Young Billy Young (1969)

Based (loosely, it seems) on the novel Who Rides with Wyatt, by Heck Allen (as Will Henry), first published in 1955.

The film starts out with a Mexican militia riding on a train, under the command of a Mexican general. They stop at a village where they execute some men who were being held prisoner at the local church. Two young men, Billy and Jesse, board the train unnoticed and hide in the horse car. After the train leaves, the youngsters invade one of the cars and shoot everyone there, including the general. They flee, riding on two horses they steal, and are chased by the general's soldiers. Billy falls from his horse and is abandoned by Jesse, yet manages to elude his chasers. He finds a jackass and mounts it; he soon comes across a man named Kane, who is camping by a river and advises Billy not to wade in it. This advice goes unheeded by Billy and he gets sucked up in quicksand. He makes it out of the river, but the donkey is gone. Kane refuses to take him and thus he has to walk to the nearest town. To make a long story short, Kane accepts a job as tax collector and deputy sheriff (?) of a town named Lordsburg, taking Billy with him. Kane's motivation for taking the job is to get revenge on Boone, the town's boss, for a past offense. And that's all I can tell you about this film's plot.

This is a melodrama, yet it is not played out with the intensity that has become usually associated with that kind of fictional narrative. On the contrary, the pace is laidback and the characters' interactions approach as much as possible the coolness we tend to associate with real life. As the New York Times reviewer (Howard Thompson) points out, this is closer to TV aesthetics than cinema. As a result, there is an odd mismatch of subject and tone, but this kind of mismatch was increasingly becoming a deliberate choice by filmmakers, in the late 60s onto the 70s, and further on up to some point of exhaustion. The theme of the movie, hiding in plain sight so to speak, is fatherhood, with Billy filling in for Kane's lost son, and Kane filling in for Billy's (presumed) absent father (Jesse and Boone are their mirror image), and all this, of course, as a metaphor for the law coming to a lawless place.

Rating: 50