BY JOHN M. WHALEN
Legendary filmmaker Sam Peckinpah was one of
the true believers—one of the last of the diehards. He believed that a man was
only as good as his word, and if he couldn’t keep his word, he was no good at
all. Just about all of the 14 films he made during his short career centered
around that idea. In most of them there is the man who stays loyal to his
friends and true to his code, contrasted with his opposite, the man who sells
out. “The Wild Bunch†told the story of an outlaw and his gang being pursued by
a posse led by a former friend turned Judas goat. “Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid†recounts Garrett’s betrayal of his former saddle mate, William H. Bonney,
to the Santa Fe Ring. Even the spy thriller, “The Killer Elite,†is about a security
agent whose friend sells him out for a price.
For Peckinpah, it was more than just a good
theme for a movie. It was a way of life. Oddly enough, the tough-talking,
hard-drinking brawler, who earned the nickname “Bloody Sam,†because of the bloodshed
and violence in his films, was often labeled a cynic. But as somebody once
observed, a cynic is just an idealist who’s had his teeth kicked in too many
time. Peckinpah’s filmmaking career was one long kick in the teeth. He battled
with the suits, the studio execs, who didn’t like him or the way he made
movies. They didn’t like the way he defied them by going over budget and
schedule, or shooting scenes that they thought weren’t necessary (but which Sam
believed were the heart of the story); and they didn’t like the way he wouldn’t
buckle under. He was a man with a vision, and he would not compromise that
vision, no matter what they did to him. His films were often cut and butchered
after he finished them. Nevertheless, he persevered on, bloodied, battered, and,
in the end, clutching self-destructively at alcohol and drugs to keep going. He
came to an early end in Mexico at age 59 after suffering a heart attack.
Peckinpah started in television. He cut his
teeth on TV westerns, writing 11 half-hour episodes of “Gunsmoke,†creating “The
Rifleman,†and “The Westerner†series and contributing scripts for “Trackdown,â€
“Tombstone Territory,†and other shows of that era. Even in those early efforts
you could see the embryonic formation of his thematic ideas. In one “Gunsmokeâ€
episode, Matt Dillon grieves after accidentally killing a friend in a gunfight.
His friend had told him that he didn’t think much of a man who notched his gun
after a shooting. At his gravesite, Matt notches his own gun for the first and
only time, as a reminder.
“Ride the High Country,†freshly released on
Blu-Ray by the Warner Archive Collection, was Peckinpah’s second feature film.
“The Deadly Companions†had preceded it, but suffered from a low budget and the
heavy-handed influence of an amateur producer. “Ride the High Country†was the
first movie where he had control over the material and could shape it the way
he wanted. It also had the added plus of having two western film legends in the
cast—Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. McCrea is Steve Judd, former lawman of
some note in his earlier years, now an old man who hires on to guard a gold
shipment from the Coarsegold Mine. He may be on in years, but he’s still the
same ramrod straight man he’d always been. He teams up with his old friend Gil
Westrum (Scott), who, in contrast, has let time bend his principles a bit. When
we first see him he is running a phony Wild West shooting gallery, posing as a
Buffalo Bill-type character. When Steve tells him about the shipment of gold
and asks if he knows anybody who’d like to sign on with him for the job, dollar
signs light up in Westrum’s eyes. He joins Judd, bringing along Heck Longtree
(Ron Starr), his young sidekick, telling him he’s pretty sure he can convince
Judd to go along with his plan to steal the gold rather than deliver it to the
bank. It’s the classic Peckinpah set-up. During the ride to the mine, Westrum
keeps working on Judd, dropping hints about how little money they had made as
lawmen. Judd admits he doesn’t have much to show for all those years. He even
has a hole in the sole of his boot to prove it. But when Westrum keeps at him,
asking him what keeps him going, Judd utters the line that everybody quotes
when they talk about this movie: “All I
want is to enter my house justified.â€
In Nick Redman’s excellent featurette, “A
Justified Life: Sam Peckinpah and the High Country,†included as a bonus
feature on the disc, Peckinpah’s sister, Fern Lee Peter, provides some insight
into Peckinpah’s upbringing and the hidden, more sensitive side of his
personality. Sam’s father, a lawyer and later a judge, was a huge influence on
him, and there is a lot of his father in the Judd character—a man of uncompromising
moral rectitude. Sam grew up with his brother, Denver, who was eight years
older, and used to tag along with him and his older friends, trying to put on a
tough front. But he was smaller than the other boys and more sensitive, more like
his mother, to whom he was closer. According to Peter, like her, he “was able
to tell when someone hurt.â€
There’s a subplot in “Ride the High Country,â€
that reveals that hidden, sensitive side. A young girl, Elsa Knudson (Marriette
Hartley), rides with the bank guards up to the mountain camp to meet her
fiancé, Billy Hammond (James Drury), one of the miners. Billy has three
brothers (Warren Oates, John Davis Chandler, and L. Q. Jones), and a father
(John Anderson). A scruffier, more depraved bunch of characters, you’ve never
met. (All the members of the Hammond clan, by the way, were played by actors
who had appeared in various TV episodes Peckinpah had written—an informal Peckinpah
stock company.) A nightmare wedding
scene presided over by drunken Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan) is shot entirely
from Elsa’s point of view, and anyone who says Peckinpah was misogynistic and insensitive
to women, should watch to see how sympathetically he portrays Elsa’s
predicament.
The trajectory of the plot follows Judd’s
ultimate clash with Westrum and a final confrontation between them and the
Hammonds. The climax is both redemptive and apotheotic. The final shot of “Ride
the High Country†is, perhaps, one of the simplest and yet most moving images
ever put on film.
The Warner Archive Blu-Ray presents the film
in 1080p High Definition with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Sound is DTS-HD Master
Audio Mono. George Bassman’s somber score sounds good. Picture quality is first
rate and Lucien Ballard’s cinematography of locations in and around Inyo
National Forest never looked better. The disc also includes audio commentary by
the Peckinpah Peckerwoods (Paul Seydor, David Weddle, and Garner Simmons), all
of whom possess extensive Peckinpah knowledge, but tend to go overboard ooh-ing
and ahh-ing over every little thing the director did. It’s a tad annoying but
informative.
“Ride the High Country,†is a classic that
every fan of westerns must see and see again. The Warner Archive Blu-Ray is a
“must have†for the true believers out there.
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John M. Whalen is the author of "This Ray Gun for Hire...and Other Tales." Click here to order from Amazon.