Rent Ride the High Country (1962)

Top end western from the 1960s - Ride the High Country review by CD

This film thoroughly deserves its high ratings. Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are both excellent in the lead roles and it's great to see James Drury, a star of the Virginian, in a main supporting role. The film is quite philosophical from the vantage point of the seasoned lawmen, but has plenty of action, moving at a steady pace across the 90 mins. The supporting cast in the miner's camp is very good and the finale is well structured although not sure why quite so many people broke cover to be shot!

For a Few Men Less - Ride the High Country review by griggs

Two western titans finally sharing a screen should be a gift, and when Ride the High Country remembers that, it delivers. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea play old friends divided by integrity and self-interest but with a dynamic that is warm, wary, and perfectly matched.

The trouble is Peckinpah’s second act, which sidelines both leads while various men harass Mariette Hartley. It’s a tedious stretch that leans on cruelty where tension should be. Even this early in his career, he’s already reaching for the grim machismo he’d later refine in The Wild Bunch, though here it just feels cheap.

Once Scott and McCrea get back to what matters, everything clicks into place. The finale is genuinely beautiful: two ageing gunslingers framed against the high country while the West dies around them. It’s enough to make up for the sag in the middle — but you can’t help wishing the whole film had just been Scott and McCrea.

The tame bunch - Ride the High Country review by HW

You can see the themes of Peckinpah’s later work beginning in this early western, his second film. Both Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott play their last western roles as ageing partners going on one last job: to protect a payroll of miners’ gold. But Scott’s character has more personal plans for all that bullion, adding tension to the plot. 

This almost feels like a gentler prototype of Peckinpah’s classic western epic about ageing gunmen, ‘The Wild Bunch’. This film becomes more of a romantic drama than an action film, when the two old partners and their younger, hot-headed companion become entangled with a young woman named Elsa: escaping from her religiously overbearing father to marry a miner at the camp the men are riding for; a scheme the younger man is not so keen on. Arguably Elsa is the strongest female character in all of Peckinpah’s male-driven films, even if she makes some poor decisions. If romantic complications aren’t your thing, there’s still some spectacular Californian scenery and a couple of thrilling shootouts at the end. They may not be as gruesomely exhilarating as the director’s later bloodbaths but they still have his trademark poetic edge.