ShangLuda Admirable film.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

adrian-43767 Although it borrows from revisionist Westerns of the 1960s, notably Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH (US 1969), THE CULPEPPER CATTLE CO. is good enough to stand on its own because it is so deeply rooted in the reality of the late 19th Century. The stills with which the film opens reflect hard and impoverished living. It sets the tone: this is no film for weak stomachs.Youngster Mockridge (Grimes) dreams of becoming a cowhand and drops the safety of life with Mom to brave a new world. His first contact with Culpepper should have shown him that he does not belong there but he knows no better, and Billy Green Bush makes Culpepper a convincing leader, who Grimes clearly admires. The way Grimes is relieved of his horse by thieves as he is relieving himself in the bush leaves you under no illusion that this film makes no apologies for human nature. He then witnesses the shooting of those thieves by the men he went to fetch for Culpepper, and baby-faced Gary Grimes captures extraordinarily well the surprise and repulsion of what he sees.In movies, the West is often portrayed as a place with no law but where, in the end, justice is done somehow. Not in this film. Here, human life is cheap, and that is brilliantly put across when Geoffrey Lewis demands a duel with a fellow cowhand who is no gunslinger, because the latter insulted him. Conversations around the fire reflect a dire absence of moral values. These men happen to be driving cattle but they would prefer to rob banks, and take considerable pleasure in killing people. Mockridge's innocence inevitably attracts trouble, costing him a broken head and a shattered spirit, and the group's horses are stolen, to Culpepper's considerable irritation.The horse recovery shootout in a salloon is a superb and credible sequence, probably the way things really happened in the West.As mentioned above, THE WILD BUNCH (US 1969) was an influence on THE CULPEPPER CATTLE CO., especially when hardened criminals decide to help a religious community against very high odds and possibly no need. There is just one point I did not understand: where did Culpepper and his men get those weapons from? Why was Mockridge carrying his Colt in a bag when it supposedly was confiscated by John McLiam and his gang?Still, Mockridge is the film's silver lining in a land of no saving grace, not even from God. The preacher who says he wants to settle on the land ("God wants it"), sees the gunmen as help to keep that land, rapidly changes his mind after the final shootout and wants to leave it because it is full of dead bodies. He does not even think to bury them, let alone pray for their souls. If ever I saw a truthful comment on the role of religion in society, this is it: the preacher resembles a vulture picking corpses. Mockridge is decent enough to force burial at gunpoint, and it is on that remotely hopeful and civilized note that this highly satisfying Western ends, to the strains of a well sung "Amazing Grace".Direction, photography, screenplay are all extremely competent. Acting is of the highest order, with Grimes, Billy Green Bush, Geoffrey Lewis, Bo Hopkins and John McLiam particularly outstanding.Strongly recommended.

georgewilliamnoble 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.

tieman64 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.

leum60 This movie was a great Western up until the last 20 minutes or so, but I don't believe in pacifism, and for this movie to end in this manner makes me want to puke! I couldn't believe my eyes! I cannot believe that nobody, or so few, agree and write similar opinions! For a good movie, that pompous so-called land-owner and his gang should have been destroyed, and the gang that was helping run the herd and which of the movie followed, while not perfect people as who of us truly are, deserved to fight and live! Just my opinion, but I was highly disappointed, and that kid is a wimp and loser. He learned nothing after being taken under the wing of the rest of the herders.I sure hope that somebody agrees with me...a little at least? Sniff.Out.