The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972)

The Culpepper Cattle Co. is a worthy example of a certain kind of early-1970s Western: deglamorized, unromantic, and frankly violent. This one begins in familiar terms, as a greenhorn lad joins a cattle drive, surrendering himself to the extremely focused leadership of boss Frank Culpepper. The episodes that follow are engrossing and colorful, and the drive gets more interesting when a quartet of lethal hombres join the ride. The business of frontier justice--which here usually means shooting strangers just to be on the safe side--is worked out in refreshingly unheroic ways. Clearly director Dick Richards (making his debut in a relatively brief directing career) is responding to the revisionist era, and specifically to the films of the great Sam Peckinpah.