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Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: DVD Brand: Warner Brothers EAN: 9780790792293 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC ISBN: 079079229X Label: Warner Home Video Manufacturer: Warner Home Video Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Warner Home Video Region Code: 1 Release Date: January 10, 2006 Running Time: 94 minutes Studio: Warner Home Video Theatrical Release Date: 1962 Sales Rank: 10179 MPN: WARD66907D
Description: An ex-lawman agrees to escort a shipment of gold cross-country, but runs into trouble when the men hired to help him turn out be not be as moral as their boss, and plot to steal the gold.
Amazon.com essential video: Ride the High Country is the one Sam Peckinpah movie about which there has never been controversy--save at MGM in 1962, when a new studio regime opted to dump this beautiful, heartbreakingly elegiac Western into the bottom half of a double-bill. Westerns rarely even got reviewed back then, so it's wellnigh miraculous that critics discovered the movie and raved about it. Newsweek called it the best American picture of the year.
Veteran cowboy stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea portray aging gunslingers in the twilight of the Old West. McCrea's character, Steve Judd, signs on to transport a shipment of gold from a remote mining camp. Gil Westrum (Scott), an old crony now trick-shooting in a carnival, agrees to help but really aims to seduce Judd into stealing the treasure. The slow-building tension between longtime friends--one still true to the code he's lived by, the other having drifted away from it--anticipates the tortuous personal dilemmas played out to the death by Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Benny and Elita in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
The action scenes are powerful, if only beginning to suggest the radical technique with which Peckinpah would astonish audiences in just a few years. But his feeling for flavorsome dialogue, Rabelaisian humor, and full-blooded character acting is already unmistakable. Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, and John Davis Chandler are among the "redneck peckerwoods" complicating the journey, and Mariette Hartley is fresh and saucy in her big-screen debut. As for McCrea and Scott, they are simply superb. The two proposed that they swap roles before filming got underway, and the question of who got first billing was settled by flipping a coin. Both men retired once the film was in the can. They knew they'd never top it. --Richard T. Jameson
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Ride The High Country
In many ways RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is a tribute to two great western stars-McCrea and Scott. It is a story of two aging, former lawmen who are good friends.
Both of them are just doing what they ... Read More
Rating: - A Natural Western
How can you go wrong with a Sam Peckinpah film,the man was a genius who visioned cinema as a piece of art as you vision in,Ride The High Country,a natural classic western acted out in a natural way with ... Read More
Rating: - On of the 5 Best Westerns (Color) ever made...
This is an essential film among the westerns. It deserves the reputation it has, among western film lovers, Peckinpah fans, Randolph Scott admirers, and cult film enthusiasts (it is considered a cult film ... Read More
Rating: - A Very Good Western
A home-run Western. I think it was Peckinpah's first. In my opinion, it gains and does not lose from the absence of the excess violence that becomes his signature in later works. The shoot-out at the end ... Read More
Rating: - The Civil Bunch
The Shut Mouth Society
The Shopkeeper
If you appreciate westerns of the old school, you'll enjoy Ride the High Country.
Under Peckinpah's direction, Randolph Scott and Joel ... Read More
- The Civil Bunch