra dialogue before he punches the guy in the hotel. He says “Your grandpa is a famous fag”, or something like that.