Ride the High Country (1962)

Ride the High Country, release in 1962, was Sam Peckinpah’s second feature film as director and it was the film that put him on the map.

Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott were both legendary stars from the glory days of the western and they were both at the tail end of their careers. This would be Scott’s last movie and McCrea did very little after this film. The casting was inspired since this is a movie about two men whose glory days are long behind them.

This is one of those “last days of the Wild West” movies. In the opening sequence we see a typical Old West town but there’s a motor car in the street. We assume that the film takes place in the first few years of the 20th century. The Wild West was starting to pass into legend.

Like the Wild West itself Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) is a relic of the past. He was once a famous lawman. Now he’s pushing sixty, he’s no longer famous and he works as a bank guard. His job is to escort gold bullion from a mining camp to a bank in town. Six miners have already been killed trying to get their gold to the bank.

When he was offered the job he was told he would be escorting a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of gold. Now he’s told it’s only $20,000 in gold (in fact it turns out to be even less which adds a nice little touch of futility to the story). The great days of gold rushes are over as well. The frontier, with its limitless possibilities, is a thing of the past. The future belongs to businessmen and book-keepers, not cowboys and gold prospectors and frontier lawmen. As we will see in the course of the movie even the classic western outlaw is now an anachronism.

To escort the gold Judd will need some help. That help is offered by his old friend, and one-time deputy, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott). Gil suggests that his young protégé Heck Longtree might be useful to have along.

Gil and Heck are actually intending to steal the gold. Since Steve Judd is such a straight arrow that’s going to be awkward. Gil has no intention of killing Steve. He hopes to persuade him to see reason. If he points out to Steve that they’ve both faithfully served the law for decades and they have nothing to show for it then surely Steve can be persuaded to go along with their plan.

A major complication arises when they stop for a night’s lodging at Joshua Knudsen’s farm. Young Heck is hopelessly smitten by Knudsen’s daughter Elsa. Old Joshua disapproves. Old Joshua disapproves of pretty much everything except the Bible. Elsa has decided to run away but she wants to run away to the mining camp to marry miner Billy Hammond. She manages to convince Steve and Gil to take her to the mining camp. That’s where things get really complicated, Steve and his companions fall foul of the five Hammond brothers and their dispute with the brothers is destined to end bloodily. While this is going on Gil and Heck wait for their opportunity to make off with the gold.

Since this is a Peckinpah movie you expect that there will be a lot of bloodletting before the movie is over, and there is.

There’s also a complex pattern of conflicting and shifting loyalties and conflicting agendas. Steve and Gil are old comrades. Heck is Gil’s protégé, but he comes to admire Steve Judd. Heck wants the gold but he wants Elsa and he can’t have both. There are betrayals of trust but there are also new loyalties being forged.

Steve Judd and Gil Westrum are (like the hero of Peckinpah’s later Junior Bonner) adrift in time. The world they understand is vanishing and a new world is coming into existence, a world they don’t understand at all. And it’s a new world that has no use for broken-down forgotten western heroes.

There’s a melancholy tinge to the film, but without self-pity. There’s plenty of cynicism about human nature. The miners are not sturdy independent-minded pioneers. They’re moronic drunken cut-throats and they’re little better than animals, as Elsa finds out to her cost. Gil and Heck are thieves. Steve Judd is a walking anachronism. But mixed with the cynicism there’s an odd idealism as well. Friendships can be betrayed but friendship still matters. Love can be betrayed. But occasionally, when you least expect it, people behave decently and heroically.

This is cynicism but it’s not nihilism. People let you down because they’re human, not necessarily because they’re evil. Redemption is possible. Judd’s determination to do the right thing is both absurd and admirable.

Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are superb. Oddly enough McCrea was originally cast as Gil with Scott cast as Judd but they decided to swap rôles. The fact that these two actors were themselves fading legends whose careers were coming to an end adds extra poignancy. It might also explain why they’re so good - they probably both knew that these would be the last great parts they would ever get so they gave everything they had.

