Review of Ride the High Country (1962) by Allan C — 11 Jan 2015

Terrific Sam Peckinpah western stands as his most elegant westerns and one can certainly make the case that this may be his best, though I'm sticking with "The Wild Bunch" as his best among several brilliant films.

The film tells the story of two old timers living in a world that's past them by and doesn't appreciate them (a reoccurring Peckinpah theme). Perfectly cast with western veteran actors Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, the two take on a beneath them job of guarding gold from a mining camp to the town bank.

On the way to camp, they pick up Mariette Hartley, a young woman running away from her religious fanatic father (another familiar Peckinpah theme) played by Peckinpah stock company actor R.G. Armstrong.

Hartley wants to hook up with a miner boyfriend up at the gold camp, so they agree to take her there. Future stock company actors L.Q. Jones and Warren Oates also appear as a couple of very uncouth gold miners.

Things get complicated when Hartley is nearly raped on her wedding night and wants to leave with McCrea, Scott and their younger partner back down the mountain to town. Things are further complicated when Scott and his younger partner decide to double cross McCrea and plan to make off with the gold they are supposed to deliver, all with the Hartley's hillbilly family on their trail to get his bride back.

Although this film doesn't break with western tradition as Peckilnpah's later revisionist westerns would, he does push the boundaries in terms of grit (the mining camp is disgusting) and some of the violence has a tougher edge (there's a chilling moment during a shootout where McCrea locks eyes with a man he's just fatally shot) that you really don't see in Hollywood films outside of a Samuel Fuller film.

Peckinpah didn't receive a writing credit, but looking at screenwriter N.B. Stone Jr.'s other credits there isn't anything nearly as good as this film, with the only standouts in his filmography being the very average Disney "Zorro" and an average Robert Mitchum oater, "Man with the Gun.

" There's no way this mostly TV western writer came up with amazing scenes like the mining camp wedding that includes prostitutes for bridesmaids, a drunken judge officiant and a near rape of the bride by the passed out groom's brothers.

That's not to mention the thematic elements that run through nearly all of Peckinpah's films. Peckinpah's frequent director of photography Lucien Ballard provides picturesque photography (even disguising the soap bubble doubling as snow in the mining came, which I never noticed until I read how pissed off Peckinpah was about that).

If you had had to boil down this film to one over arching theme, one one that you could likely apply to nearly every film by Sam Peckinpah, it comes from the moment that McCreat utters the phrase, "All I want is to enter my house justified.

" That was true of Peckinpah in his own life and was the driving force behind and drama crux of a nearly all of his most significant films (i.e.. The Wild Bunch's suicide march to save Angel or Dustin Hoffman's pacifism driven out by the need to protect his home, etc.

). But overall, this is among the finest westerns ever made and wa s fitting movie for McCrea and Scott retire on (though McCrea later decided to un-retire).