RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY: A Reflection

David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah (February 21, 1925 – December 28, 1984)

Mariette Hartley 21 June 1940, Weston, Connecticut, USA

Randolph Scott (January 23, 1898 – March 2, 1987)

Joel Albert McCrea, (November 5, 1905 – October 20, 1990)

When “Ride the High Country” was released in 1962, I was the same age as Mariette Hartley and Bob Scriver was just slightly younger (b. 1914) than Joel McCrea. If I’d been in this movie, I never would have given a second glance to the younger men -- I’d have gone like a bee to Joel McCrea. Bob and I met him at the Cowboy Hall of Fame when he received an award there and, believe me, it would have been the right impulse in spite of his long and faithful marriage to Frances.


I might have deserted McCrea for Randolph Scott. When Randolph Scott was born, the Great Northern Railroad had barely crossed the High-Line of Montana, and Bob’s dad, Thaddeus, was still not in Browning. (He came in 1903.) Peckinpah was born when Bob Scriver was 11. Both men are, let’s say, “storied.” Peckinpah’s father was very much like Joel McCrea, or at least his character in this movie.

I end up doing a lot of this time-line pondering because it explains so much about the American West where things happened just yesterday, and since then have been revised and revised -- sometimes by movies and books and sometimes by the people actually living in memory. It’s as though the terrain were eroded by storms and then again by the dust and sun. It’s revision by theory that does the most damage. I particularly despise what I call “pantywaist stuff” like what is on this DVD as voice-over about “Ride the High Country.” Four pretentious “experts” on Peckinpah peddle “ooohs” and “aaahs” about minutia without any reality-based notion of what they’re talking about.

Talk about white boys from the suburbs up north. They think the marriage in a brothel is “Fellini-esque” but to me it looked like Saturday night in a Cut Bank bar in 1962 when the oil boom was still on. I only went there once, but if I’d gone back, I’d have carried a knife in my moccasin top. The woman I went with thought it was great fun. Drunken judges are not so unusual around there either.

These “experts” who had each published a book on Peckinpah pointed out how “beautiful” and “sensitive” it was to show Mariette Hartley crossing the camp barefoot and flinching from the sharp things on the ground. “It shows that she can have pain,” cooed one. I would have thought it meant she didn’t have bedroom slippers with her, though she packed a nightgown. When camping in the high mountains, I wear socks and longjohns because cold is more of a problem then sharp rocks. Then there was the early “revolutionary” shot of her changing her clothes, thus revealing she was wearing no bra though we only see her back.

Western movies have always had the same problem as Western history, which is to say that they are a sort of “people’s subject” or were when everyone’s grandpa had been there. Many a local enjoys pointing out errors in paraphernalias and practices. In time a coulee developed between those who were operating on their own experience and those who were trained academic historians, conforming to frontier theory, documents and the like. Then along came a revolution in the way we do history: “the people’s history,” and everything began to be sliding shale underfoot. An avalanche from the feminists. Big boulders rolling down from the Chinese building a railroad up above. And where did those Indians go to? Lurking over the ridge, no doubt, cooking up some scheme for attacking white men. Try to ignore them.

Western movies and books are now seen as childs’ play, naive stuff not worth bothering with unless there were terrible blood baths involved or the characters were left over from NYPD Blue and talked like that and had sex like that. There have always been enthusiasts, re-enactors re-creating a landscape in the same way that the German Indian enthusiasts make careful copies of idealized artifacts and villages that never existed. This is where you want to locate those Peckinpah experts who will tell you on the one hand that the Coarse Gold mining camp is absolutely authentic -- “look at that detail! No one else got it so authentic!” -- and in the next breath point out that the snow is soapsuds and the tent canvas was left over from the sails of a sea-going movie made just previously.

But now the signposts are gone: the French/Algerian lit crit crowd has gotten to Western history and make their points in Latinate neologisms to ensure we get the precise meaning they intend. A puzzled veteran academic listserver reports that the Western History Quarterly recently addressed the sexuality and "homosociality" of Wyatt Earp”. (I guess they don’t want to say, “was Earp Gay?” so as a backup asked if he hung out with other guys.) Another recent paper was entitled "Pathologized Hybridities and Anthropological Provincialities." (Hard to tell whether this was meant to be sarcastic.) I know a writer of Westerns who used to wax eloquent about stuck-up fancy academic critics of genre Westerns, but it was all minor compared to this impenetrability. Makes one think of a snake oil pitch in one of those old Westerns where a quack comes to town with a decorated wagon to peddle what is essentially the same old booze given a fancy new name and -- with luck -- a new bottle.

So my summary is that “Ride the High Country” is a very fine movie with excellent actors. The commentary is self-important nonsense. But there is another “bonus” on the disc which is Peckinpah’s sister, gracefully and intelligently trying to explain how it was that Sam -- from a family of judges and legislators -- tried to compensate for being a tender artistic guy by being tougher than tough, the way he imagined his ancestors to be, and overshot into alcoholism and cocaine addiction. She remembers the idyllic days on the High Sierra ranch outside Fresno where she and Sam rode bareback through spectacular landscape like the one in this movie. She remembers her father’s rock-ribbed moral code and her mother’s over-attachment to Sam. Coarse Gold is still there, the family ranch is still there, but she says there’s no use in trying to return to the past. “Sometimes I think they should just burn it all down and let it be ashes.” But that’s no way to get rid of a ghost, a shimmering morphing mirage.