i do not fully understand Why elsa knudsen is like There in the narrative in peckinpah's Ride the High Country.

she doesn't do a lot to underline peckinpah's most beloved themes, she's mostly there to get assaulted many times, i think her naivety and black-and-white sense of morality could have been collapsed into. what's this fucker's name. heck longtree. the young jaded one, without really affecting the plot very much. judd and elsa aren't even a great parallel to the more vicious pair of westrum and longtree.

the whole inciting incident, the "am i gonna double cross my old best friend in order to steal (checks notes) the $11k in gold we're transporting down a big mountain instead of the $250k i thought was here at this mine" more than fills the "honor and ideals compromised by circumstance, the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world" themes peckinpah likes so much. the "will they help this girl get out from under the thumb of her abusive father in order to marry some guy who's also abusive and then help her get out of that also" b-plot seems to be there to fill time. which like. fine. i get you need a ninety minute movie and not an episode of television but think of a better b-plot. there was a whole ass carnival you didn't do shit with.

was it a competently made, well shot film? sure. did i enjoy the four separate assault scenes? no! why are those there at all! it's not like an equal amount of time is given to "wow the west sure sucks for guys too" bc mccrea's character is just like. poor and a little creaky and is not smothering under a life forced on him like elsa. i think getting shot four times over the course of his career is bad but on a different level of bad than being sexually assaulted four times in the course of three days and if THAT was the parallel peckinpah was trying to draw it's not a very good one

i acknowledge this movie is trying to draw Some parallels but i don't think it executes them well OR in a way i think is interesting. again, why is elsa here at all