Ride the High Country News

McMillan Memorial Library, 490 E. Grand Ave., continues the Monday movie series with "Ride the High Country," starring Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Edgar Buchanan and Mariette Hartley .

Though some critics hated it when it was released in 1969, Sam Peckinpah's seminal western "The Wild Bunch" is today considered one of the most influential, poetic -- and yes, violent -- sagebrush sagas ever made.

Are you a fan of great movies? Then head to Culpeper, at the Library of Congress' Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation , 19053 Mount Pony Road.

In the nineteen-fifties, Fred Zinnemann and George Stevens tried to freeze the Western genre into a single archetypal film, while directors like Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann were taking it in bitter new directions.

Tall, laconic character player of film and TV usually in Westerns, war films, and other tough guy fare so abundant in the 1950s and early 60s.

Good-humored, intelligent lead, mostly on TV. Hartley's film career got off to an auspicious start with a leading role in Sam Peckinpah's second film, the elegiac "Ride the High Country" . By the early 1970s,.... Good-humored, intelligent lead, mostly on TV.

Author Tom McGuane said he had the all-time greatest squint in movies. Critic David Thomson suggested that part of his singular appeal came from his being that rare actor willing to look genuinely dumb.

"Westerns are timeless. The soundtracks rarely are." Lileks tweeted that pithy two-liner a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Hollywood renegade Sam Peckinpah's favorite film was John Huston's 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre,' and when he co-wrote and directed his own tale of avarice gone awry, the 1974 thriller 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,' Peckinpah found a cinematic descendent of Humphrey Bogart in the character actor Warren Oates, whose volatile mix of machismo ...