Gary Grimes

Billy Green Bush

Luke Askew

Bo Hopkins

Geoffrey Lewis

Wayne Sutherlin

John McLiam

Matt Clark

Raymond Guth

Anthony James

Charles Martin Smith

Larry Finley

Bob Morgan

Jan Burrell

Hal Needham

Jerry Gatlin

Bob Orrison

Walter Scott

Royal Dano

Paul Harper

José Chávez

Arthur Malet

Ted Gehring

Gregory Sierra

John Pearce

Dennis Fimple

William O'Connell

Lu Shoemaker

Dick Richards

Del Armstrong

Jack Martin Smith

Desmond Marquette

Jerry Goldsmith

Carl Anderson

Terry Morse Jr.

Walter M. Scott

John F. Burnett

Paul Helmick

Tom Scott

Ralph Woolsey

Jerry Bruckheimer

Lawrence Edward Williams

Eric Bercovici

Gregory Prentiss

Western

The Culpepper Cattle Co.

20th Century Fox

United States of America

When Little Mary Became A Man.

The Culpepper Cattle Co. is a splinter of the Western genre that was tagged as revisionist. Often the makers of such Oaters went for a more grizzled look at the West, even demythologising the Hollywood Westerns that had proved so popular for decades. Directed by Dick Richards, The Culpepper Cattle Co. is one such picture.

Young Ben Mockridge (Gary Grimes) wants to be a cowboy, to work on the drives and hone his gun play skills. When trail drive boss Frank Culpepper (Billy Green Bush) is in town, Ben begs him for work and is thrilled to be hired as the cook's Little Mary. What he isn't so thrilled about is actually what it's really like out there on a drive...

And so it comes to pass, young Ben is at the bottom of the cowboy ladder and Richards and his writing team ensure there is no glamour to be found. The drive is beset with thievery and rustling, killings, stampedes, inner fighting and very hard work for very little pay. The men on the trail all look the same, they dress the same, they smell the same, they are all worked hard and understand the same weary banter.

What camaraderie there is is kept to a minimum, they are a team in a working sense, but their loyalty only comes to the fore when they are tasked with fighting and killing' enemies. The bars are not all bright and sparkly, with a well suited man playing a piano, no these are dingy holes with dirty glasses. No bordello babes either, just a hapless lassie loaned out for services by a barkeep who has in his own mind some tenuous right to have her in his keep.

This is purposely downbeat, with the photography by Lawrence Edward Williams and Ralph Woolsey emphasising this fact by stripping back the colours for authenticity. While Jerry Goldsmith and Ralph Woolsey's musical score is deftly restrained, perfectly so. The story moves to its final conclusion, a confrontation that excites and depresses equally so, for even in the whirl of bullets and thundering hooves, the realisation dawns on Ben, and us, that nothing changes the life of the cowboys out there on the drives. It's live, work and die. Cowboyin is something you do when you can't do nothing else - Indeed! 9/10

English

The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]