Cinema: The New Westerns

• Share

Ride the High Country. Grey is the color of the hero's hair. He helped bring law and order to the West, but civilization has made the former marshal (Joel McCrea) obsolete. Then he gets the offer of man's work: bankers in the town of Hornitos want him to pick up and transport gold along lonely trails from a new strike in the High Sierras at a place candidly christened Coarse Gold. He runs across another ex-lawman (Randolph Scott), who is picking up pennies as a carnival sharpshooter. Scott agrees to go along, and suggests a third partner, a sassy, fist-fast, trigger-quicker kid (Ronald Starr). The trio shortly becomes a quartet, as a naive but personable girl (Mariette Hartley) decides to swap the whip-hand threats of her religious zealot father for the ring-finger promises of a beau up at Coarse Gold.

The camp is squalid—its only purity the snow, its only building a brothel. The beau is not squalid, but his three brothers are, and they clearly expect to share communal marital privileges. When the terrified bride decamps on her wedding night and rejoins the gold-guarding trio, the serious shooting begins. The good-guy bad-guy struggle is dramatically tangled and intensified by the fact that Scott and Starr have intended all along to either sweet-talk or pistol-silence McCrea out of the gold.

This story could have been sheer slumgullion, but under Sam Peckinpah's tasteful direction it is a minor chef-d'oeuvre among westerns. Shot near California's Mammoth Lakes, the film owes much of its beauty to nature. The camera hovers with loving grace over limpid, mirror-bright pools, trees like green-hooded knights, and the rumpled grandeur of blue-blanketed mountains. Ride the High Country has a rare honesty of script, performance and theme—that goodness is not a gift but a quest. In the unhurried tempo of their speech, their ease of bearing, the firm-lipped gravity of their faces. Actors McCrea and Scott give the action strength and substance. The western has always been a stance as well as a story, and when actors with the unforced dignity of McCrea and Scott go, the old breed of western will go with them.

Lonely Are the Brave. Grim, stinking trailer trucks, the mechanistic behemoths of progress, thunder blindly along the highway. Near the white line dividing traffic, a high-strung horse skitters, rears and neighs in the kind of wild-eyed terror and anguish that Picasso gives to the horse in Guernica. The symbolic question is clear: Is the untamed free spirit an outlaw that must learn to toe the white lines of the modern world or perish?

Like Ride the High Country, Lonely Are the Brave is about a Westerner whom civilization has made an anachronism. The film is a western in spirit and setting but not in theme. Kirk Douglas plays a weatherbeaten cowpoke with mighty few cows left to poke. He is a loner, a maverick with a fence complex: he sees fences everywhere and hates them always. When he finds that an old pal is behind one—in jail—Douglas gets drunk, tangles with a barroom psycho, and manages to be thrown into the same hoosegow. He proposes to hacksaw some time off his friend's two-year sentence. But the pal has been tamed by a wife and child, and Douglas makes the jailbreak alone.