SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

IAAL This is a wonderful Western for all the reasons other reviewers have mentioned. I won't reiterate them, but I'd like to add that it's incredibly rare to see a social-dance scene in a historical movie where the dancing is completely appropriate to the period and not the product of some modern choreographer's creative urges. (There's a brilliant spoof of that sort of thing in "Top Secret.") In "Long Riders," the dancers are doing exactly the sort of dance that people did in that time and place, and they're doing it to the music on the soundtrack, and -- this one is even more rare -- whenever you see a musician playing an instrument on screen, he's really actually playing what you're hearing. This is probably related to Ry Cooder's influence, and he did a magnificent job with the score, but it's worth noting that the film also features veteran folkies Mitch Greenhill and Mayne Smith as two of the musicians; those guys used to play vintage Americana at various folk clubs in California all through the 70's and 80's. And speaking of which: there's a funeral scene in which there's a guy singing a traditional American hymn. The guy is Hugh McGraw, who ran the Sacred Harp Publishing Company for about a million years, though he's passed on now. Sacred Harp singing, or more generally "shape note singing," is a very distinctive American tradition that's closely associated with the time and place the film is set in, though it's done all over the country these days. (I won't go into details about what "shape note" means, but Google it if you're curious.) The song McGraw sings in that scene is right out of the Sacred Harp book. They could have found a million people who'd have done a fine job of singing a song, but they decided to hire the one guy who best represents the tradition they were portraying. That's a truly mind-boggling degree of attention to detail.9 stars rather than 10 because of the animal stunts. This film was made before the Humane Society's "no animals were harmed" seal of approval became as ubiquitous as it is today, and I won't go into details, but there are a couple of scenes where that's really obvious. I checked, and the Humane Society rates the film "Unacceptable." I understand that this sort of thing used to be common and that the movie industry felt differently about it in 1980 than they do today, but I still found those scenes disturbing. People with strong feelings about animal abuse in movies might want to pass on this one, though you'll be missing an otherwise stunningly great movie if you do.

poe426 THE LONG RIDERS isn't as gritty as THE GREAT NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA RAID nor as theatrical as, say, TOMBSTONE (another movie about a real life shootout), but it IS super-stylized, with an impressive cast. If I have one complaint, it's that the historical background of "the James gang" is only briefly touched upon: it would've been interesting to see how the Civil War atrocities that were committed BY and AGAINST some of these men resulted in the formation of the gang- from the loss of personal property to the acts of outright murder they then committed themselves. I've never bought into the idea that these men were Robin Hoods (I've never read any documentation to that effect); they were robbin' hoods, and they were murderers. THE LONG RIDERS is a romanticized version of what was for many a true life horror story. It would be interesting to see this story from THAT perspective. (And I've always thought it telling that the gang was decimated by armed citizens and not by Law Enforcement.)

