RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

The westerns of Sam Peckinpah come from a place informed by the director's boyhood amongst real-life cowboy types and his absorption of their reminiscences of the waning days of the old west, and RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is the film where the Peckinpah oeuvre as we came to know it got started. Originally intended as nothing more than a B western, in Peckinpah's hands RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY stands as a solid and very entertaining tale of two aging lawmen whose era has come and gone.

Western cinema legends Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea as Gil Westrum and Steve Judd.

Western legends Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott star as Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, once partners in law enforcement, but now considered over the hill. When Judd takes a job transporting what's quoted as a quarter of a million dollars-worth of gold from a mountain mining camp, he encounters Westrum for the first time in years and enlists his old friend's aid as a second hand for the job. But while Judd has stayed true to his path as a lawman, Westrum has fallen to working as a carnival games gunman in the Buffalo Bill mold and engaging in endeavors of questionable legality with the young and impetuous Heck Longtree (Ron Starr), and, at Westrum's suggestion, the two plot to go along with the trusting Judd and steal the gold once it's transported away from the mining camp. Longtree's an excitable kid with no impulse control and a hair-trigger temper, so he spends a considerable amount of the story fucking up and getting his ass handed to him by a number of opponents, including the elder lawmen who both rightly think he needs to get his shit together as a man. A major stumbling block on Longtree's path of development enters the narrative in the form of Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley in her screen debut), a lovely young woman who leads a restrictive and sheltered life with her fanatical preacher dad (R.G. Armstrong), a man of the cloth who sees sin in everyone and everything, so he has done all within his power to keep his daughter away from the outside world. (There is a strong hint of the preacher thinking that no man is good enough for his daughter except for himself, a point that his daughter calls him on and earns her a hard smack in the mouth for her efforts.)

Longtree (Ron Starr), about to put the moves on Elsa (Mariette Hartley).

Upon seeing Elsa, Longtree immediately puts the moves on her, but finds out that she is engaged, a point that frustrates him because Elsa is clearly attracted to his rough-and-tumble bad boy charm (isn't that always the case?). Much to her father's consternation, Elsa tags along with Judd and his cohorts since they are on their way to the camp where her miner fiancee, Billy Hammond (James Drury) resides, and during the trip Longtree attempts to get "ungentlemanly" with the shocked Elsa, an act that earns him a back-to-back ass-kicking from the elder gunslingers. All the while, Westrum schemes to steal the gold, fully aware that he would be betraying his old friend in doing so, but an old dude's gotta do what an old dude's gotta do...

Upon arriving at the mining camp, Judd begins collecting the gold while Longtree, now pissed off about Elsa leaving, escorts Elsa to the area where her fiancee lives with his four brothers. Much to Elsa's horror (and Longtree's, for that matter), it very quickly becomes apparent that once married to her loutish fiancee, Elsa will be expected to share her body with her husband's brothers, a scurvy and unwashed bunch comprised of, among others, L.Q. Jones and the always sleazy (and awesomely so) Warren Oates.

The grubby redneck awesomeness that was Warren Oates.

That prospect is bad enough on general principle, but it's made worse by the simple fact that Billy's brothers are about on par with the ass-rapin' hillbillies from DELIVERANCE or the cannibal mutants in THE HILLS HAVE EYES, only displaying a rather sociopathically redneck sense of humor.

Perhaps the worst wedding in cinema history.

The naive Elsa gets a hard dose of reality when the wedding ceremony, held at the divey local saloon/whorehouse, swiftly degenerates into a Fellini-esque parade of human freakishness and poor behavior fueled by booze that culminates in her attempted gang rape at the hands of the Hammond brothers. Fortunately, Elsa's screams attract the attention of our heroes and they rush to her rescue, holding off her would-be attackers at gunpoint and hauling her ass out of there. The Hammonds are not at all pleased with this development and challenge Judd and company's right to Elsa in a miner's court, but Westrum resorts to a necessary underhanded move (that I won't spoil for you) to ensure Elsa does not end up returned to what would be a lifetime of unwilling sexual slavery, and our heroes leave to return her to her father. But just before they set off to take Elsa home, it is revealed that the estimated quarter-mil to be transported is actually less than one tenth of that figure, but Westrum's desperate enough to continue on with his plan, something that does not sit well with young Longtree, who has come to respect Judd and re-consider his partnership with the duplicitous Westrum. When Judd twigs to Westrum's intended treachery, things take a turn for the worse, only to be compounded by the very pissed-off Hammonds who are bent on getting Elsa back by many means necessary...

I've only related the basic elements of the film's plot, but several of what would become recurring themes in Peckinpah's films are set in stone with this narrative. The plight of the elder gunslinger becoming a dinosaur with the advent of the 20th century, examinations of masculine loyalty, the redemption of men who have lost their moral way, it's all here, plus a very sympathetic female character in Elsa. Who can't understand the sadness of her desire to escape her smothering life on her dad's farm, only to have her dreams of a better, more exciting life utterly crushed by her filthy fiancee and his disgusting, drooling brothers? Peckinpah is obviously very much on Elsa's side, despite her naivete, thus shooting down his oft-cited reputation as a misogynistic pig.

