Ride the High Country

Two ageing lawmen, Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, take a job carrying gold down from a mining camp. Judd wants to do it honestly; Westrum plans to steal it. Along the way they take in a young woman fleeing a forced marriage. It ends in a gunfight, and the one who dies is the honest man. Sam Peckinpah directed. Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott star in the last film they made together. It went out internationally as Guns in the Afternoon. The script was by N. B. Stone Jr; the producer Richard E. Lyons had William Roberts rewrite it. Peckinpah then did a tremendous three-to-four-week dialogue rewrite and changed the ending so that the good guy died instead of the villain. That is where the film's impact comes from. MGM did not trust it and put it on the bottom half of a double bill, on the assumption that it had not cost enough to be that good. It lost 160,000 dollars. The reviews were good; one assessment called it a perfectly dandy little western. It won the Belgian Film Critics Association's Grand Prix in 1964 and entered the National Film Registry in 1992. Peckinpah's admirers count it as his first great film, with all his themes already present: honour, loyalty and the destruction of the West. Who it is for: viewers who want a film about ageing from the last stretch of the classical western. Who it is not for: anyone wanting action. Almost all of it is travel and talk, with the shooting saved for the end.