Ride the High Country (1962) on Netflix
Steve Judd, an aging ex-lawman, is hired to carry gold from a high country mining camp. His old friend Gil Westrum and Heck Longtree ride with him, and Elsa Knudsen joins them.
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- IMDb7.4/1016,504 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Steve Judd was once a respected lawman, and the work he can still find is thin. A bank hires him to bring gold down from a mining camp in the high country, two or three days' ride away, after six miners were killed carrying out an earlier shipment. Judd recruits his old friend and partner Gil Westrum, who makes a living passing himself off as a sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid, and Gil's young sidekick Heck Longtree. The three spend a night at the farm of Joshua Knudsen, a domineering and religious man. His daughter Elsa wants to marry a miner named Billy Hammond, and after she quarrels with her father she catches up with the riders and asks to travel with them to Coarsegold.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ride the High Country (1962)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sam Peckinpah flipped a coin in front of a producer to decide which of his two stars, Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea, would get top billing, and Scott won the toss. In the opening credits both names appear in the same shot, so they ended up with equal top billing.
SPOILER
Sam Peckinpah did a three- to four-week dialogue rewrite of the script and made its most important structural change: in the original Stone-Roberts draft the 'black hat' character, Randy, dies at the end, so Peckinpah switched it so the good guy dies.- The original screenwriter, Stone, suffered from chronic alcoholism that had brought his career to a standstill, and the 145-page draft he delivered was called awful. William S. Roberts rewrote it in full but insisted on staying uncredited, hoping to give his friend's career a boost.
- The film was first cast with Joel McCrea as Gil Westrum and Randolph Scott as Steve Judd, but after reading the script the two men agreed that a switch of the roles was in order.
- In Ride the High Country, the part of Billy Hammond was originally offered to Robert Culp, who turned it down.
- Charlton Heston was such an admirer of the film that he brought Sam Peckinpah the script for Major Dundee (1965), and in his 1995 autobiography he wrote that he had considered remaking Ride the High Country in the late 1980s, presumably with Clint Eastwood as co-star.
- Ride the High Country was Randolph Scott's final screen performance, and Joel McCrea made no further feature films until 1970's Cry Blood, Apache.
