And here’s the review:
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[size=12pt]http://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/The_Man_Who_Killed_Billy_The_Kid_review[/size]
Thanks for the DVD, it sounds worthy of a good DVD release. I used to get this confused with Fury of Johnny Kidd another pretty good one!
Does here someone have the spanish DVD ?
Looks like this is getting a nice release with German and Spanish Language, with German and ENGLISH subs.
Thanks for the news Farmer_J!
I might have it, but I’m not sure. (It seems to be on my DVDProfiler list though… I think…) Does it matter anymore though with the German release on the way?
I was looking for the Runtime of the spanish DVD, cause i know it’s the longest version of the film
Watched this one last night. Pretty forgettable movie. Seems kind of fragmented and to be honest pretty boring. The only decent part was the soundtrack by Gianni Ferrio. Don’t know if it was recycled from another movie but it was very ‘spaghetti’ so thumbs up to that.
I watched the German dvd by Coyote and wish I could say they did a fine job this time around but alas. The picture quality is pretty ok. Some scratches here and there but nohing major. But there ARE major problems with the release. You have the option of three different dubs: German, Spanish and English but no subs. I took the English one but sadly there are times in the movie when this dub just go quiet. One time for a minute or so, and a couple of seconds or 10 later in the movie. In the end of the movie the dub also went out of sync so had to shift to the German one to be able to stand it 
Also what is presented is the German cut I take it which is missing som 15-16 minutes. These are available as an extra on the disc in Spanish with German subs. Kind of irritiating that they weren’t incorporated into the movie. The picture quality of the extra scenes was of course worse but there where things in the movie which didn’t make any sense without these extra scenes so pretty annoying.
So movie: so-so, release: Damn Coyote do some quality-checking and spend more time on your releases.
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… and just realized that I had already previously seen this movie. Probably an old vhs-rip or something. Well that hadn’t left a mark at all so totally forgettable movie…
With the english audio on the Coyote DVD, I don’t think its too bad. The first time the dub goes quiet its like 10 seconds then the 2nd time its 3 seconds… then in the 2nd half of the film the audio randomly goes out of sync a few times but it always goes back in sync after a few seconds, I was worried it would stay out of sync.
I was surprised how good the picture quality was, the only way it could look better is on blu-ray
From my knowledge no master in correct aspect ratio is available from that movie. So Wild Coyote took the only existing German 35mm print for scanning. The original print has red colors but in general it`s good looking.
Wild Coyote did a good restoration from my point of view. The picture quality is really fine.
The German print is based on the international (shorter) version of the movie as well as the english.
The bonus scenes were taken from the spanish (long) version only available in wrong aspect ratio and pixelated.
I have not watched the english dub but I may imagine that the source was not complete anymore due to missing 35mm material/source. The out of sync seconds may result from master jump cuts.
Still. Letting these out of sync-moments and the scenes with total silence (when activating the English dub) and the fact that they didn’t incorporate the extra scenes in the actual movie makes the whole deal a kind of sloppy release. In a world where discs are being replaced because of a single accidental frame this one stands out as one that may have benefitted from a couple of hours of extra work.
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I agree with you for the out of sync and silence parts. This could have been done better or at least should have been fixed by final quality controls.
But from my point of view it does not make sense to include the extra scenes with bad picture quality and wrong aspect ratio in the new scanned master.
The long cut was only for spanish market, international version officially was only about 82min PAL (about 85min NTSC).
The Spanish version was released on the OOP release from Divisa but there are some “english friendly” dubs around.
I don`t remember if theres also silence in some parts but at least the cut parts have english subs.
This movie’s page in the database has been updated to the new layout. Let us know of any errors, or submit facts, trivia, links, reviews or pictures.
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I assume this was Lawrence’s second starring role and filmed after Fury of Johnny Kid although the two films were released in Italy only a week apart. The credits are clearly a rip-off from The Good the Bad and the Ugly so that would make this shot in late 1966 and the post production done in early 1967.
The podcast on Lawrence puts this film third and Days of Violence second but Days of Violence wasn’t released until August 1967 and must be his fourth movie after Killer Calibre with which it shares the same director. Killer Calibre was released in April 1967 and must have been shot before either this or Johnny Kid were released.
The liberties with history are quite strange. Billy’s mother actually died in 1874 before the events of this film start. Mum is played by Gloria Milland who was only 4 years older than Lawrence and they really don’t make much attempt to make her look older. I found Weisser’s incest references a bit baffling. I didn’t see that at all (but did he ever see this movie or just copy from something). Tunstall was only 24 when he was murdered and didn’t have a grown-up daughter. In some of the other movies they make Chisum’s niece Billy’s love interest but Chisum doesn’t appear in this one. But all Hollywood movies make Tunstall a middle-aged guy also. In Young Guns he’s played by Terence Stamp and they imply he has a sexual attraction to his young cowhands which is total nonsense. One suspects the writers had seen The Left Handed Gun with Paul Newman which has some of the same historical liberties.
