“I just want to enter my house justified.” RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
Sam Peckinpah came to television work with the help of Don Siegal (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). In the 1950s, Peckinpah wrote scripts for the famous television western, Gunsmoke, and he also worked on several other western TV series (e.g. Tales of Well’s Fargo, The Rifleman, and Broken Arrow). On the strength of his TV work, he got the job of directing the feature film, The Deadly Companions (1961). His second feature is Ride the High Country (1962), and it leaps far ahead of Peckinpah’s first feature effort.
From TV to feature film: Peckinpah began to gather his stock company while working in TV. Like many directors, he gathered about him a group of actors with whom he felt comfortable – unlike the actors associated with Ford and Hawks or Mann and Boetticher, Peckinpah’s actors tended to occupy secondary roles in his films. The actors include: Strother Martin, Warren Oates, L. Q. Jones, and R. G. Armstrong. All but the first of these actors appear in Ride the High Country. Oates and Jones are two of the Hammond brothers, and Armstrong is Joshua Knudson, Elsa’s Bible-quoting father.
One of the noteworthy things about the TV western and Gunsmoke in particular is the meanness of the characters. Unlike the fairly neat bad guys we see in a film like Rio Bravo, the bad guys in Gunsmoke were distinguished by their scruffiness and edginess. These were people we might associate with a film such as John Boorman’s Deliverance – hill people in the sense of the Hatfields and McCoys. The villains in Gunsmokewere as often as not ugly, dirty, unshaven, salacious, and violent. They were precursors of the Hammond brothers in Ride the High Country. These guys are immoral and lustful. They are without honour – almost completely. (At the end, Billy asks Elder, “Ain’t you got no sense of family honour,” just before the final shootout. About the only claim to honour they might have is a perverse sense of their own family solidarity.) I am speaking of the men here. These guys will even share one woman – suggesting a theme muted but nevertheless there I think: incest. These guys are, in the words of Steve Judd, “red neck peckerwoods.”
The good guys and the bad guys and the camera: the camera shoots the bad guys and the good guys differently. Much of the time we see Steve Judd, Gil Westrum, and Heck Longtree photographed from below eye level so that we are looking up at them. This is especially true of Judd (Joel McCrea). We look up to Judd for two reasons: first, he is heroic, and second, he is the kind of man one looks up to, a man of his word, honourable and straight as a poker. In the final shootout scene, the camera looks straight at the Hammonds, but it looks up at Gil and Steve as they advance toward their adversaries.
Ride the High Country
-for this film, Peckinpah had two of the genre’s most enduring stars, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. This is Scott’s final film and it might as well be McCrea’s since he went into retirement after this film and only appeared on film a couple more times and only once in a major role. In other words, this film is very much about endings – the end of two fine actors’ careers, the end of the west, the end of life itself. Part of the effect of the film depends on the viewer knowing who Scott and McCrea are.
Elegy
-like many westerns, Ride the High Countryis an elegy for the passing of an era (and one might add – a form). This is 1962 (when the film appears), and the decline of the western has commenced. The film carries the title, Guns in the Afternoon, in England, and this title makes the elegiac point clearly. The title, Ride the High Country also makes the point, but perhaps more obliquely; here the reference is to another country (i.e. death). Note the autumnal colours, the wintry feel of the landscape around the mining camp. This is a film about the end of the west, and it laments this ending. Something is lost when the virtues and values associated with a Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) can find no better place than a squalid mining town to exhibit themselves. This is a film about old age, obsolescence, changing times; it is also about honour and self-respect. As in traditional elegy, even nature itself mourns the passing of the hero. The final shot of the film indicates that the dying hero (he dies in an act of sacrifice) becomes one with the land itself.
The shot of Steve Judd's death is beautifully conceived. We see Judd in close-up as he fills the bottom and right of the screen. As this shot moves, Judd first looks away from the camera, taking one last look at the high country he has inhabited, and then he turns toward us and slowly disappears below the frame of the picture, leaving us with a long shot. We transition from close-up to long shot in one visual moment. What we see are the nearly leafless trees that signal the dying of the year, and then the vista of sky and mountains that signal the heavens, the sublime territory of death. Judd slips down below the visual field to become absorbed into nature itself. He becomes one with the land. Both the hero and the land are large, sublime, uncontainable, and beyond reach.
