Rich, beautiful film about facing mortality with dignity and integrity. The first post-credit scene has Joel McCrea entering a town in which his way of life is so outmoded that its elements have become fodder for a Wild-West carnival. Automobiles have replaced horses and horses are only used for historical re-creation. McCrea has come to this place to find an old friend (Randolph Scott) to join up for one last job transporting gold for a bank. McCrea finds his ex-partner working a penny shooting-stall whose walls are adorned with sensationalized western lore. Their conversation—a stalwart piece of acting and writing deepened by the stars' long-time association with the genre—is tinged with some shame at the hand life has dealt them in old age; the subtle dialectic between McCrea's healthy self-respect and Scott's yearning to find justification for the wasted years quietly introduces the story's central conflict and themes. These two characters refreshingly act with a force of purpose, driven by their realizations of old age and personal ethics, which give McCrea solitude from a society he doesn't understand. Scott seeks that same freedom and thinks he can attain it in stolen gold, a recompense for years of unacknowledged civil service. On the surface, this is an argument of moral righteousness vs. relativism, but in Peckinpah's hands it is the weighing of two ideas of independence: the everlasting virtue of inner peace—which McCrea finds in his final look at the sky over the mountains—and the illusory riches of monetary wealth. Central to nearly all the Peckinpah films I've seen is the notion of finding peace through a sense of honor that must be honed and perfected wholly by the individual. This theme finds its greatest advocate in McCrea's unwavering man-of-character, who does the right thing because it yields solace. To echo the film's most memorable line—"All I want is to enter my house justified"—a justified life is an imperative of choice and action, not of entitlement, a truth that Scott's character must discover for himself.
Review of Ride the High Country
