Seven years before The Wild Bunch roamed a dead West, Sam Peckinpah gave the dying West one last, strong breath in Ride the High Country, considered by many critics to be the best Western of the 1960s. Peckinpah brought Joel McCrea, age 57, and Randolph Scott, age 59, out of semi-retirement to portray two legendary lawmen now reduced to guarding a gold shipment en route across the Sierras to a small-town bank. Their last battle is a telling clash of wills: Scott intends to adapt to the tarnished rules of a new frontier by embezzling the gold; McCrea refuses. Their wry dialogue and brittle performances only add poignancy to Peckinpah's assertion that times change, but ideals still must be pursued. “The Western,” lamented Time's reviewer, “has always been a stance as well as a story, and when actors with the unforced dignity of McCrea and Scott go, the old breed of the Western will go with them.” Lucien Ballard's exquisite location photography indicates that, in the post-Western West, the landscape thrives with a poetic vengeance.