Product Description

An innocent western teenager learns about life on a long, violent and harrowing cattle drive. The American West as it really was.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18496 in DVD
• Brand: CULPEPPER CATTLE COMPANY SENSORMATIC (DVD MOV
• Released on: 2006-05-23
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 5.00 pounds
• Running time: 92 minutes

Amazon.com
The Culpepper Cattle Company is a worthy example of a certain kind of early-1970s Western: deglamorized, unromantic, and frankly violent. This one begins in familiar terms, as a greenhorn lad (Gary Grimes, recently deflowered in Summer of '42) joins a cattle drive, surrendering himself to the extremely focused leadership of boss Frank Culpepper (the authentically Western Billy "Green" Bush). The episodes that follow are engrossing and colorful, and the drive gets more interesting when a quartet of lethal hombres (among them Bo Hopkins, Luke Askew, and wild-eyed Geoffrey Lewis) join the ride. The business of frontier justice--which here usually means shooting strangers just to be on the safe side--is worked out in refreshingly unheroic ways. Clearly director Dick Richards (making his debut in a relatively brief directing career) is responding to the revisionist era, and specifically to the films of the great Sam Peckinpah; this movie's climax is a scaled-down nod to The Wild Bunch. Probably too scaled-down, given the somewhat abrupt ending. The music uses themes from Jerry Goldsmith's terrific score for The Flim-Flam Man, released five years earlier. Culpepper got lost in the flurry of revisionist westerns that sounded similar themes: The Cowboys, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, and by far the best of this group, Robert Benton's Bad Company. All were released in 1972, a high-water mark for re-thinking the genre. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

They don't get better this!
I saw this film when I was 12 back in 1981 on tv and was captivated and emotionally saddened as with few other films, especially western films. This film begins with a teenagers dream of becoming a cowboy and tears it down as the youth realizes what being a cowboy is really about. In many ways the film UNFORGIVEN by Clint Eastwood does the same thing only with gunfighters instead of cowboys. THE CULPEPPER CATTLE CO. is a much better film. It moves faster and has better characters.

For years I have tried to rent or buy this movie. Almost no stores have it or have even heard of It. I finally found it at a video store that was liquidating its previously viewed films. I am so glad Amazon is now offering it. I hope that it ends up on DVD soon

Tough, dark and bloody exciting
This is a cracker of a western - certainly one of the best of the "tell it like it was" batch that came out after The Wild Bunch. Sure, it's got its faults - the narrative doesn't really flow smoothly but instead is made up of a series of incidents, and the final battle at the Mormon camp, while thrilling, doesn't quite jell with the rest of the movie - but it's always been a personal favourite with me. It's your basic coming of age tale with Gary Grimes signing on for a cattle drive and watching all his friends die through a series of violent incidents. And what a band of companions - some of the best western character actors doing what I feel is their best work. Geoffery Lewis, Bo Hopkins and Luke Askew are great as the supposed good guys who aren't above killing unarmed people in cold blood, while John McLiam has never been nastier as the land hungry cattle baron who causes Grimes and his cynical sidekicks to make a final stand to protect the beleaguered Mormons. The music (composed in part by Jerry Goldsmith) and the sepia cinematography help to create a sense of what I guess the west was really like. And even though that final gunfight seems tacked on, it's still one of the best shoot-outs you'll see in a western (I'd rate it up there with the final bloodbath of The Wild Bunch and the Northfield raid in The Long Riders). Get it. It's good.

Against the Grain
This is an unduly neglected work that sank quickly into audience oblivion - the Vietnam seventies were not a good time for Westerns. True to the iconoclasm of the period, the producers set out to debunk the mystique of the cattle drive, and in the process take a big swipe at that arch-romancer of the Old West, John Ford. They only half-succeed. Put simply, their stab at realism is undone by too much gunplay, too much blood, and way too much conventional violence. Staples of the ordinary Western, their presence here only serves to reinforce the usual cliches. Much better when the story-telling cowboy refuses Geoffrey Lewis's challenge by quitting the drive, saying a gunfight over trifling matters makes no sense. That's certainly no cliche.

The role reversal at movie's end is stunning, given what Hollywood has led us to expect. Nevertheless, it works by bringing out a latent code of honor that at times can guide even the most brutal among us. Here Ford is trumped by Kurosawa. There are many fine touches in the movie. Billy "Green" Bush is totally convincing as the ruthless trail boss; Gary Grimes, appropriately callow; and the four gunsels, alternately abusive and sullen, while Geoffrey Lewis's cold-eyed stare bespeaks a lifetime of casual cruelty. Not the best of anti-Westerns, but deserves consideration.