Долгая дорога мщения The Long Riders (Долгая дорога)

1980 film by Walter Hill

The Long Riders is a 1980 American Western film directed by Walter Hill. It was produced by James Keach, Stacy Keach and Tim Zinnemann and featured an original soundtrack by Ry Cooder. Cooder won the Best Music award in 1980 from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for this soundtrack. The film was entered into the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. The film is notable for having cast four sets of actual brothers to play the four sets of brothers in the James–Younger Gang.

During the years following the Civil War, banks and trains become the targets of the James Younger gang, who terrorize the Midwestern United States. The band of robbers is led by Jesse James and Cole Younger, along with several of their brothers. After getting antsy during a bank robbery, Ed Miller opens fire and kills the clerk, resulting in a shootout where Jesse is wounded. Jesse dismisses Ed from the gang; his brother Clell remains. Mr. Rixley, a detective from the Pinkerton's agency, is assigned to capture the outlaws. Rixley doggedly remains on their trail, accidentally killing a Younger cousin and the youngest James brother, and losing several of his men in the process. Due to his errors, the Pinkertons back off. Jim Younger, who initially courted a girl named Beth, is disturbed to find her engaged to Ed. At Frank and Jesse's younger brother's funeral, he convinces Beth to leave Ed and she eventually marries him. Clell Miller suggests the James Younger Gang ride north in September 1876 to rob a bank belonging to "squareheads" in Northfield, Minnesota; word is out about them and the town has been warned by the Pinkertons. The holdup goes wrong: the bank's vault has been set on a timer and cannot be opened. A cashier and another citizen are shot and killed. While trying to escape, the gang is fired upon by the townspeople. Two outlaws are killed, Clell is fatally shot, Frank is hit in the arm, and all of the Youngers are badly wounded. The surviving gang members temporarily make camp in the woods. Jesse decides to continue running, leaving the injured to their fate when a posse catches up to them. Though reluctant and threatened by Cole, Frank joins Jesse and they ride off. Jesse informs Frank he intends to strike up a new gang when they return to Missouri, but Frank is clearly reticent. The James brothers return home to Missouri and the Youngers are captured. Rixley interrogates the Youngers in prison, but they refuse to give up Jesse. Bob and Charley Ford offer to give up Jesse, who has asked them to join his new gang, for money. Rixley recruits them to assassinate Jesse for $15,000. They have dinner at Jesse's house and, while he adjusts a hanging picture, Bob kills him. Upon learning of his brother's assassination, Frank James turns himself in on the condition he can take Jesse home to be buried. Rixley complies with Frank in custody.

In 1971 James and Stacy Keach played the Wright brothers The brothers rewrote the material into screenplay form and combined it with the work of Bill Bryden, who had his own Jesse James script. Stacy Keach says another writer called Steven Smith "came in to pull all the threads together".

In 1974 James Keach was acting opposite Robert Carradine in the television film The Hatfields and the McCoys and mentioned the project to him; Carradine suggested that he and his brothers play the Younger brothers.</blockquote>
The idea that all the brothers in the story would be played by real life brothers expanded, and Randy and Dennis Quaid also became attached to the project to play the Miller brothers.

Some of the film was shot in Parrott, Georgia, with the opening sequence being filmed in Leary, Georgia. The Main street of Leary was covered with dirt to hide the asphalt road, along with many of the store fronts being modified to look "authentic" to the times. The railroad scenes were filmed on the Texas State Railroad and the Sierra Railroad in Tuolumne County, California. "The company originally wanted to shoot in Missouri, but they found that urban sprawl just blew that out of the tub," said a publicist. "Parrott was chosen because it's almost as if time stood still there. The ravages of the years have not touched the buildings and it closely resembles Northfield, Minn., in 1876," said Gene Levy, the production manager. Hill says the most difficult sequence was the one where horses jumped through glass. "We trained them for three weeks, making them do the jump without the glass. Once we conditioned them to that, we put the glass in. It's a big surprise to the horses, and they'll only do it once. We had to use a different set of horses for the second jump." Hill shot the sequence in slow motion, a technique associated with the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah. Hill believes "the way Sam used slow motion was almost directly opposite to mine. What Sam was doing was making individual moments more real by extending them, kind of underlining the horrible moment of being shot. The Long Riders is meant to be almost dream like to have the reality of a nightmare, where everything is going wrong but there's no focus to it, you don't know where you are or how you got there." When the film went over its original $7.5 million budget, the Keaches forfeited their executive producer fees. "The Long Riders has been made on faith and idealism," said Keach.