Landscape and Setting:
-we have three locations in the film: the town, the homestead, and the mining settlement. These places work in a complex fashion. The first and third – Hornitos and Coarsegold – function horizontally as one place, Hornitos being the ostensibly refined part of town and Coarsegold being the dark side of town. Both Hornitos and Coarsegold are real places in California, and both are associated with the California gold rush. In Spanish, hornitos means “little oven” and refers to above ground graves where the ground is too hard for a person to dig. We might structure the locations as follows:
a. Hornitos: this is the town Steve Judd enters at the beginning of the film. He arrives just as a festival is going on, and he is distinctly out of place. The automobile informs us that this is a town with progress on its mind. The camel race indicates just how degenerate the old west has become, as does Gil Westrum’s rigged shooting game. Hornitos is a place of banks and hucksterism. Westrum wears false Buffalo Bill hair and beard and pretends to be the Oregon Kid. He is a cheat and a fabricator. What he represents is the cheapening and fictionalization of the west. The west now exists only as entertainment, and as market hype. Steve says he does not recall the Omaha Gang or that Gil worked with the Earps in Witchita or Dodge City.
The point is not only that Steve Judd is out of place, but also that he is old. When we first see him, he mistakenly and rather stupidly thinks the cheering people are cheering him. His awkwardness here will be contrasted with his ability out on the trail. He fits the high country, but not the town.
We have one shot of a couple of kids peeking at what looks like a girlie show. A woman comes along and takes the boys by their ears and marches them away. This moment illustrates how efficiently Peckinpah works. What we see is not simply humourous and a throwaway. Hornitos is a respectable town where boys should not look at women who are in suggestive costumes. This veneer of respectability in the bourgeois town will later come off in the proletariat mining camp at Kate’s Place. We might also remember this when we see The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah will extend his use of children in that film, both in the beginning and at the end.
And not only is Steve old, but he is also down on his luck. In the bank we have a close-up of his shirt cuff, and we see the bank manager’s son look with disapproval at the worn cuff. The bank manager and his son – they look nearly the same suggesting the uniformity of town life – represent the new age, money and entrepreneurship. “The days of the forty-niners are gone,” the manager says, adding that these are the days of the steady businessman. Judd has come to work for the bank, understanding that he will be transporting $250,000.00, but he now learns that the sum will be a mere $20,000.00. In actuality, he brings back from Coarsegold only about $11,000.00. The town promises much, but delivers little.
b. Coarsegold: as the name suggests, this place is rough (coarse) and primitive. It is a place devoted to the senses. Here people grub for gold and carouse in Kate’s saloon/whorehouse. This is a place that parodies conventional life. Here men live together in primitive conditions. The Hammond Brothers are a parodic family; one of them (Sylvus) even wears an apron. Here a drunken old judge represents the law; he dries out enough to give a speech at a wedding ceremony. He reminds those in attendance that this is a civil and not a religious ceremony. He also reminds everyone, including bride and groom, that a good marriage is as hard to find as a rare animal and just as hard to keep. The whole marriage ritual is parodic, an inversion of conventional and proper marriage. The ride to Kate’s place, with Elsa in her wedding dress followed by the Hammond brothers who are loudly singing “When the roll is called up yonder,” parodies John Ford and his penchant for having men sing robustly as an indication of their civilized behaviour. The wedding itself is also parodic of Ford’s penchant for ritual. Once the wedding is about to begin, we have another anomalous song; instead of “Here Comes the Bride,” we have “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” And very quickly Elsa comprehends that she is not just marrying one Hammond brother. Coarsegold is a place of excess and sin. This frontier is far coarser than the frontier we see in Ford’s films. And yes, Peckinpah has assimilated Ford so intimately, that we have a similar interest in mythic resonance.
