Director Sam Peckinpah was just Starting out when MGM released Ride the High Country in 1962. The New York Times review referred to him as an "unknown," though in truth he had already made a string of TV Westerns and one forgotten feature. He was a new kind of director: young, brash, and in a hurry to help the Western "grow up" by treating it with adult themes. Ride the High Country was, for its time, something new and different, something a little reassuring and a little scary, a hybrid Western that let viewers know that not only was the West changing, but so was the Western. Stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were old hands at this sort of things. Ride the High Country gave the two veteran actors one last job to do and a change to go out with some dignity-exactly like the characters they played in the film. Just a year before the assassination of a popular president, the escalation of an unpopular war, and the turmoil of civil-rights protests that would upend the nation, Ride the High Country did in fact help the genre mature and adapt to the turbulent, changing times. It also launched Peckinpah's career and invoked all the themes of honor, loyalty, and compromised ideals, the destruction of the West and its heroes, and the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world-themes that would be developed to their pinnacle in Peckinpah's masterpiece, The Wild Bunch.