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Sep 28, 2017 Web Exclusive By Stephen Mayne

Death is present in The Long Riders without truly being real. It occurs in a balletic slow-motion whirl, bodies twisting and turning and falling to the ground in a slowly spreading storm of exploding crimson squibs. And it happens a lot, because no story involving Jesse James can get to the end without an ever-mounting body count.

The dead are initially those unlucky enough to get caught up on the fringes of the exploits of the James-Younger gang and their fast escalating battle with the Pinkerton agents sent to bring them to heel. Family members are blown up and bank clerks gunned down by impetuous trigger fingers, each killing adding to a debt that has to be paid eventually.

It’s this debt director Walter Hill is happy to compile across a narrative arc that’s less a tightly told tale of the rise and fall of martyred outlaws as it is the drifting exploits of unknowable figures. The screenplay never tries to get inside the disparate members of the doomed gang, happy to stand aside and watch them rob and seek revenge, and drink and rob again.

The casting choices are interesting not so much because anyone gets deep into their characters—there’s little depth to be found—as it is for the decision to cast four sets of brothers as brothers. James and Stacy Keach play Jesse and Frank James, David, Keith, and Robert Carradine take on the Youngers, Dennis and Randy Quaid are the Millers, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest are the Fords. The Keaches also contributed to the screenplay, along with Bill Bryden, and Steven Phillip Smith.

Here’s where things get interesting again. As well as eschewing a nice conventional through line, The Long Riders breaks up the action into distinctly different chapters complete with a climax that falls before the end. We get the start of something as hold-ups go awry, and efforts to bring the gang down go even more awry, we have the tilt from good-time outlawing to hard-nosed revenge, complete with the competing attractions of home life, before the film segues into a disastrous big score, and a muted epilogue that wraps up the final defeat.

What a disastrous big score it is as the Northfield massacre descends into frozen carnage. It’s the moment Hill brings out his best, starting with the gradual build-up as he jumps the camera from face to expectant face. Then the shooting starts and bodies tumble at half-speed from roofs or are slowly blown apart attempting to ride to safety. This culminates in a gloriously chaotic horseback charge through large windows, glass shattering in all directions.

Then the brave heroes, for they are viewed most sympathetically, are almost done, left with a series of short scenes until the clock ticks down and a legend is cemented. The Long Riders doesn’t have the depth of the best revisionist westerns, but its knows a thing or two about mythmaking, and it knows how to make those myths attractive enough to stick.

Author rating: 7/10