Reception
The film was a NYT Critics Pick: according to Bosley Crowther, who saw it in a double bill with The Tartars, greatly preferred Ride the High Country, calling it a "perfectly dandy little Western" and "the most disarming little horse opera in months." According to Crowther:
The two young people are quite good, especially Miss Hartley, a newcomer with real promise. R. M. Armstrong and Edgar Buchanan also contribute telling bits. We know little about the director and scenarist, but Mr. Peckinpah and Mr. Stone certainly have what it takes. And so, if anybody ever doubted it, do a couple of leathery, graying hombres named McCrea and Scott.
Ride the High Country was hailed as a success upon its release in Europe, beating Fellini's classic 8½ for first prize at the Belgium Film Festival and winning the Paris film critics award for best film. Critics were particularly enthusiastic about the film's mix of the conventional and the revisionist in its treatment of the Western. They hailed Peckinpah as a worthy successor to classic Western directors such as John Ford.
The film's reputation has only grown in following years, with Peckinpah's admirers citing it as his first great film. They also note that all of the themes of Peckinpah's later films, such as honor and ideals compromised by circumstance, the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world, the destruction of the West and its heroes by industrial modernity, and the importance of loyalty between men are all present in Ride the High Country for the first time.
In his autobiography In the Arena (1995), Charlton Heston wrote that he was considering remaking the film in the late 1980s, presumably with Clint Eastwood as a co-star. After viewing Ride the High Country Heston proposed Harry Julian Fink's script of Major Dundee (1965) to Peckinpah.
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