Warren Oates makes the first of many appearances in Peckinpah films as one of the Hammond brothers.

While this was not a major production it’s certainly not a B-movie. It was shot in colour and Cinemascope. Lucien Ballard’s cinematography is impressive.

The Region 4 DVD offers a good anamorphic transfer with some extras - a Peckinpah documentary and an audio commentary by a panel of Peckinpah scholars. It’s now available on a Warner Archive Blu-Ray as well.

Ride the High Country is an intelligent grown-up western with plenty of psychological and emotional complexity, and plenty of action. Highly recommended.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is seen by many as a landmark film, the last of the great westerns and the beginnings of the modern (or even postmodern in the eyes of the more silly and pretentious critics) western. At the time of its release in 1969 it was highly controversial because of the unprecedented violence of the film. It’s a movie that is difficult to judge rationally since it tends to provoke very strong feelings especially among its legion of admirers.

What The Wild Bunch really is is a moderately interesting western of the second rank, not in the same league as the truly great westerns of John Ford, Howard Hawks or Anthony Mann. It’s as good as the better spaghetti westerns, but that’s not saying very much.



The movie opens in spectacular style as a group of US soldiers arrive in a Texas town and proceed to rob the local bank. They’re not soldiers at all, but outlaws. And waiting for them to emerge from the bank is a group of bounty hunters employed by the railroad (the money in the bank being mostly the railroad’s money). The result is a bloodbath which leaves half the gang, many of the bounty hunters and a lot of innocent bystanders dead.

The gang is led by Pike Bishop (William Holden). His chief lieutenant is Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine). The bounty hunters are led by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), an old friend and former accomplice of Pike’s. Thornton didn’t want this job but it was either that or return to prison. When the surviving members of the gang are safely away the stop to divide up their loot, only to found that the bags that were supposed to contain gold contain nothing but worthless washers. The whole thing was a setup staged by the railroad which was determined to put an end once and for all to Pike Bishop’s train robberies.



The gang meet up with old-timer Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) and head to Mexico. There they are employed by a corrupt general to rob a US Army train carrying a shipment of guns. Pike agrees to let one of the gang members, Angel (Jaime Sánchez), have one crate of guns. Angel’s village was ravaged by the general’s troops and his girlfriend ran off with the general. Now Angel wants to join Pancho Villa’s rebels and take revenge on the general. But things don’t run smoothly this time either, setting up an ending that is as apocalyptic as the opening sequence.

The movie was based very loosely on the exploits of Butch Cassidy whose gang was known as the Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch of this movie is a group of ageing outlaws whose time has passed them by. They should have been living in the days of Jesse James, the days of the Wild West of legend. Instead they are still around as the First World War is beginning. Both they and Deke Thornton are out of place in the world of 1914. This is the main theme of the movie, the passing of an age and a way of life, a theme Peckinpah explored much more interestingly and much more sensitively a few years later in his greatest film, Junior Bonner.



To tell his story Peckinpah assembled a cast of ageing actors, all of whom give fine performances in spite of a script that doesn’t give them much to work with. Oddly enough, given his excellent performance, William Holden was just about Peckinpah’s last choice to play Pike Bishop. Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, James Stewart, Burt Lancaster and Robert Mitchum were among a host of actors who turned down the role. Lee Marvin finally accepted the role but then withdrew in order to star in the ill-fated musical Paint Your Wagon (in retrospect not one of Marvin’s better decisions).

Robert Ryan was also not Peckinpah’s first choice for the role of Deke Thornton. He got the part after Brian Keith turned it down.

Visually it’s an impressive movie with some good use of Mexican locations. Lucien Ballard was responsible for the cinematography and does a fine job.



