Simply A Masterpiece

Please don't spend money on this.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Released in 1962, "Ride the High Country" was Sam Peckinpah's second feature film and arguably his best Western; yes, better than the overrated "Wild Bunch" (1969). While it lacks that movie's slow-motion ultra-violence, it has a superior story and more interesting characters.BASIC PLOT: Too aging ex-lawmen and old friends take a job transporting a gold shipment from a mountain mining settlement to the bank in the town below. One is a man of integrity (Joel McCrea) while the other has compromised his (Randolph Scott). Can he be redeemed? And at what cost? What about his young mentee (Ron Starr)? The conflict between puritanical religion and purity of purpose is spotlighted with Elsa's curmudgeonly father representing the former and Judd (McCrea) the latter.Yet there's so much more, like the five redneck brothers from hell at the wild mining camp, not to mention Mariette Hartley (Elsa) in her debut. The movie's short at 94 minutes, but seems longer (in a good way) because it's so dense with gems to mine, like Elsa's brief discussion with Judd: ELSA: "My father says there's only right and wrong, good and evil; nothing in between. It isn't that simple, is it?"JUDD: "No, it isn't. It should be, but it isn't." Elsa flees the stifling clutches of her legalistic father to marry some young buck at the hedonistic frontier camp. She's swings on the pendulum from legalism to libertinism, which is the opposite extreme, but they're actually two sides of the same bad coin. Judd represents the sound middle path of wisdom. Everyone near him recognizes this and is positively influenced by him, one way or another, even his old wayward friend. Kudos to the genius of writer N.B. Stone Jr.Both Scott and McCrea retired from acting after this winner, although the latter decided to return several years later. Some say "Ride the High Country" represents the non-official end of the traditional Western and the beginning of the new.The film was shot in Inyo National Forest, Malibu Creek State Park, Merrimac & Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park, California.GRADE: A

Multiple themes unfold in this narrative. Age versus youth; innocence versus depravity; greed versus poverty; puritanism versus immorality; crime versus integrity. It is packed with incident, but seems slow. Lasts only 90 minutes but seems much longer. The acting by Scott and McCrea was OK, but not remarkable. The roles were undemanding. Mariette Hartley was excellent, and she had a very appealing and attractive presence. Ron Starr receives a lot of criticism on this site, but seemed to be doing nothing wrong. He wears a disgruntled expression, but that's part of his role. Although there are several fist-fights, as well as shoot-outs, raging drunkenness, and the girl's unlamented father is shot (off-screen), it still doesn't give the impression of a specially violent movie, at least not in comparison with some of Peckinpah's later efforts.The wedding scene was demented. The face-off with the bad guys, anticipating the ending of The Wild Bunch, at the end of the story strikes me as totally improbable and utterly unrealistic, rather like the wacky race with the camel in the opening minutes. Do camels really run faster than horses ? Much of the rest of the film seemed real. This may be due to the photography and the calm scenery. A strange mixture.

At one point about two-thirds of the way into Ride the High Country, Elsa practically spells out the point of the movie: we're taught by our elders that there's good and evil, black and white, but the world isn't that simple (Joel McCrea responds that it should be simpler but it isn't). This is a magnificent Western for its story and character, but also for something more: in the same year that John Ford made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, another twist in the screws of the genre that the director helped to innovate, Peckinpah made a movie that was both deeply footed in the past (the actors Scott and McCrea were veterans in the industry and had acted together many times, often in sort of stock genre films that have likely not aged well) while also looking ahead to the future. What happens when you don't always have such sharply defined lines between good and evil? What happens if the person you think you trust has a crappy family or lives in a town that's not exactly savory, or on the flipside the person you don't quite trust wins it back, somehow? What happens if there's a double-cross? The world's much more complicated, despite such trusty and classically styled old-timers like the ones here.It's a film with its focus on two things but they merge together very well: Scott and McCrea are old friends who team up, along with a young hot-shot to go to a small town and bring back some gold and profits (nowhere near what McCrea's Judd expected - more like $20,000 instead of $200,000, such is the way of life sometimes post-1849), and along the way they on their trek they go to a farm tended by a not-comically-but-still-extremely religious man named Knudsen and his daughter Elsa. This is where the emotional component sort of kicks in; she isn't allowed by her strict father to talk to men he sees unfit, which means basically anyone, even as she intends to marry a young man named Billy Hammond who has stopped by a few times.Against his wishes she leaves and tags along with the other men. Ron Starr plays the young cowboy, his first name is Heck, and they take a liking to each other until he takes things too far one night in an almost-rapey sort of way. When she gets to the small mining town - complete with whorehouse, of course - and meets again with the man she intends to marry, she doesn't seem to understand his brothers are part of the package (this includes future Peckinpah regulars like Warren Oates in a wildly funny performance and LQ Jones). And then there's the wedding night.The plot involving the gold isn't unimportant here, and to be sure a major reveal upends things for the audience, but like in many other films that the director made (and extremely well), he is more fascinated by behavior, how the brothers interact with one another as human cretins, like in being filthy and unkempt and, well, unable to keep it in their pants around a woman like Elsa especially when the booze kicks in. This is a movie where a wedding scene includes perhaps the greatest wedding speech by the officiator I've ever seen (try and find it online, it's actually thoughtful and philosophical and you'll want it for your wedding), and then in the next beat a whirlwind of Elsa being taken this way and that by Billy's drunken louts. What is she to make of all of this? Could she have dealt with this had she grown up in that town and not been so sheltered? What are the gray areas in this world? Peckinpah gets a good contrast with the movie's questions of morals whether it's with a young man and a young woman who may be in love (and the young man in question, Starr as the sort of weak link in the cast though he's not bad as this would-be-f***-up of a love interest), or with these two grizzled men who have lived full lives and gone through many ordeals together and separate. The director really loves just watching these two guys on horses talking about how things used to be but how things also are now, and yet makes the drama that comes up between them feel real. At the same time the script brings up a lot of moments of clever dialog - Scott delivers it a little more dryly than McCrea, but this works - so that you're having a good time more often than not... then when a dramatic revelation happens, or we see the outcome of this disastrous wedding Elsa takes part in, it makes a more sizable impact.Themes of loyalty, trust, honor, respect to women, and what it means to face people with guns head on get explored here in an entertaining and exciting and funny script, and here we see this filmmaker take shape with the first, shall one say, "true" Peckinpah film. Though certainly not bloody like future films - it's still for MGM before the code broke down, and it's almost surprising how much is shown of the prostitutes in the film - it's got plenty of tremendous gun-fights, and the ending has bad-ass written in ballsy gunsmoke. It's among the director's finest, and it gives a lot to do for McCrea (who I like her as much as I do in Sullivan's Travels) and Scott, who dig in to a script with a lot of potential and take it to another level. Its a soulful film about what it means to be IN this place and time and what lines are drawn for good men, not so good men, and judges who get drunk after performing wedding ceremonies.

Very disappointing film with Joel McRea and Randolph Scott showing that years had passed from their glory days.You would think from the premise that the film was about getting the shipment of gold safely to where it belonged. Instead, we get bogged down with a girl, Mariette Hartley, who flees from her overly zealous pious father and runs with the crew and a young man intended, to meet up with and marry the man of her dreams, James Drury. Instead, she weds a drunken Drury and the film is devoted to her getting away from Drury and his awful brothers.The gold shipment is almost a forgotten entity here if it weren't for the fact that one of our heroes is prepared to steal the gold for himself.