Ride the High Country (1962)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
An ex-lawman is hired to transport gold from a mining community through dangerous territory. But what he doesn't realize is that his partner and old friend is plotting to double-cross him.
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What critics compared Ride the High Country to
The graying gunfighters of David Webb Peoples's acutely observant script recall such classic films as John Ford's Searchers, Howard Hawks's El Dorado and Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country.
What Eastwood does with that anti-character here is similar to what Sean Connery did with the James Bond character in "Never Say Never Again" or what Sam Peckinpah did with the aging western heroes in "Ride the High Country."
For "Unforgiven," the story of a reformed killer who re-confronts his past, is very definitely an old-guy Western, as elegiac in its own way as such classics as "The Wild Bunch" and "Ride the High Country."
Nothing, of course, turns out as it should or as we quite expect, and there is a sudden, spectacularly handled outburst of violence worthy of Sam Peckinpah, whose first important movie, Ride the High Country , dealt with similar themes of coming of age, moral growth, ethical tutelage and a climactic confrontation between men of honour and representatives of brute force.
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Though florid Italian westerns, primarily those of Sergio Corbucci, one of Tarantino’s idols, are front and center in the story line, the tone of this film owes as much to low-key, end-of-an-era Hollywood westerns like the Joel McCrea/Randolph Scott pairing in Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country.”
There's a line in Ride the High Country I absolutely adore, where aging marshall Joel McCrea paraphrases The Book of Luke, wearily, perfectly: "All I want is to enter my house justified."
NEW YORK - "Peckinpah's Ride the High Country," says James Schamus, producer of Brokeback Mountain and right-hand man for Ang Lee for his last nine movies.
Only Sam Peckinpah ("The Wild Bunch," "Major Dundee," "Ride the High Country") did as much to rejuvenate the genre.