Welcome back, folks, to another deep dive into the chaotic underbelly of free streaming, where the algorithm is your only guide, and brother can she be cruel.
This time, Jordan, Mark, and Andy dared to stare into the abyss of The Long Riders, Walter Hill’s 1980 Western that takes the Jesse James gang and stuffs it full of as many real-life brother actors as humanly possible. The Carradines? Check. The Quaids? Check. The Keeches? Oh yeah. The Guests? We’re going deep-cut with Christopher and Nicholas Guest, making this movie something of a genetic experiment in casting.
Right off the bat, Jordan recognizes that convening yet another set of brothers to discuss such a brother-heavy movie might be in violation of some ancient cosmic law. But much like the Pinkertons, they charge ahead like paid dogs, hell-bent on getting the job done.
As they unravel The Long Riders, the conversation meanders through its place in the Western genre, its mid-budget Keech Favor miracle status ($7 million in 1980 money), and the sheer amount of on-screen violence at once turned up to Peckinpah levels but also absent that signature final measure of sadism.
Squibs? Oh, there are squibs. Horses jumping through glass? Naturally. Stunts that were clearly performed with no regard for insurance claims? You betcha. The brother vs. brother one-upmanship must have reached unparalleled heights.
David Carradine (a man with 239 acting credits and a Wikipedia page best left unvisited) looms large over the film as Cole Younger, dishing out glares and the occasional “harshly romantic” insult to paramor Belle Starr (Pamela Reed). Dennis Quaid is in and out of the film in a terrible hat to remind everyone that he is, indeed, a Quaid.
Finally, James Remar bursts in like a true agent of unbrothered chaos for three minutes, engages in an absurdly oversized knife fight (tm), and then promptly vanishes, presumably off to audition for (and get thrown out of) Aliens.
The fellas can’t help but get into the philosophical undercurrents of the movie: the encroaching doom of modernity, the romanticized outlaw myth, and whether or not Missouri is, in fact, part of the South (spoiler: it is, but don’t expect Kansas City to admit it).
They also ponder the immortal question: why, in every Jesse James movie, do people keep following Jesse James? Because he “knows how to think”?
And of course, no 7 Levels of Tubi recap is complete without some historical trivia, leading to a dramatic battle over the term “Manifest Destiny” and a moment of high controversy when “Lakota” vs. “Sioux” becomes the moops incident of the night.
By the end, it’s clear—The Long Riders may not be the most famous or best Jesse James movie, but it’s certainly the one where the most actors got to punch their siblings on screen. And in the end, isn’t that the real American dream?
You can keep up with us here - irregularly and Mark over at Rip Borrow Steal podcast for more movie mayhem.
Here’s what Janet Maslin had to say if you even care…https://www.nytimes.com/1980/05/16/archives/film-the-long-riders-with-gangs-of-the-westoh-brothers.html
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