Ride the High Country

An aging former lawman (Randolph Scott) agrees to help his old partner (Joel McCrea) transport gold from a mining town with the intention of stealing it for himself.

Ride the High Country, while not his first film, served as something of a debut for director Sam Peckinpah, representing his first visit to the revisionist western genre that would later become so closely associated with him.

And what a visit it is. Peckinpah takes two lesser-known mainstays of the traditional western and elevates them to genre icons. Scott and McCrea are absolutely perfect as a pair of aging former lawman; now well past their prime and simply trying to find their place in a world that’s passing them by. Through them, Peckinpah shows us a harsh, brutal west that’s light years removed from traditional genre setting. This loss of innocence perfectly mirrors the era in which the film was made, as the more sedate fifties were giving way to the tumultuous sixties.

For their part, Scott and McCrea rise to the material, each giving the performance of their career. Scott himself would retire after this film, saying that Ride the High Country was his best performance and that he wanted to go out on top.

Supporting them are future Peckinpah mainstays L.Q. Jones and Warren Oates, as well as Mariette Hartley and Ron Starr, all of whom work well.

The script runs a very disciplined 94 minutes and avoids any indulgences. Peckinpah keeps the action moving at a solid pace, yet manages to flesh out his two leads to a magnificent degree. The ending (which, according to the IMDb, Peckinpah rewrote himself) takes a good movie and makes it great.

The icing on the cake is Lucien Ballard’s magnificent cinematography, which manages to take the traditional western look and somehow make it more intimate and realistic.