Screengrab: The film that launched Butch Cassidy

March 14, 2021, 8:36 am , by newsdesk

Richard Lutz points to a wry old cowboy movie that paved the way for Butch and Sundance

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For some reason, I haven’t filed a Screengrab story for years. It usually highlighted the movie of the week that you’d find nestling in the week’s tv listings. I wonder why. What could have stopped me in my televisual tracks? Gosh.

Oh yes, I remember now- downloads, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Youtube, Russian TV Classic Gold Extra. Who needs schedules when you just think of a movie and it appears magically or, I guess, implants itself into your head by translucent pixies wthin 12 seconds? My, how time flies.

But I’m old school. So, if you can get your brain around actually turning on a flatscreen, check out Ride The High Country (TCM, Thurs 8.15am). Watch it, record it, tape it, hard drive it or cut and paste the title and find it somewhere in the hyper-ether.

This is because this Peckinpaugh film is one of the great cowboy films, driven by a droll script that heralded the new wave of sagebrush operas such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, One Eyed Jacks, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Meeks Crossing and even those early Eastwood films.

spikey as a cactus, wry as desert dust….

It was made in 1962 by Sam Peckinpaugh and it’s about two jaded out of luck outlaws who get pn each other’s nerves, rub each other the wrong way and are,avtually, inseparable. Just like Newman and Reford seven years later. The script is tough, spikey as a cactus and wry as dust. The cowpokes are watching the Old West- and their lives- slowly disppear into the maw of the 20thc. But they can’t accept it.

Randolph Scott and Joel McCrae are cranky has-beens riding the high country guarding a gold shipment and trying to keep the Old West alive, kind of superannuated Butch and Sundance. They complain and snipe, they grumble and snipe some more but they know when the good gets bad, it’s time to start shooting, just like B and S. It’s the seminal western buddy film, the script spikey as a cactus, wry as desert dust. They bitch like ratty teenagers, double cross each other, snip and snarl. And, crucially, they are inseparable. They’re in each other’s blood. The New York Times called it ‘the perfect western’.

And if you want another pitch on the fading of The Old Ways, Scott (above), a B-movie stalwart, never made another film. McCrae, a former A-lister, made a trio of feeble dross before handing in his Guild card. For both, Ride The High Country was a farewell to the big screen.

TCM, here in UK-ville, isn’t the only channel emitting 24 hours of old stuff. Talking Pictures, way down there in the schedules, has cornered the market in movies that time really forgot. I don’t know about the quality. But I love the titles: The Face of Fu Manchu, Guilt Is My Shadow, Enemy at the Door, and Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb.

It also splashes out on old tv series (William Tell, Zorro, Robin Hood) and can’t-ignore gripping documentaries such as the public service thriller Report on Litter.

I rest my case, m’lord.