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Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah) 1962)
This may well not be the classic it's made out to be by some semi-modern critics, but it's easily a film which is well-worth seeing repeatedly and one which shows how the entire genre evolved and inched that much closer to the concept of revisionism. This is basically a mainstream western, and one which was only thought of as semi-important, even though it contained Randolph Scott's last performance and Joel McCrea's last significant one. Peckinpah teamed up with DP Lucien Ballard for the first time (he used him four more times in the future, beginning with The Wild Bunch). This was Warren Oates' first Peckinpah film, and he's rather important in introducing Peck's theme that women are mostly abused by males, especially the most-immature, but sometimes the females can turn the tables on the men. The problem is that when "immature" boys get into a group, their first thought seems to be to retaliate by killing and then by raping. Within the studio system in a lower-mid-level production, there seems to be a great deal of artistic freedom, and it almost seems like Peckinpah was being groomed for stardom. However, his metier seemed to be realistic deaths in ugly surroundings and violent showdown finales, hopefully with something involving camraderie among cowboy friends and chivalry among aging cowboys. If you have never seen a western in your life or have never seen this particular western. make sure you give it a shot. I haven't even mentioned R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, James Drury, John Anderson, Edgar Buchanan and, in a surprisingly affective performance, young Ron Starr, who never actually made another movie again, even if he conceived a child with Meg Foster.
This may well not be the classic it's made out to be by some semi-modern critics, but it's easily a film which is well-worth seeing repeatedly and one which shows how the entire genre evolved and inched that much closer to the concept of revisionism. This is basically a mainstream western, and one which was only thought of as semi-important, even though it contained Randolph Scott's last performance and Joel McCrea's last significant one. Peckinpah teamed up with DP Lucien Ballard for the first time (he used him four more times in the future, beginning with The Wild Bunch). This was Warren Oates' first Peckinpah film, and he's rather important in introducing Peck's theme that women are mostly abused by males, especially the most-immature, but sometimes the females can turn the tables on the men. The problem is that when "immature" boys get into a group, their first thought seems to be to retaliate by killing and then by raping. Within the studio system in a lower-mid-level production, there seems to be a great deal of artistic freedom, and it almost seems like Peckinpah was being groomed for stardom. However, his metier seemed to be realistic deaths in ugly surroundings and violent showdown finales, hopefully with something involving camraderie among cowboy friends and chivalry among aging cowboys. If you have never seen a western in your life or have never seen this particular western. make sure you give it a shot. I haven't even mentioned R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, James Drury, John Anderson, Edgar Buchanan and, in a surprisingly affective performance, young Ron Starr, who never actually made another movie again, even if he conceived a child with Meg Foster.