virek213 The American West has provided an endless amount of true-life stories that have become legends of our nation's history. Inevitably, of course, this means that men that are branded as "outlaws" have become a part of all that. One such gang of outlaws was the one led by Frank and Jesse James that terrorized a large chunk of the Midwest in the years following the Civil War, and right up to the first years of the 20th century. That legend, unsurprisingly, has seen its share of films being made by Hollywood. But perhaps the most provocative of the bunch is the one made by action film stalwart Walter Hill at the turn of the 1980s. That film was THE LONG RIDERS.This take on the venerable outlaw legend is notable for having sets of brothers play the outlaws: Stacy and James Keach play the James Brothers'; the Carradines (Keith, Robert, David) are the Youngers; the Quaids (Dennis and Randy) play the Miller Brothers; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest portray the Fords. During the 1870s and 1880s, these men rack up a series of felonies so long and so brutal that they become oversized legends of their time, and quickly become the focus of the equally legendary Pinkerton detective agency (the frontier forerunner to the FBI). But the methods the Pinkertons use to hunt down the James/Younger boys are not only unconventional, but even criminal at times themselves, earning the scorn of a lot of people, especially those close to the boys in the states of Missouri and Tennessee. The end result is a blood-soaked affair that climaxes when the gang attempts to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in a raid that only nets them a lot of bloodshed since it was all set up by the Pinkertons and that the entire town was waiting for them. All three of the Youngers are so badly wounded that the Jameses abandon them. Those that are not wounded are eventually captured by the Pinkertons. Only the Fords were ever offered a deal: to turn state's evidence and track down the James Brothers, which they indeed took.Made on what was a fairly sizeable budget for a Western ($10 million), THE LONG RIDERS did, however, score quite well at the box office; and as a result, the film was perhaps the last great Western to be a hit before the monstrous critical and box office debacle of HEAVEN'S GATE came along at year's end in 1980, all but decimating the Western as a genre. Hill and his crew were sticklers for authenticity, and it shows in every frame of the film, with each set of acting brothers doing convincing turns as the outlaws, and with Pamela Reed giving a fine turn as soon-to-be-outlaw cowgirl Belle Starr, a loose associate of the James/Younger gang. Given the period in which it was made, no one should be surprised that the outlaws are seen as the heroes, and the Pinkertons as more or less the heavies (since their methods of hunting down the gang are terribly unethical at times). And since Hill wrote the screenplay for director Sam Peckinpah's 1972 crime thriller classic THE GETAWAY, and loosely studied under that director, no one should be shocked either that THE LONG RIDERS is a fairly violent film, with bloody shootouts rendered in slow-motion (though Hill's editing style is not as cascading, nor quite as memorable, as Peckinpah's was for, say, THE WILD BUNCH).Filmed primarily on locations in northern California, Texas, and Georgia, THE LONG RIDERS benefits greatly not only from its casting and its period authenticity, but also from the rustic, down-home country/folk music score by Americana legend Ry Cooder, who would work again with Hill on films like STREETS OF FIRE, SOUTHERN COMFORT, TRESPASS, JOHNNY HANDSOME, LAST MAN STANDING, and GERONIMO: AN American LEGEND. It is sad that the Western genre had basically entered its twilight by the time THE LONG RIDERS was released, and that HEAVEN'S GATE (released, ironically, by the same studio, United Artists) would all but bury it in the ground for a long time, because this film has a lot to recommend to it. It belongs squarely in the traditions that both Peckinpah and Sergio Leone set forth in the 1960s, that in which the demarcation between black and white was really quite gray, and where right and wrong were determined by the participants, and not a half-baked sense of morality. Hill, who can sometimes be an uneven director, nevertheless understood that better than most, which is a big reason THE LONG RIDERS is one of the best of the latter breed of that most distinctly American of film genres.

alexandre michel liberman (tmwest) The story of Jesse James is the richest source of material for westerns. There is so much written about it and only a small part of it was shown on the screen. 'The Long Riders' keeps to the same part of the story as most other films: what happened shortly before Northfield, Minnesota and a bit after. I wish a more complete film would be made about it, starting with the civil war and ending after the trial of the Ford brothers, also showing the alleged involvement of the Governor of Missouri in the cowardly killing of Jesse. The film has great moments: the "handkerchief" fight between Cole Younger and Sam Starr where each man has to hold on his mouth a part of a handkerchief, while they fight with "Bowie" knives, a fight that was probably inspired by "Kansas Raiders"(1950), the night before Northfield with the members of the gang and their women, the beautiful landscape with the group riding their horses. The Carradine brothers as the Youngers are superb and so are Randy and Dennis Quaid as the Millers. Same for Pamela Reed as Belle Starr. I cannot think of a Frank James that can compare to Henry Fonda. Stacy Keach does his best but there is something lacking. James Keach underplays Jesse. It is not a bad performance, far from it, but from what I read Jesse was more outgoing than Frank, who was the guy who wanted no publicity.The shootout at Northfield would have come out better without the slow motion scenes.