Ride the High Country (1962)
- kbroer
- Sep 6, 2024
- 3 min read
Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Mariette Hartley
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Available to stream on Prime Video
In September we are watching Jill and Rick's picks. They are each choosing two of their favorite classic films that we haven't yet covered. Rick's first pick is a classic Western - Ride the High Country.
In frontier California of the early-1900's a retired federal marshal tasked with transporting gold from a mountain mining camp to a bank in town hires his former partner to help him, not foreseeing the dangers ahead.
Why Rick loves it:
It’s a loving, but unsentimental and realistic, look at the “Wild West” and the people who lived in it.
Both Joel McCrea, aged 56, and Randolph Scott, 63, are at the height of their acting lives, comfortable in their own skins, effortlessly showing the struggles everyone has with right and wrong, ethics and expediency, self-interest and friendship.
The photography is excellent and the scenery is breathtaking.
The film goes beyond being a “typical” Western: its ending is poignant, its pacing is measured, and it grapples with important issues.
Mariette Hartley, in her first film role, is perfect for the part of Elsa. Her acting holds up well to the two veterans and she exhibits just the right combination of strength and naiveté. Her growing sense of panic and fear in the pivotal wedding scene is convincingly real.
Fun Facts:
Veteran actors Scott and McCrea, who had never worked together before this film, had limited their acting to Westerns for a long time and were considering retiring. This was Scott's last movie—it is said that he felt he couldn’t top this performance—and McCrea’s last significant one.
This was director Sam Peckinpah's second--and first successful--film. He had substantial earlier work all in TV and went on to make 14 more movies, specializing in Westerns.
Originally the two leads were cast in the opposite’s part. After reading the script, they agreed to switch.
Joel McCrea once listed his occupation as "rancher" and his hobby as "acting" and reportedly joked that he "only acted so he could afford to ranch."
While the film was in post-production the studio changed management. The new boss reportedly fell asleep during a screening of the film. When he woke up, he said it was the worst he had ever seen. This led to its being shown as the second feature on a double bill in smaller, neighborhood theatres, not getting the initial exposure or early commercial success it deserved.
Reviewers found more in the film than the studio boss had:
"That Hollywood can't tell the gold from the dross has seldom been so plainly demonstrated. Ride the High Country, deemed unworthy of a first-class run, has been gradually leaked—like a secret—to various theatres around the country. ... Everything about this picture has the ring of truth, from the unglamorized settings to the flavorful dialogue and the natural acting. [It] is pure gold."- Newsweek, 1962.
A review in Time magazine said the film “has a rare honesty of script, performance and theme. ... When actors with the unforced dignity of McCrea and Scott go, the old breed of Western will go with them."
Featured Cocktail:
Boilermaker
A Boilermaker is a simple drink—a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser. First mentioned in the 1890s, it was served to miners at the end of their shifts in mining areas of Montana. Traditionally, the shot of whiskey, usually bourbon or rye, is dropped into a glass of beer. Today’s bartender is likely to serve the whiskey and beer in separate glasses, leaving the choice of how to drink the two liquids up to the drinker.
1 oz bourbon or rye
8 oz beer
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