The Long riders [DVD]

Walter Hill’s version of the infamous James-Younger gang, an outlaw group of veterans who terrorised Missouri and Minnesota in the immediate post-Civil War years, is a homage to the archetypal classic Westerns of Hollywood’s Classic era. The James-Younger Gang consisted of three sets of siblings (Jesse and Frank James, Cole, Jim and Bob Younger, and Ed and Clell Miller) and it is Walter Hill’s conceit with “The Long Riders” to have three sets of Hollywood siblings play the gang members (James and Stacy Keach play the James’; David, Keith and Robert Carradine are the Youngers; Randy and Dennis Quaid, the Millers). It can be seen that in many respects “The Long Riders”, made at the beginning of the 1980s, inaugurated Hollywood’s obsession in that decade for pastiche and uncritical homage as opposed to the revisionism of genre that dominated the American cinema of the early seventies. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Ric Waite, who uses the lush southern United States locales to recall the mythological terrain of the John Ford westerns, and featuring original music by Ry Cooder which is faithful to the musical legacy of the United States Civil War, “The Long Riders” is, for all the directness of its violence, language and sexual lives of the gang, very much a traditional western. Cast also includes Christopher Guest and Nicholas Guest as Charlie and Bob Ford respectively, Pamela Reed, Amy Stryker.