Twilight of the Old West(ern)

Ride the High Country (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)Once again a Western was the main feature of Not a Film Night and once more Randy Scott swung up into the saddle to accompany our beer and cheese. This time it was Ride the High Country aka Guns in the Afternoon. Beware: There may be spoilers heading you off at the pass yonder.

Ride the High Country was made in 1962 and directed by someone later to direct one of the classic Westerns of all time but who at this time had written and directed only for television: Sam Peckinpah.
Image via Wikipedia

For my money this is in itself a classic mythic western and it took its stars by surprise at the time by being lauded by the critics.

We don't always consider that the "Old West" didn't really last very long but there are indications in the opening shots that the cowboy and his horse had had its day as Joel McCrea (as ex-lawman Steve Judd) narrowly avoids being run down by a motor-car. The horseless carriage looks fairly well established and the horse is also being beaten in some dodgey races by a camel. The camel's rider is a young man teamed with Randolph Scott (aka Gil Westrum) who it quickly becomes clear has once been a man of action, taming frontier towns, but is now milking the somewhat exaggerated legend of his past as a carny with a slightly crooked target-shooting stall. The camel racing is also something of a scam as we later learn that no horse could beat a camel over the distance Gil and his young partner have set.

 Image via Wikipedia
Joel McCrea recognises Scott (they have been Marshal and deputy together several times in earlier days) and recruits his former partner for another proper job then blags himself into a gold bullion escort job from a nearby mining camp (reading the contract in the lavatory to avoid exposing the fact that he needs spectacles to read it).
Both the leads were somewhat playing themselves as they were reaching the end of their cinematic cowboy-playing trail (although McCrea was still a fine horseman and successful rancher in real life). As McCrea himself put it "Both Randy and I were washed-up actors playing washed-up lawmen"

They do a great job in this elegaic Western and Scott once more plays a character with some interesting light and shade unlike some of his more heroic roles. The two heroes rather steal the picture unsurprisingly but Heck Longtree, the young camel rider (Ron Starr) gives us the key conflict plot by falling in love with Elsa a young woman with a very sheltered upbringing and stirring up trouble from her father and her fiancé and his crazy family. Meanwhile he has fallen in with another no-good scheme of his partner Gil and looks likely to be double-crossing their employer and friend. The end is both poignant and satisfying and we thouroughly enjoyed our main feature.

The Hunters (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)The second feature was not quite so universally admired. Chosen because of our love of vintage warbirds (and in particular from my friend's love of early jets) we watched The Hunters.

This is a Robert Mitchum vehicle and is immediately interesting because it is set in that rather unpopular era for films, the Korean War.

While some of the flying (which after all is what we wanted to see) is fascinating, we became eleven year old boys again deriding the sloppy love subplot which interrupts the aeroplane action.

Mitchum (as Major Cleveland Sivelle) falls for the young wife of one of the pilots in his new posting (before he realises that is who she is) and this affects his future actions as he reluctantly keeps her husband in his flight and even takes him as his wingman despite knowing that he takes refuge in a bottle at every opportunity and has never shot down a MiG. Incidentally and not surprisingly MiGs were not available in 1958 and so were played by American F-84Fs. The love interest was played by the lovely Mrs Sammy Davis: May Britt

Mitchum eventually rescues his rival after he ejects over enemy territory after tangling with "Casey Jones" a hot-shot Chinese pilot (although we now know he would have been much more likely to be Russian).

Image via WikipediaIn the process we also have to contend with a brilliant but wayward pilot played by Robert Wagner. For some reason he has to talk a kind of fifties jive talk: Calling his officer "daddio" and replacing OK with "George". This is probably the third or fourth time I have seen this film and I'm not growing any fonder of "Ed Pell". In fact most of the flyboys featured are drunk, insubordinate and prone to lethal dereliction of duty. Personally I think the whole stinking lot should have been subject to courts-martial, from their commanding officer Richard Egan, aka Col. Dutch Imil, on down. Seemingly without conscience, albeit with some rather unfortunate notions of honour, they leave a trail of dead friends which must come close to exceeding their tally of dead "Chinese" in exploding "MiGs".

It's tosh but tosh with interesting aeroplanes and at least one fine actor. Of course we enjoyed it as well as being irritated by some aspects.