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is truly one of the great westerns and should not be missed by serious students of the genre or even the casual DVD watcher. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for a great many reasons that I will leave you to discover for yourself.

THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970)

Stella Stevens and Jason Robards in a sweet love story directed by Sam (THE WILD BUNCH) Peckinpah. Yes, you read that right.

It will come as no surprise that Sam Peckinpah is a filmmaker whose body of work I mostly hold in very high esteem (though let us not make mention of THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND), yet in recent weeks I realized I had not yet seen all of his films. Setting out in earnest to correct that gaping hole in my cinematic education, I ordered some of what I had not seen from Amazon and what awaited me was a pair of very pleasant surprises. I'll get to discussing RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY soon, but before that I thought I'd show some love to THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, easily the most atypical of Peckinpah's films and one of the most under-appreciated and misunderstood.

Coming a year after his fantastically violent (for its time) and simultaneously artistic THE WILD BUNCH (1969), THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE is a work that seems almost intentionally calculated to piss off audiences whose blood thirst was catered to with Peckinpah's previous film. It's a western alright, but when you look at it it's really a love story that happens to have a western setting. Yes, you read that right: a love story directed by Sam Peckinpah, a complex filmmaker and man whose work and person have been labeled as misogynistic innumerable times over the past four decades.

Rated R for no good reason — it would get a PG-13 if submitted to the MPAA these days — THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE is the story of the title character (played by Jason Robards in an outstanding and totally believable performance), a man whose "friends" (L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin) strand him in the desert with no water, yet, after a few day's trek through blistering heat and a sandstorm, he discovers a watering hole and survives to profit from it. After setting up a dinky makeshift way-station where he charges ten cents per drink — the nearest water for horses and carriage passengers is twenty miles in either direction — Hogue meets a sleazy and rather fraudulent traveling preacher (David Warner, in the first of three collaborations with Peckinpah) who gives him the idea of staking a legal claim on the land where the water is. Venturing into the nearest town to make said claim, Hogue lays eyes on Hildy (Stella Stevens in her finest role), a local whore, and in no time Hogue finds himself deeply smitten by her. There are other sub-plots, the most significant one involving Hogue's firm belief that the sons of bitches who left him to die will some day end up at the watering hole and in Hogue's vengeance-seeking clutches, but the film belongs to the romance of Hogue and Hildy, and if ever there were a film featuring a believable "whore with a heart of gold," this is it. The two snags in all of this are Hildy's disapproval of Hogue's plan for vengeance, something that does not sit well with her or the audience because Hogue is clearly not a killer, and Hildy's goal to leave the remote desert town for the high life in San Francisco, a path that will spell the end of a relationship that's a truly beautiful thing to behold. The sweet Hogue treats Hildy like the lady she very obviously is, her vocation as a whore not mattering to him one bit, and his kindness to and respect for her affect the woman deeply, an aspect of the tale that also touches the audience. Stevens deserved an Oscar for her performance, as did Robards, and their romance is a great example of the oft-seen but seldom believable cinematic trope of true love. The montage that illustrates Hildy and Hogue's blossoming relationship once she moves in with him out in the middle of nowhere is both sweetly intimate and heartfelt, and considering my love of Peckinpah's testosterone-fueled cinema of violence and sheer manliness, you can imagine my surprise at discovering the director was capable of anything even remotely within that realm of appreciably tender humanity.

Along with the unlikely spectacle of a Peckinpah romance, the film is also loaded with the most humor in any Peckinpah film before or since, and, unlike many attempts at comedy within a western context, it actually works here to genuinely amusing effect. Hogue's dealings with officials in the town, Cable's initial encounter with Hildy and his subsequent fleeing from the saloon where she plies her trade, the preacher's "comforting" of a nubile and grieving young woman, and several other segments are quite funny and may be somewhat jarring to some of those in the audience who expected a standard western, especially when taking into account the film's very straight and dead-serious opening five minutes and largely serious final fifth. It's something to keep in mind when approaching this film for the first time.

Considering how open, honest and tender THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE is, I would have loved to see Peckinpah return to the narrative well from which it sprang, but such was not to be. Peckinpah immediately followed THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE with 1971's STRAW DOGS, a vicious piece of work that more than any other earned him his rep as a misogynist (thanks to its infamous two-on-one rape scene) and remains highly controversial to this day. That film could not have been more of a polar opposite to CABLE HOGUE if it tried, and from then on Peckinpah remained firmly entrenched in the realm of ass-kicking uber-masculinity, forever more denying his potential for the more sensitive story to us he-men who are unafraid of and unashamed about our enjoyment of that which is romantic.

There is much about the film's plot particulars that I have not discussed in order not to spoil its myriad surprises for the first-timer, so I'll sum up by saying that this is a very special film from a director who handled elegiac looks at the old west like no other, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to see a side of Sam Peckinpah that puts the lie to those who ignorantly slag him off as a macho shithead. With that in mind, I especially recommend THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE to any women who never gave Peckinpah a chance thanks to his mis-diagnosed misogyny or a dislike of westerns. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

Poster from the original theatrical release.