In Coarsegold, moral certainties are upset. Up to now we have known Steve Judd as upholder of what is right – even here, he tells Elsa, “The problem is that you were legally married.” But when it comes right down to it, he is willing to break this legality to get Elsa away. He tells Gil that they will wait for the court’s decision, but if the court decides that Elsa should stay with Billy Hammond, he will take her away anyway. His remark: “We’ll be a little short-handed,” indicates he is willing to shoot their way out. The court decision we do not see, but we know what happens because of the scene in which Gil, who has up to now given every indication that he did not care about the girl, forces Judge Tolliver to say that he does not have a license to perform marriages in California. Gil fixes it so that they can ride out of Coarsegold without incident.
Whereas Hornitos is a place for controlled desires, Coarsegold is a place where desire has free rein. The one place might be the ego and the other place the id. Disjunction between appearance and reality is not the case in either Hornitos or Coarsegold, but it is the case at the ranch. Note the finale when Steve’s failing eyesight lets him down. He thinks he sees Elsa’s father praying, but he is mistaken.
c. the Homestead: between Hornitos and Coarsegold is the homestead, the Knudson ranch. This place works on more than one level. We first see this place from the inside – inside the barn where Elsa and her father are at work. The ranch is nestled in a beautiful valley, a pastoral land of beauty. But the Knudsons work inside, and their very expansive yard is bare and brown. Father and daughter appear oblivious to the beauty around them – or at least Joshua Knudson is. He is the patriarch, always spouting verses from the Bible. We learn, through reading the epitaph Joshua has written for his former wife, that he has driven one woman from this place in the past. He will drive one more away shortly after we meet him. Joshua is a bitter, fearful man. He engages Steve in a battle of biblical verses, and he finishes with: “into the land of trouble and anguish from whence come the young and old lion, the viper and fiery flying serpent, they will carry their riches upon the shoulders of young asses, and the treasures upon the bunches of camels, to a people that shall not profit them” (Isaiah 30:6).
Despite all the beautiful scenery outside the house and barn, Joshua Knudson lives an insular, interior life. Much of our time here is in the dark, just as Knudson is really in the dark as to the character of these visitors. The farm appears pastoral and inviting, but it is bleak and puritanical – a place without joy.
As middle ground, between town and mining camp, the ranch is morally testing. Here the young man begins to become something more than callow. Here Steve Judd measures well against the moral stiffness and inflexibility of Joshua Knudson. Joshua and Steve are doubles; however, Steve is a person with feeling and compassion and Joshua is a person without human kindness and compassion.
On the return trip, the ranch takes on another dimension. Here it becomes a ritual space, the ground for heroic action. The final gunfight in which the bad guys and good guys face off against each other in the open – “just like always,” Steve says – takes place in a barren open space. The brown ground becomes ritual space in which the characters play out their mythic roles; it is an arena where warriors do battle. This is epic confrontation, shot in a manner we will see developed to the extreme in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). The western has always been a ritualistic form – rituals of confrontation in saloons, rituals of the gunfight, rituals associated with behaviour and speech, rituals of dance or of weddings. In its ritual repetitions, it echoes the traditional epic. In the final moments of Ride the High Country, the heroes’ journey comes to an end. They have rescued the girl and carried out their quest – here the quest is for regained self-respect. The treasure at the end of the quest turns out not to be gold, but to be Elsa. We might recall that early in the film, Gil Westrum remarks that it takes a lot of drinks to let him sleep at night (“It takes all the free drinks I can get just to put me to sleep at night.”), and we know that Steve Judd has lost self-respect by taking on a succession of demeaning jobs in places like Kate’s Place – bartender, stickman, bouncer, and so on. Both men come to understand that what is important in life is not money.
Three places and in-between: and so the three places, Hornitos, the ranch, and Coarsegold, serve as proving ground for moral choice. The measure of a man is available in how he navigates each place. Steve Judd just manages to survive the town. We see how anxious he is negotiating with his employers in the bank. He goes into the bathroom, pulls out his glasses, wipes his brow, and flushes before he leaves. But he pulls through. Gil Westrum survives the town by prostituting himself, by donning a costume and pretending to be what he is not. Heck survives by living aggressively. “He’ll do,” Judd says after Heck has been knocked flying in the restaurant fight. He will do because he is willing to take a beating and to stand up to one.