I am watching the German DVD which is the International version with the extra Spanish scenes as extras. The first half an hour had some quite abrupt edits but the deleted scenes didn’t really help - there’s a long one in which Billy meets a peddler (Paco Sanz) which belonged deleted!
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A few other points:
I think this one was heavily influenced by The Left Handed Gun. It was also made before it was properly understood that William Bonney just seems to have been an alias used by the Kid and was never a real name. Historians tracked down his mother’s marriage certificate from her marriage to William Antrim in 1873 - the name she had on that was Catherine McCarty and Henry McCarty (the Kid) was a witness. He was called Henry throughout the period he was with his mother and stepfather - documented several times - so that must have been his real name. Billy came later. Catherine claimed at one point to have been married to a Michael McCarty. However no-one has been able to track him down , find out when he died or find any marriage certificate. We don’t know if he was even Henry’s real father. We also don’t know when or where exactly the Kid was born (the date is either 1858 or 1859 based in his own words) or where Catherine was born or what her maiden name was if McCarty was a married name. She was 13 years older than her second husband (43 per the marriage certificate).
All of that of course is missing from this one including her second husband. She didn’t know Garrett or even meet him. She died a year after the marriage when Henry was only about 15 and then he went gallivanting a while afterwards.
I found it odd that they saw fit to add a Man Who Shot Liberty Valance twist - particularly as it was a pointless twist as well with no real need and Billy is killed by a fictional character.
They didn’t have his arrest by Garrett and subsequent jail break in which he kills two deputies which all the other films have and which was well documented at the time. The Lincoln county war was much cut down - the fight in the town between the two factions lasted 4/5 days in reality. The army was called in by Dolan ( Murphy’s associate missing here) on his side but they arrived to stop the violence in Lincoln and didn’t turn up at the Tunstall ranch. The soldiers were from a black cavalry regiment (which is ‘whitewashed’ in the movies). Governor Lew Wallace, the Ben Hur author, did discuss a pardon with Billy which came to nothing - part of it was in exchange for evidence against the army Colonel Dudley for his misuse of power.
Garrett claimed reward money for killing the kid but it took ages for him to get it. He had to take legal action. In spaghetti westerns, bounty hunters just turn up at the sheriff’s office with a body and get paid straight away. This is nonsense. Few outlaws had rewards on them (let alone reward posters with their photograph on) and rewards were offered if at all by the state or territorial governor and you had to go to him to claim your money which could take ages as there were sometimes competing claims. Jesse James’ huge reward money was offered by the railroad rather than any state official. Other rewards tended to be offered by rich private individuals or organisations - in the novel and film True Grit the fictional Deputy US Marshal Rooster Cogburn only goes after his prey to get the private reward and the Texas ranger is after a private reward as well.
Those comments in the database review attributed to Nick Nostro about Lucio Fulci have got to be nonsense. The story is 100% about Billy the Kid and not Salvatore Giuliano. There is no way this story could ever have been originally about Giuliano who was post WW2. All the western sets, character names and events etc. I imagine Nostro has conflated this with some other project. If there was a Giuliano project it must have been thrown in the bin at an early development stage. Francisco Rosi had made a film about Giuliano only a few years previously which had been very well received.
According to the review Nostro said it was a dramatisation of Salvatore Giuliano transplanted to the west (and then disguised as Billy the Kid), so this could still be correct. I haven’t done any research whether the film’s plot has any similarities to Salvatore Giuliano’s life though.
No similarities at all from what I can gather looking at Guiliano’s career on Wikipedia.
What he is saying is rubbish (or he has confused it with something else). Why would you write a story about Guiliano but then call the character Billy the Kid and be a sort-of-faithful recreation of the life of Billy the Kid. Nonsensical.
It’s like saying you are making a film about William Tell but setting it in England several hundred years earlier calling the hero Robin Hood and have him fight the sheriff of Nottingham and romancing Marion (with no apple scene).
Point taken. However, taking the basics of the assassination of JFK (in Dallas) and serving it in a film (also set in Dallas) about the assassination of President Garfield (who was killed in Washington) isn’t that far off in terms of free spirited intertwining of different real events or legends or whatever, in my opinion. 
Yes - but Price of Power clearly recreates the Kennedy assassination in the Wild West and doesn’t try and hide it. It’s also a fictional story with fictional characters.
It’s not the Garfield assassination and the President is not Garfield. He’s never referred to as such. Reviewers seem to assume he is because Garfield was assassinated but the President is not named. The film seems to be set about 10 years before the Garfield assassination as well.
If you’re looking for historical accuracy, then an Italian/Spanish action adventure film, obviously ‘ain’t’ the place?
I like the film a lot, as I’m watching on it’s own terms … light entertainment, with an attractive leading man, which is well produced in great locations and has a tremendous soundtrack.
As you mention in your detailed comments, none of the films get it right … personally I’d be more bothered by Peckinpah’s film, which seems to be aiming for a kind of gritty, grotty realism, but right from the outset, with the casting of then 37 year old Kris Kristofferson, it’s basically nonsense.
As a western history buff, you might want to avoid ‘Gunmen of the Rio Grande’, as that’s all about Wyatt Earp … Italian style!