During the making of Ride the High Country in 1962, director Sam Peckinpah was ordered by MGM to stop filming on location (Mammoth Lakes, near Bishop) due to unfavorable weather conditions and to relocate to Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles instead. Peckinpah allegedly saw to it that none of the cast and crew members remain sober during the six-hour bus ride back to L.A. A cast member recalled asking the director whether he had always wanted to make movies, to which an inebriated Peckinpah said: “Yeah, pretty much. I’m thinking this may be my last one. It’s not worth going through all this nonsense.” Then he was asked what he would have done had he not become a filmmaker. His response? “I seriously considered being a Buddhist monk at one time.” When taking into account the overwhelmingly positive reviews that Ride the High Country received despite the studio’s complete lack of faith in it, it turns out that directing it proved to have been worth going through all that trouble after all. And lucky for cinephiles everywhere, not only was Peckinpah’s second feature film not his last one, but it became the first of his many memorable movies still piquing interest all around the globe. Had the director gone to a monastery instead of pursuing filmmaking, the world would have been deprived of critically acclaimed—albeit controversial—masterpieces such as The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971), as well as many other feature films Peckinpah would come to direct in the years to come, before ultimately dying of heart failure in 1984 at the age of 59. But although Ride the High Country was the seed from which the director’s revisionist approach to Westerns would ultimately grow, it wasn’t nearly as graphically violent as his following features, which would eventually earn him the nickname “Bloody Sam.” Sam was not bloody just yet and the controversy around his persona wasn’t nearly as widespread.
According to actor James Drury, who played a substantial, although supporting role in Ride the High Country, Peckinpah was on his best behavior for the majority of time on set: “He was innovative, imaginative, always anxious to work with actors on their characters. He’d get involved in heavy-duty discussions but he didn’t overdirect—he’d consult. He had a tremendous amount of respect for McCrea and Scott and they had a lot of respect for him. They were pleased to be working in the picture. At that point, he was a happy man. We knew him at his best and most likable.” Western legends Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott were, of course, the leading men chosen for the roles of former federal marshal Steve Judd and his fellow ex-lawman Gil Westrum, respectively. The movie follows Judd, hired to transport a gold shipment from a mining camp to a small town, as he recruits his old friend Westrum, as well as Westrum’s young sidekick Heck Longtree (Ron Starr). Unbeknownst to Judd, his two companions have no intention of allowing the shipment to reach the town, but even their plans get temporarily disrupted when Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), a young woman they helped escape the clutches of her religious father, joins them on their journey.
For both Scott and McCrea, Ride the High Country was nothing short of a swansong (although McCrea would come to shoot four more films before his retirement, none of which managed to achieve the greatness of Ride the High Country), the same way the movie itself is a eulogy of sorts for the Western genre’s previous decade. Peckinpah’s masterpiece about “salvation and loneliness,” as he himself described it, depicts the old West dying out along with its legends, paving the way for the dawning of a new era. The theme of lonely individuals who have somehow outstayed their welcome in the time-space continuum they are forced to inhabit is a prevalent one in Ride the High Country and continued being the driving force behind Peckinpah’s following features. The director explores this notion by focusing on two characters who mirror each other perfectly, each one reflecting back to the other who he might have been, had he made different choices i.e. reacted differently to the circumstances he found himself in. It is precisely this mirroring that sets the stage for redemption that both Judd and Gil are ultimately allowed to achieve, indicating how that which we perceive as our wickedness is more often than not circumstantial and therefore—redeemable.
But had Peckinpah not greatly interfered in the script itself, it is questionable how well these themes would have strung a cord with movie enthusiasts and critics alike. In search of a great script, producer Richard Lyons asked writer William S. Roberts for a recommendation. The latter introduced him to N.B. Stone and neglected to say how Stone’s alcoholism affected his career, rendering him an unreliable co-worker. After having finally read Stone’s 145-pages-long draft, Lyons declared it to be “awful.” Embarrassed by the whole ordeal and wanting to help his friend’s career, Roberts offered to re-write the script entirely and insisted on being left out of the credits, which meant that Stone was ultimately credited as the sole author. And while the rewritten script proved to be better than the draft, it was still, as Lyons put it, “a diamond in the rough.” And this is where Peckinpah came in, knowing “how to cut it to really bring out its brilliance.” Not only had the director changed the original title—Guns in the Afternoon nevertheless remained the title under which the movie was released in Europe—and rewritten the dialogue in merely three to four weeks’ time, but he had also made the most significant plot change—the one at the very end. By reversing the all-too-familiar trope of the bad guy getting what was coming to him, Peckinpah made an even more poignant point about the importance and strength of redemption, implying that our inherent goodness is in us the entire time, just waiting for us to gain awareness of its existence. In other words, every individual has the right to salvation, provided he responds to the same circumstance with a different choice.
Even though filming lasted only twenty-six days, Peckinpah had trouble getting his movie completed, let alone distributed. MGM studio’s production head Sol Siegel enabled Peckinpah to make the first cut on Ride the High Country, together with editor Frank Santillo. But before the duo could finish editing, Siegel was replaced by studio executive Joseph Vogel, who fell asleep while watching the rough cut and subsequently described it as the worst movie he had ever seen. Although Peckinpah was barred from the studio, Santillo and Lyons wanted the movie to be cut as the director intended, so they consulted with him in secret, playing him sound mixes over the phone. Due to the studio’s aforementioned lack of faith in the movie, it was put on the market as the lower half of double features, resulting in Ride the High Country being a commercial disaster in the US. Nevertheless, it managed to become one of MGM’s highest grossing films in Europe during its run. Despite the unfavorable conditions that Peckinpah’s movie was exposed to (weather and otherwise), it managed to stand the test of time—it was hailed in years to come as the director’s first great film. And rightfully so.
Here’s a rarity: Sam Peckinpah & N.B. Stone’s screenplay for Ride the High Country [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
Lucien Ballard has to be ranked among the greatest of Hollywood cinematographers. He began his career at Paramount as editor and assistant to the great cameraman Lee Garmes on Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco‘ starring Marlene Dietrich. Ballard then entered the next phase of his training when he struggled to make all forms of genre films a bit distinguished. The late 1930s saw his credits accumulate, even through work on many a two-reeler including the comedies of The Three Stooges and Charlie Chase. His principal employer, Columbia Pictures, may have been on Poverty Row, but it afforded Ballard the perfect place to learn to shoot Hollywood films quickly and efficiently. World War II, with many talented cameramen off working for the military, provided him with a chance to move up to top Hollywood productions. He jumped from Columbia to Twentieth Century-Fox, a top studio. In the mid-1940s he became a bit of a celebrity as the husband of Merle Oberon and the cameraman who struggled with Howard Hughes to create the idiosyncratic Western, The Outlaw. But then his career stuck and he returned to shooting lower-budget fare. He achieved a measure of excellence with The Killer Is Loose and Buchanan Rides Alone for Budd Boetticher, and The Killing for Stanley Kubrick. In 1962 his career took a turn for the better and he began to achieve fame as an exceptional cameraman with work for director Sam Peckinpah. Their Ride the High Country stands as one of the most beautiful of Westerns. This final phase of Ballard’s career was underlined with greatness for the clean, elegant visual style he brought to the Western just, ironically, as that form was passing from the movie screen.
Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country. Photographed by N/A © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.