Ride the High Country (1962)

Film: Ride the High Country (1962)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Mariette Hartley, Ron Starr, Edgar Buchanan

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Throughout this month, we've tried a different approach to the career of Randolph Scott, discussing much of his early career, while the actual films we've watched have been exclusively the iconic Budd Boetticher movies that Scott made late in his career, generally considered to be some of the most important pictures of the actor's long stardom, and some of the signature westerns of the era.  We're going to finish this month looking beyond Scott's partnership with Boetticher with him working in another western (one of the only stars this year we'll devote entirely to westerns and no other genres) with his work in the film of another great western director, Sam Peckinpah, who seven years later would make his most famous film, The Wild Bunch, which would largely redefine the western genre by bringing true violence to a genre that had largely kept that offscreen.  Peckinpah's film would in many ways mark the end of the Classic Hollywood western, but in 1962 he was working within its framework with one of the genre's most important stars...a cowboy who was about to walk into the sunset.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about two former friends and partners who have lived in very different circumstances.  Steve Judd (McCrea) is an aging lawman, one who is clearly destined soon for retirement, but who is pretty reputable and is hired by a bank to transport gold to California.  He enlists the help of Gil Westrum (Scott), who is now a charlatan in a traveling act pretending to be a famous sharpshooter but who is really a carnival conman, who works with his hotheaded sidekick Heck Longtree (Starr).  It's pretty clear early on that Gil, despite his past friendship with Judd, wants to steal the gold for himself, and will do so in a double cross with Heck, but fate steps in when they hole up with a farmer and his daughter Elsa (Hartley), and Heck initially falls for Elsa, though after some romance he attempts to rape her (we'll get into it in a second, but he's stopped by Gil & Judd) and she runs off to the arms of a local ruffian who marries her, but when she won't have sex with him right away on their wedding night, he passes out and her brothers then attempt to rape her, until Judd & Heck stop them and bring her back to her father.  While on the way, Gil attempts the double cross, but Heck has decided to abandon the plan, taking a prison sentence because he's seen the error of his ways.  Gil initially doesn't agree, and tries to escape, but knowing that the brothers will come back for Elsa, Heck, & Judd, he returns, and in one last stand he & Judd kill the brothers...but in the process, Judd dies.  Gil, now back to the side of justice, vows to Judd on the latter's deathbed that he will bring the gold to California and honor his commitment.

As we've seen throughout this year, one of my favorite motifs in westerns is "the one last ride" concept, and it works remarkably well here.  Scott & McCrea are both longtime figures in the western, and while I've talked this month about (headed into this month) my reluctance with Scott as a leading man, he does well here.  It helps that this is his final film (and what a way to go out) has gorgeous western skies & a lovely score.  The whole cast is good, though the best of the bunch is Mariette Hartley.  Hartley has a tricky part, playing a woman who has to be "in love" with two men she's pitting against each other, not realizing in both the cases the men are bad news & she's over-her-head.  It's nice that the film acknowledges the violence her character endures-this is not sugarcoated or romanticized, though it has to be said she clearly will "end up with" a reformed Heck at the end of the movie.  It's definitely further than you'd expect a film at the tail-end of the Hays Code to have gone with the subject matter.

Scott, as I mentioned, never worked in movies again after this, despite being alive for another 25 years.  He and his longtime wife Patricia retired after this, living off of the string of investments that Scott had made at the peak of his fame that had made him a fortune.  Scott would spend his retirement relatively uneventfully, getting involved in political fundraising for Ronald Reagan (Scott was an ardent Republican), golfing, attending church (he was an ardent supporter of Billy Graham's church), and about the only clear movie star thing he did was go to Dodgers games with his best friend Fred Astaire.  He died in 1987 at the age of 89.  Next month we're going to shift gears away from someone like Randolph Scott, whose career would become synonymous with westerns throughout his decades above the title card, and move to an actor who came onto Hollywood's scene in a splash in the mid-1950's in about every genre you can think of except for westerns...but by the end of his career this was where he would find his most consistent work.