It concerns two aging ex-lawmen, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) and Steve Judd (Joel McCrea), old friends who are hired to transport a shipment of gold from a mining camp to a bank.
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Ride the High Country was Peckinpah’s second film after the low-budget The Deadly Companions most avid Peckinpah fans consider it his first great movie and the first indicator of his thematic interests (among them the difficulty of upholding honor and justice in a corrupt society, the destruction of the Old West and its myths by encroaching modernity, and camaraderie among men). Even at this low point, however, MGM’s esteem and vast collection of classics were great enough to garner retrospectives from national cinematheques and arthouses like the Walker-comparatively rare tributes not to directors or stars, but to a movie studio. This negative trend continued into the 1970s, a decade which saw MGM decrease its rate of production, close numerous sales and distribution offices, sell large portions of its backlot to other production companies, and focus its energies on its more lucrative hotel and casino establishments. In the late 1950s and 1960s, however, MGM-even more than contemporaries such as Paramount and Warner Bros.-underwent a drastic decline that coincided with the increasing popularity of television and several court cases that limited the oligopolistic power of the Hollywood studios over American film production, distribution, and exhibition. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, MGM was synonymous with Tinseltown elegance. Under the semi-tyrannical rule of Louis B. This is the company that, in 1939, released both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Their roster of stars once included Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy, and their staff of directors featured such names as King Vidor, Erich von Stroheim, and Tod Browning. The 1970s saw the swift decline of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which at one point had been arguably the wealthiest and most elegant of the Hollywood studios. They were tough-guy movies, but they also happened to be unassumingly smart (and distinctly weird).
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( Point Blank also played, incidentally, as part of the Walker’s Summer Music & Movies series in 1999.) A double-feature that would surely inspire fist-clenched euphoria in any fan of classic Hollywood action movies, Ride the High Country and Point Blank remind us of a time when action movies bankrolled by major American studios-at least when commandeered by gung-ho iconoclasts like Peckinpah, Boorman, Samuel Fuller, or Robert Aldrich-could pulsate with more subversive energy and intense creativity than many other Hollywood releases. On August 25 th 1977, the Walker Art Center screened two films as part of its tribute to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Sam Peckinpah’s second feature film, Ride the High Country (1962), and John Boorman’s trippy actioner Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin in what may be his most iconic role.