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| United Artists | Release Date: May 16, 1980 |
Starring:
David Carradine, Dennis Quaid, Stacy Keach
Summary:
Walter Hill's major contribution to the group of westerns about the James-Younger gang, which robbed trains and banks, wreaking havoc in post-civil war Missouri.
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THE LONG RIDERS is one of the last great westerns made in America, directed tautly by Walter Hill from an excellent, well-researched script. The cinematography by Ric Waite is magnificent, the period is beautifully captured, and Ry Cooder's outstanding score nicely incorporates folk music of the era. The whole feeling of this film is one of antiquity, an atmosphere marvelously created by Hill and enhanced by a superb cast.
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Hill wants the viewer to read his frames, not his dialogue; lighting, angles and cut ting carry the weight of meaning. Perhaps he sends too many people to meet their maker in balletic slow-motion. But that is only a small reservation. Hill is very much in the American grain, the inheritor of the Ford-Hawks-Walsh tradition of artful, understated action film making.
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Concentrating on familiar rituals - the funeral, the hoe-down, the robbery (a stunning tour de force in slow motion) - Hill pays tribute to such directors as Ford, Hawks and Ray, emphasises the mythic aspects of the Western, and focuses on the subjects of kinship and the land (probably suggested by Scotsman Bill Bryden's screenplay). This last theme is emphasised by Hill's coup of casting real-life brothers as the members of the gang. A beautiful, laconic and unsentimental film.
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A very Peckinpah-influenced film about the James Gang with four sets of real-life brothers playing the outlaw broods. [16 Jul 2004, p.C4]
The main hook of The Long Riders is clearly in the casting, but this never feels gimmicky in a film that attempts to balance the pastoral and the brutal. It’s a noble ambition and one which works for the most part; there are occasions upon which it means a jarring switch of tone but largely the timbre remains consistently elegiac.
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May 18, 2017
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