theriverjordan’s review published on Letterboxd:
“The Long Riders” goes for the gimmick while styling itself in the Western attire of genre legend Sam Peckinpah.
Director Walter Hill - who penned the screenplay for Peckinpah’s own “The Getaway,” finally got to make a Western himself in “Riders;” after an early career spent incarnating the genre’s tropes in his other works.
It turns out… he’s just more interesting when transplanting the Western to other locales.
“Hard Times” was the Western as a boxing flick, and “The Driver” was the Western as a gangster heist film. “Riders” shoots straight inside its genre lines as a retelling of the Jesse James myth.
Perhaps aware that the time of the classical cowboy had long since passed into tv rerun territory, Hill went for a hook to lure in the crowds: stunt casting.
In relating the history of clan feuds, Hill picked his actors along family lines. Real life brothers from the artistic lineages of: Quaid, Carradine, Guest and Keach play opposite their own real life kin. Outside the realms of gawking celebrity or cinephile curiosity, the choice isn’t so misinformed as to cause catastrophe; but also it isn’t enough to lean an entire film on.
“Riders” has elements of Peckinpah’s cruelty and deconstructed masculine desperation. But, it rides into town dragging the severed head of the Hollywood system behind it… and there’s no burying the stench of that corpse.
From West to East(wood): Westerns Ranked
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