Three places and three protagonists. Young Heck is between
Gil and Steve, the one who wears red long johns and the one who wears white long johns. “The Lord’s bounty may not be for sale,” Gil says to Heck, “but the devil’s is, if you are willing to pay the price.” Then shortly after he says this, we see him in his red long johns. Heck is between devil and angel. The devil’s price, it turns out, is loss of self-respect and trust. And so on the trail, young Heck comes to see the strength and nobility of Steve Judd and the weakness of Gil Westrum. The film is about changing times and the passing of the torch from one generation to the next. Heck’s willingness to go to jail testifies to his change of heart, his learning what is important. As Elsa and Heck wait for Steve to return from checking out the ranch, Heck pulls a revolver from the pack horse’s burden and says that the “old man is taking quite a chance.” “I don’t think so,” Elsa replies, “and neither does he.”
Much of the interaction between the characters takes place on the trail and in evening camp. At one point, Steve tells Heck to pick up his waste – an early example of the eco-theme. Then later we see Gil tear up the marriage license and toss the pieces behind him on the trail.
Friendship:
-one recurring theme in the western is friendship. The two old guys are and have been friends for many years, and the two young people are embarking on a different kind of friendship. The two young people are the future (coming up from behind), and the two old guys are the past (on the front lines).
-Gil Westrum and Steve Judd have worked together as lawmen many times over the years. But the years have passed and now Steve is an anachronism in a changing world, while Gil has become a cynic. What matters to Steve are the old verities; what matters to Gil is money. Gil feels he is owed something for all the years he worked for various communities, putting his life on the line as a lawman. Steve feels he is owed just the $20.00 a day stipulated in his contract.
Steve: It all pointed this way, all that talk about old Doc Franklin, ungrateful citizens, what we had coming but never got paid. I knew in my bones what you were aiming for but I wouldn’t believe it. I kept telling myself you were a good man, you were my friend.
Gil: This is bank money, not yours.
Steve: And what they don't know won’t hurt them. Not them, only me!
This is the confrontation between two friends, followed by Steve challenging Gil to draw: “Draw, you damn tinhorn!” The insult, “tinhorn” (a petty braggart who pretends to be rich and famous or important – as Gil pretended to be the Oregon Kid), gets to Gil, and he drops his gun belt. Later, Steve tells Elsa that he will speak up for Heck at the trial, but not for Gil. He won't speak for Gil because he feels betrayed by his friend. He is hurt, and he reacts by being spiteful.
For his part, Gil proves his friendship when the chips are down. He rides back to the aid of Steve and the young people. Then when Steve is dying, Gil tells him that he will finish the job just as Steve would have. Steve replies: “Hell, I know that. I always did. You just forgot it for a while, that’s all.” We have here the strength of forgiveness and the trust in a friend.
Peckinpah has said that this film is all about “salvation and loneliness.” What is more lonely than the experience of death? “I’ll go it alone,” Steve says at the end. Loneliness is the condition of the trail, without a good pardner. It is also the condition of a woman such as Elsa. As for salvation, this is what characters like Elsa and Gil find. Salvation often comes at the price of sacrifice, and the one sacrificed here is Steve. The biblical quotations and resonances throughout the film not only reflect on character (Steve and Joshua Knudson), but also on the tone of the film. This is a film about last things; it is almost eschatological. To put this another way, I might return to the notion of the epic. This is a modest film with epic implications. It is about redemption, heroism, death, and loyalty – big themes. In some way, these characters must lose their lives to save their lives. Their journey, as epic journeys always do, takes them to hell and back. In the end, the hero find apotheosis.
The western and old age:
-the western is a form interested in old age. We saw this in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. But after 1960, the theme of age becomes nearly obsessive. Here is a list of film off the top of my head that deal with age:
Ride the High Country
The Wild Bunch
Monte Walsh
Will Penny
True Grit
The Shootist
A Gunfight
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys
El Dorado
Unforgiven
The Spikes Gang
My Name is Nobody
Junior Bonner
This interest in old age may explain or help explain the western’s fall from popularity. When youth becomes front and center culturally, as we see during the 1960s, then age recedes in importance. Coupled with this, other genres – especially Science Fiction and Fantasy and Horror – take up the slack left by the western. The western begins to look old fashioned, its historical contexts dated and irrelevant. Tant pis.
