The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972)

I was watching this revisionist western on TV, a movie from the early nineteen seventies Vietnam Era, for the first time in 45 years, and i had remembered the thread of it pretty well. With it's historic cast of familiar faces if not exactly familiar names the movie paints a gritty more realist view of the western frontier sometime after the civil war though the movie is abstract to it's exact setting. This is an episodic trail movie, with threads of plot rather than having a big story line, other than that it is set during a cattle drive jointed by an idealist naive green horn and it is this character the film centre's on played sympathetically by Gary Grimes more famous for the "Summer Of 42" a big success the previous year, he is again cast to portray innocence and he is very capable in the role. The movie shot in washed out sepia tones painting a lush dreamlike vision of the frontier, dry, dusty, dirty and deadly for many. The music reinforces the film's revisionist anti violence anti hero credentials with laconic soft tones that compliment the soft filtered photography. In the final analysis the movie has nothing very profound to say, yet it is never less than very watchable as it herds it's long horn's to market, it is the journey within not the destination, that matters.

Set in Texas sometime after the Civil War, "The Culpepper Cattle Company" stars Gary Grimes as Ben Mockridge, a young kid who aspires to be a cowboy. Though a gangly, awkward kid, Mockridge is hired by local big-shot Frank Culpepper and ordered to help drive a herd of cattle to Colorado.This skimpy plot, in typical 1970's revisionist fashion, is then used to broaden both the audience's and young Ben Mockridge's perception of life out on the open plains. And so we're treated to many excellent sequences in which men bond over camp fires, kids learn tough life lessons as well as the genre's usual prerequisite of gunfights and standoffs. Couple this to an aesthetic which marries macho action to arty cinematography and much laconic simplicity and you have one of the better revisionist westerns of the 70s.Unfortunately this was also the producing debut of Jerry Bruckheimer, and so the film also has a bit of an identity crisis. On one hand, "The Culpepper Cattle Company" strives for a kind of quiet, gritty realism, and it's absolutely splendid when working along these simple lines. But on the other hand, the film develops several unconvincing subplots packed with Bruckheimer's brand of lug headed violence. Regardless of whether or not Bruckheimer actually had an influence, these portions of the film are simply dumb.Still, the film is thematically interesting for two reasons. Observe, for example, how the film's characters are constantly shifting from being caring, father figures, to more malevolent figures seeking only to beat Mockridge (and others) down in order to assert their own masculinity and sooth their own wounded egos. Toward the end of the film, Mockridge then decides to quit Culpepper's company and defend a group of religious pacifists from a cruel landowner. The other cowboys in Culpepper's company then join him, not because they care about Mockridge, or even the fate of the religious pacifists, but because they don't want to be upstaged by the bravery of a dumb kid. The film captures an interesting game of hand holding and oneupmanship.The second interesting thing about the film is the way it works as a rather thin Vietnam war allegory, the film's climax featuring brave men who die for cowardly pacifists, not for ideological reasons, but for simple masculine codes. Of course the religious tribe whom the men die for then reject their sacrifice, as does Mockridge, just as the Vietnamese and US civvies promptly turned their backs on Vietnam vets.The film opens and closes with sepia stained photographs, a trait common in movies during this period.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.

This picture hit the theaters on April 16 1972 starring Gary Grimes as Ben Mockridge, Billy Green Bush as Frank Culpepper and Luke Askew as Luke. Ben Mockridge, is a 16-year-old boy who has long dreamed of living the life of a cowboy. Frank Culpepper is getting ready to take one the biggest cattle drives across Texas land that no one has seen before. Ben goes to Frank's ranch to beg him for a job and he's willing to just about anything as long as he's part of this cattle drive. However, Ben finds out that being a cowboy on cattle drive is not what he thought it was. Dealing with, loneliness, exhausting work from sun up to sun down and then some. Ben also for the first time has to use a gun to defend himself and the feeling he's left with is not a good one. Ben soon realizes that being a cowboy is only a job for those who can't find anything else to do with there lives. I grew up on a farm, I love cows, and that's why I give this movie 8 weasel stars for the cattle, country, and land that the movie was filmed on.

I've heard all the "Western Classic" comments but I would call it a Seventies Classic view of the old west. Unlike some real Western classics like "The Searchers", "Rio Bravo", "Open Range" and others, this film left me with a bad taste in my mouth both because of characters and the so called realism. It seems like every character in this movie had either a major flaw that made them unbelievable in their role. A kid with a widow mom that regularly races the wagon and team? How long is that going to go on before he's got a wreaked wagon, a dead horse, and financial ruin? Taking off for Colorodo without even a slicker or a bedroll? A trail boss that lets his men get close to a shootout between themselves and lets a green kid take the night watch alone after just losing four men to rustlers? The settlers the men died for don't even have the decency to bury them and then the final straw was the kid throwing his gun away after the burial. Good Grief!!! He's out between home and Colorado, been thru several gun fights and he decides to throw his gun away and head home(?)!!! This is just going too far to make a peace statement for the end of a bloody movie. The wranglers have lost nearly all their guns, five men and horses, and $200; he could at least round up the horses, guns and money and take them back to the drivers.I could go on and on, but basically, everyone the drivers run into needs to be shot and some of the the drivers could use a good flesh wound themselves. Just because the cowboys are dirty and dusty instead of clean and in fancy shirts, doesn't make it realistic. I really felt lead on after sitting thru this movie.