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- The theme of lonely individuals who have somehow outstayed their welcome in the time-space continuum they are forced to inhabit is a prevalent one in Ride the High Countryand continued being the driving force behind Peckinpah’s following features.
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The theme of lonely individuals who have somehow outstayed their welcome in the time-space continuum they are forced to inhabit is a prevalent one in Ride the High Country and continued being the driving force behind Peckinpah’s following features. The director explores this notion by focusing on two characters who mirror each other perfectly ...
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- Ride The High Country
- Overview
- Production notes and credits
- Cast
Ride the High Country, American western film, released in 1962, that was a revisionist take on the genre. It was the second movie by director Sam Peckinpah, and its embittered characters and realistic gunplay began to establish the formulas for which he became famous.
Ex-lawman Steve Judd (played by Joel McCrea) has fallen on hard times. He takes a job transporting gold deposits from a mining camp in the Sierra Nevadas across the mountains to a bank. He is pleased when his old friend Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), another ex-lawman, agrees to assist him. Gil’s young friend and protégé Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) also accompanies them on the dangerous journey. Along the way they rescue a desperate young woman, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), from a horrific life with her abusive father. The men escort Elsa to her fiancé, Billy Hammond (James Drury), and the young couple are quickly married. However, Steve, Gil, and Heck must soon rescue her again when she discovers that she will have to endure Billy’s brothers, who intend on “sharing” her for their sexual pleasure. The situation becomes even more complicated when Steve learns that Gil and Heck intend to rob the gold shipment. He thwarts their plans, and Gil runs off, leaving Steve and Heck to face Billy and his brothers, who have ambushed them in the hopes of taking back Elsa. In the midst of the seemingly hopeless battle, Gil has pangs of conscience and returns in time to help Steve and Heck defeat their assailants. However, Steve has been mortally wounded. Gil makes a solemn promise to fulfill his mission to get the gold shipment to the bank.
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•Studio: MGM
•Director: Sam Peckinpah
•Producer: Richard E. Lyons
•Writer: N.B. Stone, Jr.
•Music: George Bassman
•Running time: 94 minutes
•Randolph Scott (Gil Westrum)
•Joel McCrea (Steve Judd)
•Mariette Hartley (Elsa Knudsen)
•Ron Starr (Heck Longtree)
- Lee Pfeiffer
In Ride the High Country, Peckinpah takes a long look at two such men - Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) - in their twilight years, powerless to stop the changes in the world around them and struggling with themselves and with each other as they try to define themselves in relation to the new order.
- Sam Peckinpah, Hal Polaire
- Randolph Scott
Feb 9, 2023 · Ride the High Country is about the death of a generation and the sad inevitability of change. It’s a story about the 1960s. About the end of an era of film and a style of acting. About a director wrestling with his father’s legacy.
Jun 18, 2015 · Review: Marvelous movie with one of the great endings in Western film history. Scott and McCrea excel, of course, and Hartley turns in a splendid performance as a young woman anxious to grow up in what marked her film debut.
- (5)
Jul 7, 2014 · One of the best aspects of Ride the High Country is undoubtedly the interplay of McCrea and Scott, the former stoic, flinty, scriptural, lonely, with all the most stirring speeches, the latter happy-go-lucky, with wavering moral purpose, essentially pathetic; he has the quips and good one-liners. Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott were never better.
By Stephen Prince. “Ride the High Country” is the eye of the hurricane, the stillness at the center of the storm of transgression that Sam Peckinpah brought to American film in the late 1960s. That it hails from the on-set of that decade and of Peckinpah’s career as a feature film director ac-counts for its singular grace and affabil-ity.
