Billy the Kid (1930 film)

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Billy the Kid (1930) is a film about the relationship between frontier outlaw Billy the Kid (Johnny Mack Brown) and Pat Garrett (Wallace Beery), the man who later killed him. Directed by King Vidor, the movie was filmed in an early widescreen process (John Wayne's first film, The Big Trail, released the same year and directed by Raoul Walsh, used a similar process and has been restored by the Museum of Modern Art). No widescreen prints of Billy the Kid are known to currently exist and the movie can only be viewed in a standard-width version that was filmed simultaneously.

The film was remade in color in 1941 as Billy the Kid (1941 film) with Robert Taylor as Billy and Brian Donlevy as a fictionalized version of Pat Garrett. The Howard Hughes version two years later, called The Outlaw and mainly serving as an introductory vehicle for Jane Russell, owes at least as much to the 1930 film, particularly in the casting of Thomas Mitchell, a superb actor who physically resembles Wallace Beery, as Garrett.

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