It wasn't uncommon back in the Hollywood studio era for studios to produce biopics that were ostensibly about a famous subject, but barely reflected reality. Recently, I watched another film that fit that description: the 1941 version of Billy the Kid.
Robert Taylor plays Billy Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, and as the movie opens he's climbing into the living quarters above a jail in what is probably Lincoln County, NM (although the location backgrounds are very obviously Monument Valley in Utah) where he overpowers a sheriff's deputy and frees his friend Pedro (Frank Puglia), whose main purpose in this story is to provide some musical background and then be a key plot point later in the movie. Billy takes Pedro to a saloon run by cattle baron Dan Hickey (Gene Lockhart). Hickey makes his money selling cattle to the US government, who need the cattle to feed their soldiers.
But it's a bit of a ruse, as what Hickey and his men really do is cause competing ranchers' cattle to stampede, which means that Hickey's cattle would be the only ones left to sell to the government. Unfortunately, this time, the stampede kills one of the opposing farmers, which is a big problem. Meanwhile, one of the men affected by the stampede is Jim Sherwood (Brian Donlevy), who knew Billy when the two of them were kids.
Jim is working for one of the competing ranchers, Eric Keating (Ian Hunter), so Jim brings Billy and Pedro to the Keating ranch with the possibility of jobs. This is the depiction of the Lincoln County War, which has been depicted by Hollywood several times, notably in Chisum and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, although it's even more fictionalized here than in other movies. Keating has a sister Edith, and Billy falls in love with her, not that they're romantically suited for each other. And there's also the issue that people are still getting shot. The sheriff, McAndrews, has been working for Hickey, so Keating decides that he's going to go see the territorial governor (which would be Lew Wallace of Ben-Hur fame although he's not a character in this movie) with the aim of being deputized into law enforcement.
Keating, however, gets waylaid and ever returns to his ranch, leading Sherwood to go and get deputized himself; he's the Pat Garrett character even though the names have changed. Billy, here on the side of Keating's men, decides to go into town to get Hickey and the men Hickey sent to kill Keating, but Hickey is no dummy and sends the actual killers away so that they can't be found. Now, we know that the real life Billy the Kid was killed at the tender age of 22, so the question remains of how this movie version of Billy is going to get it in the end.
One of the reviews of Billy the Kid that I read made the argument that this is a generic Hollywood western, except that MGM decided to attach the name of Billy the Kid to is, which causes all sorts of problems considering the liberties that they had to tak with what's known about the real Billy Bonney's life. If it had been about totally fictitious people, the movie might be better. But what we actually get is a bunch of nonsense that probably looked nice on screen back in 1941 since it's in Technicolor. But even then, the print that TCM ran isn't all that good, so we don't even rally get the benefit of Technicolor.
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