The Long Riders
(1980) dir. Walter Hill
viewed: 11/19/07
This was meant to be the last of my little Jesse James cycle, Walter Hill’s 1980 take on the James gang. However, I stumbled on a couple others, so I may write about a couple more. Still, for the goal of looking at the Jesse James story as told by four interesting directors in four wholly different decades, this completes the cycle. Not that this was comprehensive by any means.
I’d seen The Long Riders back in England years ago and had enjoyed it. Walter Hill is one of those not-so-well-known but yet pretty darn good directors from the late 1970’s through the 1980’s, whose star has diminished in more recent times. I’d seen his film The Driver (1978) a couple of years back, which was also quite good.
The best things about The Long Riders are the shootouts and action sequences, the musical score by Ry Cooder, and some of the familial interactions between the actors. This film was notable because four groups of brothers played the gangs and siblings: James and Stacey Keach play Jesse and Frank James respectively, the Carradine brothers play the Youngers, the Quaids play the Millers, and the Guests (including Christopher Guest) play the Fords. The film focuses, unsurprisingly on the fraternity of brothers and criminals, but also quite a bit on their romantic interests, loves, girls, whores, and wives. That is an unfortunate aspect of the film. Those parts drag significantly and lack charm.
The film is nicely shot, truly a post-Peckinpah Western, with lots of slow-motion bodies flying through the air. Anyone that gets shot down from a rooftop falls in slow-motion (note: it seems obligitory that anyone shot from a rooftop or high window in any Western has to fall to the ground.) The film focuses more on the Youngers, it seems, than the James’. I only note this oddity since the Keach brothers co-produced the film and might have given their characters more intensive screen time.
James Keach as Jesse James is about the most-deadfaced of the portrayals I’ve seen. Whether he is kind or cruel, his face is impassive and he bears an aspect of the inscrutable or unknowable. The film’s attitude toward them is typical of the subject matter, sympathizing with what brought them into crime and not with the Pinkertons who ham-fistedly hunt them down, but acknowledging a crossing of the line between good and irredeemable. Also interesting how this film carries some of the era of the Western in the 1970’s but shifts toward a more “pop” sensibility that characterizes films of the 1980’s.
This film, by and far, had the best soundtrack of the bunch.
