Together with the late Westerns of Ford, Hawks and Boetticher, Ride the High Country—which was originally intended as the last of Boetticher's Renown series—marks the transition from the classical Western to the genre's long revisionist period. In his last screen appearance, Randolph Scott plays a retired lawman hired to escort a shipment of gold through bandit territory. Peckinpah’s recurrent themes are already legible in his second feature: codes of honor and their betrayal, greed as a corrosive force and the fragility of friendship. While Ride the High Country's meditative and autumnal qualities give it a surprising emotional depth, the film also displays Peckinpah's consummate skills as an editor. Considered to be impossible to edit, Columbia Pictures uncharacteristically gave the film to its journeyman director to cut, resulting in an important early example of the radical montage for which Peckinpah would become justly famous. Although Ride the High Country was largely ignored during its initial release, it was fervently championed by Andrew Sarris and drew the attention of Pauline Kael and other enlightened critics.