Sick Shooter

By JAY COCKS

DIRTY LITTLE BILLY

Directed by STAN DRAGOTI Screenplay by CHARLES MOSS and STAN DRAGOTI

From early sound epics featuring Johnny Mack Brown to Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun, there have been many attempts to dramatize either the inglorious life or the tarnished legend of William H. Bonney--otherwise known as Billy the Kid. Dirty Little Billy, however, is the first to deal with Billy while he is still literally a kid, a punk adolescent just learning to shoot, to booze, to whore and to stay up past midnight. Billy is an eager pupil.

Since Michael J. Pollard (most familiar for his slow-witted C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde) holds down the title role, this movie is, alas, a Pollard vehicle. In fact, Pollard is physically right for the part, although with his bulbous cheeks and cretinous eyes, he looks a bit like Dopey. However, he acts more like all the Seven Dwarfs--simultaneously. Instead of directing him, Dragoti indulges him. Pollard either mopes or mugs in every scene, and cruelly prolongs every line of dialogue that he cannot swallow entirely. There are some good secondary performances, though: by Charles Aidman as a sort of Babbitt aborning, Lee Purcell as a wilted prairie flower, and Dran Hamilton as Billy's mother. Both women have the same blind strength of will, the same poignant sense of the hopelessness of their characters that transcends the hand-tooled mannerisms of the movie.

Everything is gray: the landscape, the light, the morality. There are no heroes, only villains and victims. The splendid myth of the West originated in blood and mud, both of which are in abundant evidence here, along with every other cliche of what has come to be called the antiwestern. The action takes place mostly on the main street of Coffeyville, Kans., which looks like a bayou. Whoever is not shot there is pretty sure to catch it in the saloon, which, like every other set in the picture, has been designed and dressed to look determinedly shabby. The actors wear worn clothes coated with dirt, as if they had all been wrestling in an anthracite pit. Their faces are ever so carefully caked with filth. Reality is swallowed up in such elaborately misplaced attention to detail; the movie looks quite as fussy and phony in its ramshackle posturings as Shane did in its opulent mythologizing.

What is remarkable about Dirty Little Billy is the fervor with which its director has seized upon each thumping bromide of the anti-western and put them all on review, like a rodeo parade. Dragoti, formerly a director of television commercials, ought to have developed some expertise in manipulating an audience--but Dirty Little Billy, his first movie, is a shambling, enervating exercise. qedJ.C.

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