What's so great about Ride the High Country?

I love Ride The High Country, saw it when it was brand new. It was a modestly budgeted film that got rave reviews, wasn't really a hit, though. What greatness the film possesses,--and this may not last, not hold up to the test of time--is that it's one of the many elegiac, wistful westerns of its era; its stars were icons of the western genre; and the action occurs at a time when the old wild west was yielding to the modern, more tame one.

The film may be too locked in its own time to endure. It was made for an audience familiar with the movie west and its themes; and that included children, such as myself, who had begun watching the Lone Ranger and Tonto on TV, moved on to Sky King, then the Texas Rangers, and finally the "adult" westerns which included Gunsmoke, Wagon Train and so many others of roughly the 1955-65 period. It was a grand time for fans of westerns. Then there were the movie westerns of John Wayne.

American films practically began with the western, specifically The Great Train Robbery, made at the turn of the 20th century (in, of all places, the "wilds" of New Jersey, large portions of which were still wild). The first movie superstar was "Bronco Billy Anderson". He was a western star. Then came all the others,--William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Tim McCoy--and with the coming of sound the decline of westerns as a major genre, as it was sort of "downgraded" to B picture status,--for the most part--till after World War II.

There's a point in all this carrying on about westerns, and it's that there was, around the time Ride The High Country came out there were a few other, similarly downbeat westerns, and there was a creeping sadness, a sense of tragedy, in even the TV westerns. It's as if Hollywood knew, collectively, unconsciously, that the western's day as America's favorite movie genre was coming to an end. More than the other "sad westerns" of its era Ride The High Country, with its aging western stars, seems a fitting farewell to the western, to which it's worth mentioning, as we knew it.

The spaghetti western was right around the corner, but it didn't build on the western mythos, the American western mythos. It was a European creation, often humorous, or what we'd now called deconstructionist. Perhaps only in this end of an era context does Ride The High Country truly resonate as a classic, a great film. To those who didn't grow up on western movies and TV shows maybe it's just another old movie whose classic status is a puzzle. I hope that in this post I've been able to put some of the pieces of that puzzle in their proper context.

Sometimes that could be the "dangers" of watching a movie that get's rave reviews in many movie guides, I've been there many times myself, maybe expecting too much, and after "The End" flashes by wondering "was that it?" and sometimes wondered "have we seen the same movie?".

Sometimes it can be better to see a movie carte blanche in mind, and make up your own mind about it, and later compare it with others reviews.