Short Cut: “The Long Riders”

The Long Riders (1980, Dir. Walter Hill): 

It reads like a gimmick — get four sets of acting brothers (the Carradines, the Keaches, the Quaids and the Guests) and have them star as real-life outlaw brothers (the legendary James-Younger-Miller band of bank robbers who terrorized the Midwest in the late 1800s). And while The Long Riders falls just short of rising above that winky premise, the results are diverting enough. Stealing moves from Sam Peckinpah and pepping up the proceedings with an authentic dreamy soundtrack of plucked guitars and fiddles courtesy of Ry Cooder, Hill knows how to shoot an action scene, and the gang’s climactic robbery attempt in Northfield, Minnesota is stuffed with enough slow-mo and exploding squibs to satisfy most action junkies. Some of the acting’s pretty durn fine too, with the normally inexpressive David Carradine stealing the show as the cocky, near-feral Cole Younger. His on-and-off-again romance with Pamela Reed’s Belle Starr is almost completely incidental to the plot, but it does lead to a nifty knife fight with Sam Starr (James Remar) and some much-needed sexual sparks. (As an aside, it’s almost criminal how Reed has been ignored by the movies over the years — she seems incapable of giving an unconvincing performance.) The rest of the gang is a mixed bag, reduced to individual tics: James Keach gives good glower as Jesse James without suggesting the crazy depths the real-life Jesse reportedly had, Keith Carradine gets flirty, Stacy Keach gets flinty, Randy Quaid waxes about Old Dixie, and Dennis Quaid brings up the rear as the disgraced, whiny little brother.

“First getting shot, then getting married — bad habits.”
— David Carradine, The Long Riders

The story doesn’t hew closely to the real-life story of Jesse James and his gang in the specifcs, but it doesn’t do much to offer up a counter-myth either. Shot in a near-sepia tone with elegaic touches here and there, the movie seems to be straining towards a thematic resonance that the script can’t be bothered to supply. Films from the halcyon ’60s and ’70s tend to be either wistful about the dying Old West, as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or operatic about it, like Once Upon a Time in the West; The Long Riders prefers to wander aimlessly from one incident to the next.  The most it can muster is a wry “boys will be boys” subtext wherein the James and Younger brothers flirt with conjugal bliss but decide to stick with what they do best — would-be wives and girlfriends played by Shelby Leverington and Savannah Smith barely qualify as decorative — and when they receive their inevitable comeuppance, it’s treated with the weight of a weary sigh. Minor it may be, but The Long Riders is a fun reminder of the days of taciturn action cinema, where even death is greeted with a hail of squibs and a shrug.