Trivia / Ride the High Country

• Acclaimed Flop: Didn't do well at the box office, but was critically praised.
• Breakthrough Hit: Not a box-office hit, but a critical hit, which jumpstarted the movie career of Sam Peckinpah.
• California Doubling: Ironically the case for a film set in California. Filming began in the Sierra Nevada mountains where the story was set, but an October snowstorm led to a costly delay, and MGM ordered Peckinpah back to Hollywood to finish the film. That's Bronson Canyon playing the role of Coarsegold.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Joel McCrea was originally cast as Westrum and Randolph Scott was Judd. But early in the production each actor went to the producer on his own, dissatisfied and ready to quit, so the roles were reversed.
• Darkhorse Casting: Mariette Hartley was a relative unknown when she was cast as Elsa.
• Dawson Casting: Veteran actor Byron Foulger playing the son of Percy Helton, was only five years older than Foulger.
• Development Hell: In the late 1980s, Charlton Heston considered starring in a remake with Clint Eastwood.
• Method Acting: Sam Peckinpah had the actors playing the Hammond brothers room together and told them to stay in character for the whole shoot.
• Production Posse: This marked the first gathering of many of Sam Peckinpah's favorite collaborators, like actors R. G. Armstrong, Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, as well as cinematographer Lucien Ballard.
• Prop Recycling: The tents in the mining camp were made of material that had been used for the ship sails in Mutiny on the Bounty.
• Recycled Set: An outer set used for How the West Was Won was utilized.
• Screwed by the Network: Although the movie was completed in only 26 days, Sam Peckinpah ran into problems when Joseph R. Vogel replaced Sol Siegel as MGM's chief executive. The mogul allegedly fell asleep while screening the film and later proclaimed it "the worst picture I ever saw," dooming its chances for a successful commercial run. MGM had no faith in Ride the High Country and dumped it on the market as the lower half of double features.
• Spared by the Cut: The film's original ending had Westrum dying and Judd surviving. Sam Peckinpah felt it more poignant that Westrum is redeemed by promising the dying Judd that he will deliver the gold, so the characters' outcome were reversed.
• Troubled Production: This was relatively calm and uneventful for a Sam Peckinpah shoot, but his initial plan to shoot the entire film on location in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (where the story was set) got scuttled by an October snowstorm that delayed filming. Studio executives ordered him to return to Hollywood and finish the film on studio backlot sets (though the gold mining town of Coarsegold was created at the oft-used Bronson Canyon site in Griffith Park). The studio loathed the finished film and stuck it onto the bottom half of a double bill, only to have it get rave reviews from critics.
• Uncredited Role: N.B. Stone, the writer of the original story and screenplay, got sole credit, but the shooting version was rewritten by others including Peckinpah, whose own characteristic turns of phrase can be heard all through the film (like the protagonists calling the villains "red-necked peckerwoods," a term that would turn up again in The Wild Bunch).
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film had originally been intended for Gary Cooper and John Wayne, but Cooper died before filming began.
  • Sam Peckinpah offered Robert Culp the role of Billy Hammond, but he was only interested in leading man parts and turned it down. He claimed that Peckinpah never forgave him for this and never offered him another part.
  • Both Kim Novak and Jean Simmons were considered for Elsa.
• Working Title: Guns in the Afternoon.
• Write Who You Know: Sam Peckinpah tailored much of the character of Steve Judd to reflect his own father, David, a lawyer and judge who believed very strongly in honesty and principled behavior, who'd passed away a few months before his son began work on the film. Judd's most memorable line, "I just want to enter my house justified," was a Bible reference line he often heard his father say. On seeing the finished film, Peckinpah's sister cried, struck by how effectively and completely he had captured the essence of "the old man" on screen. Peckinpah biographer David Weddle also suggests that Joshua Knudsen was a reflection of Sam's overbearing, judgmental mother Fern.
  • Peckinpah put several other details and impressions from his own life into the script. His ancestors were true Westerners, and there was a mountain named for the Peckinpahs near Coarsegold, the real-life town where the two lawmen in the movie ride to retrieve a shipment of gold. In his childhood, Peckinpah had been taken by his grandfather to a town very much like the mining town in the movie.

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