The Hi-Lo Country (1998)

The Hi-Lo Country lies in the West of the Imagination, the West of Myth, and finally: the True West.

Directed by: Stephen Frears

Written by: Walon Green

Based on The Hi Lo Country, a novel by Max Evans

With: Woody Harrelson as Big Boy Matson, Billy Crudup as Pete Calder, Patricia Arquette as Mona Birk, Cole Hauser as Little Boy Matson, Penélope Cruz as Josepha O’Neil, Darren Burrows as Billy Harte, Jacob Vargas as Delfino Mondragon, James Gammon as Hoover Young, Lane Smith as Steve Shaw, Katy Jurado as Meesa, Sam Elliott as Jim Ed Love, John Diehl as Les Birk

The Hi-Lo country consists of Northeast New Mexico to Southern Colorado, and includes parts of the Oklahoma panhandle and West Texas. It is grassland, cattle country, cowboy country.  Max Evans, its chronicler, was a cowboy, a novelist, a painter, miner and a soldier in World War II.  A sometime actor and friend of Sam Peckinpah. A national treasure.

The story of the Hi-Lo country is the story of Big Boy Matson, part cattleman Teddy Blue Abbot, part Errol Flynn and all hell-raiser. The story is told by his friend Pete Calder, “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.” The men were brought together by a horse Pete could not ride, but Big Boy could.

The story opens in 1941 when the U.S. was brought into the war (that’s World War II for all you Tarantino fans).  Pete to the army in Europe, Big Boy to the marines.  He is part of the hellish nightmare landing at Tarawa.  Death holds no terrors for these men.

The county they return to is much changed from the country they left to defend.  Big corporate ranching in the person of Jim Ed Love, a man with a yellow automobile, and arrogant wad of cash, buying up, or outright stealing, with the arms of the surrounding law, the small cattle outfits and the way of life that went with them; that of changing cowboys to simple farmhands. 

Matson falls for the wife of Jim Ed’s ineffectual ranch foreman, Mona Birk; a woman who has no defense to a strong male presence other than to submit to him.  Pete is not immune to her studied innocence or easy sexuality.

Like all tragic characters, Big Boy is the author of his own downfall, or so it would seem. Wild times are over, the West  is fairly tame, and the bankers and lawyers have taken it all, just as Gus McCrae, in another tale of the vanishing West had predicted.

In the end, Big Boy remains with the land he loved, and Pete lights out for California.

“It was once in the saddle he used to go dashing…”