Lumpy-cheeked and slow-eyed, Michael J. Pollard (chum to Bonnie and Clyde in the 1967 film) plays Billy the Kid, a seventeen-year-old bit of pathology in the making. But the source of the pathology is not exclusive to this rabid runt; it's endemic to the festering environs of Coffeyville, Kansas, the rickety, mud-caked town where Billy lands from the East Coast. Billy soon falls in with Goldie (Richard Evans) and Berle (Lee Purcell), a local desperado and his slutty gal, and he's mentored for mayhem. J. Hoberman called Dirty Little Billy a “miserabilist Western,” tagging not only the grubby cowpokes and their squalid digs but the general lack of moral hygiene. When it‘s decided that Billy and his crazed cohorts must go, the town's settlers respond with depraved ferocity. No spurs, no Stetsons, no chaps-this punked-out oater shoots holes in the heroic. With a gleam in his eye, Billy boasts: “Not many people know this, but I almost killed a guy in New York . . . with a brick.”