Tue, Apr 30
|Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse
Robert Nott, Ride the High Country
Robert Nott delves into how the film Ride the High Country helped the Western genre mature and adapt to turbulent and changing times.
Date, Time & Location
Apr 30, 2024, 6:00 PM MDT
Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
About the Event
This will be an in-store event and live streamed to Zoom, register for Zoom here.
Purchase Ride the High Country ($19.95, paperback) from CW online here or call the store to order (505) 988-4226.Â
Director Sam Peckinpah was just starting out when MGM released Ride the High Country in 1962. He was a new kind of director: young, brash, and in a hurry to help the Western "grow up" by treating it with adult themes. Ride the High Country was something new and different, a changing Western to match a changing West. Stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were old hands at this sort of thing. Ride the High Country gave the two veteran actors one last job to do and a chance to go out with some dignity. It launched Peckinpah's career by invoking the themes of honor, loyalty, and compromised ideals, the destruction of the West and its heroes, and the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world--themes developed to their pinnacle in Peckinpah's later masterpiece, The Wild Bunch.
About the Author
Robert Nott is the author of The Films of Randolph Scott; Last of the Cowboy Heroes: The Westerns of Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy; and The Films of Budd Boetticher. He is also the coauthor, with Max Evans, of Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends (UNM Press). He has been a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican for the last twenty-five years.