Saturday, August 2, 2014

Movies In History: The Culpepper Cattle Company.

The Culpepper Cattle Company 

This Western, which is in someways the antithesis of the classic The Cowboys, is also an "anti-Western" according to reviewers, but probably only because they don't really understand the nature of the late 19th Century West all that well.  Like The Cowboys, it deals with a 19th Century cattle drive, this one starting out in Texas rather than Montana, and it involves a young protagonist.

Filmed in the 1972, this Western has its problems, but in some ways it's really accurate.  It's one of the very few Westerns in which the cattle owner is really concerned about the economic bottom line, making it a very rare Western in which the cattle industry is actually shown as an industry.  The film also gets pretty good marks for getting details of dress partially correct, and for showing the pretty gritty nature of the subjects of the film fairly accurately, if in a somewhat exaggerated fashion.  "The Cowboys" (which I like), or "Red River" (which I also like), it is not.

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