The Long Riders

Realistic, Grim, Mature, Modern Western (actually an Eastern)

Walter Hill's "The Long Riders" is about the James-Younger Gang, former Confederate bushwhackers in Missouri during the Civil War who kept on fighting after the conflict. The movie details the events over the next sixteen years during which the gang robbed banks, trains, and stagecoaches in Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, West Virginia and Minnesota. The ill-fated Northfield, Minnesota, bank robbery on the first day of hunting season September 7, 1876, is depicted in the second half, as well as the fact that Jesse started a new gang by 1879, which carried on the criminal legacy in Alabama, Missouri, Louisiana and Mississippi. The film climaxes by showing how things ended for Jesse and Frank in 1882.

There are some inaccuracies; for instance, Jesse James wasn't as wooden as James Keach portrays him, Belle Starr wasn't a prostitute, although her daughter Pearl was, and there's no record of a fight between Cole Younger and Sam Starr. Nevertheless, Hill gets the gist of the story right and he James-Younger guys are not painted as a bunch of good-guy Robin Hoods, but rather as outlaws who steal & kill for a living, justifying it by their bitter experiences in the Civil War. Nor are the Pinkerton detectives made out to be the bad guys; they make some mistakes, as is common, but they ultimately find a way to get their quarry, although it wasn't easy and took forever.

The gimmick with this film is that they used real-life siblings to portray the outlaw brothers: James and Stacy Keach as Jesse and Frank; David, Keith and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim and Bob Younger; Randy and Dennis Quaid as Clell and Ed Miller; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charlie and Bob Ford.

There's a bar knife fight that's an intense highlight. While this particular fight never happened, fights like it did (Heck, when I was a teen a friend of mine got stabbed in the gut in a bar knife fi...