The music for the film was composed, arranged, and performed by Ry Cooder. Cooder said Hill had heard one of his records while making the film "and thought that my music had an atmospheric quality he was looking for. Walter likes scores to be part of his movie’s environment instead of the factor that’s driving it, and I’ve always looked at film music as an environmental issue." Other performers on the soundtrack were multi instrumentalist David Lindley and percussionist Milt Holland. Some of the songs were released as an album, The Long Riders. It was the first of several soundtracks Cooder would write for Walter Hill. Cooder later said this was "the simplest" of his soundtracks to do, adding that:
I’d heard and played enough old time Southern music that it wasn’t too much of a stretch for me to create it. The film was about community and family, and I had to think what the music would have felt like in those days. It had to capture that early American aesthetic, which is a world away from how we live now You have to sound "authentic," but you also have to invent that authenticity. I had to imagine myself in another time, and not think about what was happy, sad or dangerous to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but what was happy, sad and dangerous to Jesse James. I ended up concentrating on the scene’s emotions, and the music worked fine.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote of the film, "Even its languid moments hold a certain fascination, what with Ric Waite's handsome photography and a cast that Noah might envy. The film is slow and only vaguely speculative, though, without much story to give it shape." Todd McCarthy of Variety stated that the film "is striking in several ways, not the least of which being the casting of actor brothers as historical outlaw kin, but narrative is episodic in the extreme and disparate artistic qualities fail to completely jell into satisfactory whole. Despite interesting try, this wouldn't appear to be the film to get Westerns off the ground again." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three and a half stars out of four and wrote that "the Western will live as long as directors make Westerns as fresh and exciting as The Long Riders, which tells an oft told story uncommonly well." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times said, "Since 'The Long Riders' various writers, which include James and Stacy Keach, who also play Jesse and Frank James, and its director Walter Hill, haven't anything new to reveal, their film by default becomes merely an excuse to restage that Northfield raid in as bloody a way as possible. This hollow and tedious outlaw saga may feature an unprecedented number of brothers—four sets, no less—in the leading roles, but it's no family film, that's for sure." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post declared that the film "seems a flawlessly felt and visualized western, true to the subject matter and the aspirations the filmmakers probably held for it." David Ansen of Newsweek wrote: "the story seems more re enacted than acted and one is finally more impressed than moved. Only David Carradine's cool, mangy macho as Cole Younger and Pamela Reed's jaundiced wit as Belle Starr cut through the tempered, elegiac surface. The screenplay (by Bill Bryden, Steven Phillip Smith, Stacy and James Keach) is basically an assemblage of bits and pieces that doesn't build toward any real emotional payoff. Yet 'The Long Riders' is still the best Western in many years — it has the laconic elegance of a ritual." Film historian Leonard Maltin described this picture as "Stylish, if extremely bloody All In the Family Out West" and gave it 3 out of a possible 4 stars in his annual Movie & Video Guide (no longer published). On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 82% based on 28 reviews, with a weighted average rating of 6.8/10. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews".

The Long Riders was a box office disappointment upon its initial release. In June 1981 James Keach wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times in response to an article on the poor box office performance of Westerns. Keach claimed The Long Riders "wasn't a Star Wars at the box office" but recouped its full $9 million investment and earned United Artists a profit. Stacy Keach wrote in his memoirs that "I believe to this day that the movie made money even though the studio claimed it only broke even."

In May 1981 David Carradine said a prequel, set during the Civil War, was in development. In February 1982 Stacy Keach said the script was being written and that it would be a theatrical feature or a television mini series. He said when he was in Arkansas making a TV series "so many people came up to talk about The Long Riders which had been shown there on cable that I got enthusiastic again. I realised the Jesse James legend goes on and on. I can't wait to do the new one." In September 1982 Stacy Keach said "There's the possibility of doing something for television with it. There's a tremendous amount of history that goes on after The Long Riders. Everybody says, "Well, Jesse's dead,' but it's our contention that he didn't die in quite the way history says he died." However, the project never came to fruition.