You'd Watch Ride The High Country For Randolph Scott

Randolph Scott!

My dad doesn't think I have a proper appreciation for Randolph Scott. I don't think that's entirely accurate.

I didn't like To The Last Man, this is true, but it had to do with the theme of the pointlessness of revenge being poorly handled. Scott was not the issue.

My problems with The Spoilers were due to a) John Wayne covering his face with soot to rob a bank, making me wonder if "John Wayne wearing blackface" was an proper description, and b) the approach Wayne's character takes to dealing with women, which is a problem I tend to have with lots of John Wayne movies. I thought Scott played a rather good villain.

There wasn't anything wrong with Virginia City (other than they told Humphrey Bogart to play a bandito when he can't hold his terrible Mexican accent for more than two sentences in a row). I simply didn't agree with Errol Flynn's decision with regards to his mission to keep the Scott from getting that $5 million in gold to Jefferson Davis. I understood it, but I didn't think it was the smart play at all. Especially when it almost got him shot for treason by his own government.

At any rate, we wound up watching Ride the High Country, which I did very much enjoy. It reminded me a bit of Unforgiven, so that isn't terribly surprising. I think Scott, and Joel McCrea, each play characters who are the logical endpoints of the characters they'd played in Westerns for years, much as William Munny, Little Bill, and English Bob were the likely results for the sorts of guys you'd see in an Eastwood Western.

Gil (Scott) and Steve Judd (McCrea) were both lawmen at one point, one frequently serving as the other's deputy. Now they're older and things aren't going so well. McCrea's spent most of the last few years in crap jobs like bartender or bouncer. Scott's traveling in a fair, wearing as a disguise as he plays "Omaha Bill", who defeated any number of dangerous outlaws. Now he's running a crap shooting gallery, bilking yokels out of nickels and pennies. Gil has a partner, a kid named Heck, who tricks cowboys into racing their horses against his camel over a quarter-mile. Horses can't outrun camels over a quarter-mile, apparently.

But Judd's got a job now, bringing miners' gold from the camp in the mountains to the exchange in town. It's not quite as big a strike as he was originally told (for $250,000 to $20,000), but that's how things go, since as the exchangers put it, 'The day of the Forty-Niner is gone. The day of the steady businessman has arrived.' How horrifyingly dull.

Judd needs some help, so Gil and Heck agree to help bring the gold back safely. Along the way they stop at the farm of an extremely religious man and his daughter, Elsa, who would very badly like to get away from her protective father, and marry that nice Billy Hammond up at the mines. To say she has poor taste in men would be an understatement, though I don't know how many she knows, besides Heck and Billy, so we can chalk it up to not knowing any better. So there wind up being fights over Elsa, and conflicts over the gold, though not from the same direction. It all ends with the good guys squaring off against the bad, face-to-face, if not at high noon, at least in a nice afternoon sun.

My caveats are that I found Heck extremely annoying early on, as he tended to behave stupidly, and by so doing, create trouble for Judd and Gil. It reached a point where he was being insulted by the Hammonds, and I was actually surprised he didn't lose his cool. Still, he's a young man, and they're prone to acting stupid, especially where their pride or a woman is involved, so it makes a certain amount of sense, and provides a nice counterpoint to Judd and Gil, who have very different approaches for most of the film. Judd is very much about the letter of the law, Gil is more of a pragmatist. He may follow the law, or break it, but it'll be based on which is the best path to getting what he wants.

The other caveat is that Elsa has more than one close call at being raped, which I understand is pretty common in Peckinpah films. The whole sequence of her wedding plays like a nightmare, which is about what you'd expect for a matrimonial ceremony that takes place in a house of ill repute, presided over by a judge described as so drunk he 'can't hit the ground with his hat'. On the one hand, Peckinpah films it well, making it this dizzying, horrifying affair for the viewer, who's seeing it through Elsa's eyes. So it's very well done, but it's very unpleasant to have to watch, made worse when neither Gil nor Steve show much interest in getting involved (again, each for reasons consistent with their characters up to that point).

Aside from my squeamishness at that, and my early irritation with Heck, I'd highly recommend the movie.