Ride the High Country

Peckinpah’s second—and arguably first great—film is a magnificent ode to the waning West. Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott (in his final screen appearance) are two-thirds of a trio of tough hombres hired to transport a shipment of gold from a rough-and-tumble mining town—but things don’t unfold quite according to plan. The presence of the two veteran Western stars in the twilight of their careers connects Ride the High Country to the classic oaters of the studio era, while Peckinpah’s modernist sensibility—seen in the pungent depiction of the debauched miners’ camp and the brilliantly choreographed, bullet-riddled climax—points the way toward the revisionist Westerns to come.