The Long Riders

Repeated throughout Walter Hill's The Long Riders is the notion that, at their core, the James-Younger gang are belligerents, still doing their bit to fight for an already vanquished Confederacy. It's a phoney sort of romanticism that, quite apart from the aims of their parent herrenvolk, registers as an excuse; a way for these criminals to, all too easily, achieve a kind of folk hero status in territories still reeling from their abject and no doubt humiliating defeat. Written by Bill Bryden and Steven Phillip Smith, as well as the actors playing Jesse and Frank James, James and Stacy Keach, The Long Riders is a fragmented and episodic experience. It's an elliptical piece that simultaneously feels like a dog-eared bank robber rambling through their most beloved escapades and a much longer television series that has been chopped down to squib-riddled action and the connective tissue between these eruptions. Long Riders is a beautiful-looking film too; Ric Waite's cinematography often of a piece with Barry Lyndon or The Duellists in how verdant and untouched greens are used to state, definitively, that we are in the past. 

Largely focused around a series of cack-handed attempts by the Pinkerton detective agency to put an end to the James-Younger gang, Long Riders uses these strike-breaking mercenaries to generate a genuine (rather than just an assumed) sympathy for the central stick-up artists. The James-Younger gang are bold in their crimes while still adhering to a strangled sort of code of honour. By comparison the Pinkertons are bushwhackers who hide in long grass, shooting through anything or anyone who just so happens to be between them and their quarry. Children burn in their homes after malfunctioning smoke bombs are tossed, unannounced, through their homestead windows; pig farmers are blasted to pieces on their own land, judged instantly guilty by agents who haven't even established the presence of their prey. As in Hill's previous film, The Warriors, the establishment is presented as a lurking system of dehumanisation and cruelty, one so incredibly resourced and protected that it needn't worry about the particulars of anyone they are inadvertently exterminating. Long Riders goes one further too. Unlike The Warriors, which failed to draw a line between the actions of David Patrick Kelly's Rogues gang and an agitating NYPD, Long Riders explicitly links Jesse James' assassins with the Pinkertons. Nicholas Guest's Robert Ford is a spurned fanboy acting on shadowy orders and hoping to claim a substantial prize by betraying the man he formerly looked up to.