"Kid, cowboying is something you do when you can't do nothing else."
The Culpepper Cattle Co. is a 1972 revisionist Western directed by Dick Richards, starring Gary Grimes, Billy Green Bush, and Geoffrey Lewis.
It tells the story of Ben Mockridge (Grimes), a teenage farmboy who believes in the romantic ideal of the cowboy and wishes to become one. He joins a cattle drive led by the jaded Frank Culpepper (Bush), hoping it will be the first step to accomplishing his dream. But Ben eventually comes to realize that real cowboys are more concerned with profits than heroics and that a reward for the latter is exceedingly rare.
Tropes:
- Berserk Button: Ben learns it's not a good idea to handle Russ Caldwell's gun the hard way.
- Cattle Drive: Culpepper is tasked with bringing cattle to Fort Lewis in Colorado. Ben joins the drive as they're setting out.
- Coming of Age Story: Ben joins Culpepper's company in hopes of becoming a man. The things he experiences certainly force him to shed much of his youthful idealism.
- Downer Ending: Russ and a number of Culpepper's company die fighting for the ungrateful pilgrims and Ben is completely disillusioned and ends the film riding off to parts unknown.
- The Load: Ben tries to be valuable to Culpepper's gang, but his inexperience makes him mostly unhelpful and he's the unintentional cause of some problems (like when the gang loses the horses) instead.
- Market-Based Title: Known as Dust, Sweat and Gunpowder in Australia. Many European countries also translated the title from that instead of the original.
- Redemption Equals Death: Played with. [[spoiler: After Russ and his companions leave with Frank, they have second thoughts about leaving Ben to fight Pierce and his gang alone, (in addition to wanting payback.) They all die for their troubles by not leaving.
- Senseless Sacrifice: Ben's allies' sacrifices amount to nothing when the pilgrims' leader refuses to stay in the land now that it's the site of a massacre.
- Ungrateful Bastard: The leader of the pilgrims wants to stay in the land they're at because he thinks God brought them there, even though it legally belongs to Pierce. When Pierce warns everyone to get off his land, the pilgrim leader begs for Culpepper's help. Initially, only Ben, in his idealism, decides to fight for the pilgrims (though Russ and some of the others join him later), while the pilgrims do nothing to help except praying. When everyone who helped Ben dies protecting the community, the leader wants to haul ass to somewhere else, saying they can't stay in a blood-soaked land. Ben is rightfully pissed, tells him off and forces him to bury the dead (which the leader didn't even want to do).
