Reviews


Ride the High Country

Colorama: Ride the High Country

Ride the High Country was based on an old script by N.B. Stone, Jr. called Guns in the Afternoon. Stone was hired to work on the movie, but he was deep in the throes of alcoholism, and the script was given a major, though uncredited rewrite by Stone's friend, William S. Roberts, the screenwriter of The Magnificent Seven (1960).

Sam Peckinpah was hired to direct, and the movie features many of his signature themes. The 'decline of the west' is especially evident in the brutish, bleak, violent world where there is no clear line between the white and black hats. Another classic Peckinpah trope concerns characters left behind as their eras vanish, and he could not have found better actors than Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott to give life to two such men.

Scott plays Gil, a retired lawman who makes a living as a carnival sharpshooter (a depressing but illustrative career shift to demonstrate the epic changes in the West). McCrea plays Steve, another ex-lawman who still picks up occasional work as a hired gun. His current job is escorting a gold shipment from a California mountain mining settlement to a town several days ride away. He asks his old friend and partner for help and Gil brings along his young sidekick Heck (Ron Starr) to help guard the gold. But Gil and Heck plan to steal the treasure in a betrayal that demonstrates how far Gil has fallen.

When this was made McCrea was 57 and Scott was 64, and both were nearing the end of incredibly long careers. They'd both entered the movie business in the late 1920s, and their leading man looks and natural acting styles saw them rise to success in pre-Codes, comedies, dramas, and, of course, westerns. Scott and McCrea were cowboys at heart, and beginning in the 1940s they started making westerns almost exclusively, becoming linked to the genre and the character of the (mostly) good guy; both were inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Their star images and long history with the genre makes the moral struggle in the film poignant and dramatic.

Along the way, the trio meets Elsa (Mariette Hartley), who runs away from her cruel father and joins Steve's party. Her boyfriend is a miner at the camp, and she intends to marry him once they arrive. Things don't go entirely as planned, though, and the scenes in the rough, gritty mining camp can be difficult to watch. Elsa is continually threatened with assault, and Steve and Gil appear to be the only good men left in the west, though they aren't quite as heroic as one might wish. Unlike earlier westerns, this depiction of the frontier is far from idealistic and hopeful. Instead, it shows a world where people are barely surviving, and where moral codes and decency have been dismissed as useless or even dangerous.

Ride the High Country was filmed in 26 days, and the original plan was to shoot it on location in the mountains near Bishop, California. But a snowstorm four days into shooting made filming impossible, so the production moved to the MGM backlot. Mariette Hartley remembered how upset Peckinpah was to leave the mountains: 'It just got him in the gut....he wanted it to be a true Western, and he didn't want to fake it.' Despite the unfortunate snow, the film is full of beautiful shots, and the juxtaposition between the grandeur of the scenery and the sordid events is powerful.

Ride the High Country (1962) is considered a classic western today, but at the time MGM considered it to be a throwaway movie: in fact, Joseph R. Vogel, MGM's chief executive, actually fell asleep while he watched it and called it 'the worst picture I ever saw.' The studio released it as the bottom of double bills, (often with what Newsweek called the 'abysmal company' of The Tartars (1962),) and it's no surprise Ride the High Country failed in America.

But it was a hit both commercially and critically in Europe under the title Guns in the Afternoon, becoming one of the studio's biggest grossing films in the country where it won first prize at Cannes, the Silver Goddess Best Foreign Film at the Mexican Film Festival, and Grand Prize at the Brussels Film Festival. The foreign attention made MGM take another look and they eventually re-released it to much better results.

If you're a Peckinpah fan, this is a fascinating example of his early work. He tries out some of the tropes that would become so important; for example, you can find similar mirror-image protagonist pairs in Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Peckinpah's work is often cited as influencing films such as Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Clint Eastwood's westerns, especially Unforgiven (1992), and you can see why.

The director later said, 'I love outsiders. Unless you conform, give in completely, you're going to be alone in this world. But by giving in, you lose your independence as a human being....I'm nothing if not a romantic, and I've got this weakness for losers on a grand scale, as well as a kind of sneaky affection for all the misfits and drifters in the world.' You certainly find this 'sneaky affection' for outsiders and losers in Ride the High Country.

This was Randolph Scott's final film, and it was intended to be McCrea's, though two years later he made four more westerns, but this is generally considered his last great film. McCrea wrote a prescient letter to Peckinpah after he saw it for the first time: 'It was a pleasure to do a picture with a man who can write, direct, and knows the West. I saw the picture at the studio and think everyone connected with it did a good job. I hope the public likes it as well as I do. If so, we have a hit. I'll expect to hear big things about you in the years ahead.' McCrea was right, though it took a little while for the appreciation to set in.

Cameron Howard has loved classic movies since she was a kid checking out VHS tapes from her local library. Today she lives in Durham, NC, and writes about classic Hollywood at The Blonde at the Film.