Then there’s the violence. Not very extreme by today’s standards (although the callousness with which innocent bystanders are gunned down is still fairly shocking. By the standards of 1969 it was very extreme indeed and ignited a major controversy with defenders of the movie often falling back on the fatuous notion that such graphic violence has the effect of shocking the viewer into a revulsion against violence. This argument was trotted out by people who had clearly never encountered a real cinema audience. As always happens with violence it ends up being self-defeating and lacking the impact that was intended. Mostly it’s tedious, and this movie is no exception.

The movie’s biggest problem is that there are no heroes, only anti-heroes, which tends to work against it. It’s difficult to care much about the disappearance of a way of life or a code of “honour” that is represented by pathetic losers like this lot. Pike Bishop waffles on about loyalty but in fact he has to spend much of his time stopping his band of losers from cutting each other’s throats.



The Wild Bunch is not a bad movie by any means but it’s not a great one either. It ranks with Bonnie and Clyde as one of the most overrated movies of the 60s. It’s worth a watch but it’s not exactly a life-changing experience and the movie’s influence has been almost entirely bad.

The Region 4 DVD boasts a good 16x9 enhanced print.

Junior Bonner (1972)

Junior Bonner saw Sam Peckinpah move away from westerns and action movies to make an offbeat little film that is in fact one of his most satisfying efforts.

It’s still a tough guy movie of sorts, but it’s about tough guys who no longer have any place in the world.

Steve McQueen plays JR Bonner (or Junior as he’s also also known), a rodeo star on the long downhill slide to failure. He’s never been any good at anything else and now the years are catching up and he soon won’t even be much use as a rodeo rider. At his last rodeo he tried and failed to ride the meanest bull on the circuit (a bull (ironically named Sunshine). The opening sequences show him thrown from the bull and leaving the arena, a man battered, weary and defeated. Throughout the movie Peckinpah keeps cutting back to these scenes of Bonner’s failure.



Now JR has returned to his home town of Prescott, Arizona for another rodeo. Things have changed while he’s been gone. His sleazy real estate agent brother Curly has sold out the farm from under his father, Ace Bonner (Robert Preston). Ace is another former rodeo star whose life has been a series of failures. Now he’s lost all his money in an ill-advised gld-prospecting scheme. But Ace is undaunted - he’s heading for Australia to go prospecting again. I guess no-one has told him he’s more than a century late for the Australian gold rush. Ace is a cheerful loser who’ll try his hand at anything to make a buck. Well, anything short of actual work.



Junior’s mother Elvira (Ida Lupino) is the one who holds the family together. Life with Ace has been a series of disappointments but she still can’t resist his boyish charm.

JR has been left with one ambition - to ride Sunshine for eight seconds. It would be one last victory. He’s even prepared to offer half his prize money to Buck Roan (who runs the rodeo) if he can ensure that JR draws Sunshine in the bull-riding event.



That’s about all the plot consists of and it’s not much. And what there is doesn’t really go anywhere. But that’s the point. These are people whose lives aren’t really going anywhere. What saves the movie is Peckinpah’s affection for these amiable losers, and the subtlety and depth with which the characters are drawn. And some very fine acting.

Ida Lupino still lights up the screen. Robert Preston (as always) steals every scene he’s in. Joe Don Baker makes a wonderful Curly - he’s sleazy but he’s not a mere monster. He’s just moved with the times. The rodeo now exists purely for the tourists. It lures them to the town where locals like Curly can have a shot at fleecing them.



Steve McQueen in the title role gives a marvelously effective performance. JR is watching his life slowly slip away. You know he’s going to end up like Ace, drinking too much and living on past glories and dreaming of a future that has passed him by, But he has no regrets. He knows no other life. And if he had a choice this is still the life he’d choose. This is one of two superb performances he gave for Peckinpah in 1972 (the other being The Getaway), both of which are seriously underrated.



The two great dangers facing a movie like this are excessive sentimentality and overdone irony. Peckinpah skillfully avoids both pitfalls. He even manages to end the movie in a perfectly satisfying way. It’s a finely crafted movie. Arguably one of the most unfairly neglected, and best, American movies of the 70s.