Seven years before The Wild Bunch roamed a dead West, Peckinpah gave the dying West one last, strong breath in Ride the High Country, a film at once elegiac and honest. Peckinpah brought Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, both in their late fifties, out of semiretirement 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 itself met its demise when the old codes were up for grabs, but Lucien Ballard's exquisite location photography tells us that, in the post-Western West, the landscape thrives with a poetic vengeance.