After the success of The Warriors, director Walter Hill was probably offered every gang project in development, but chose to make a lyrical western about the original gangsters, the James-Younger gang.

During the opening bank robbery, the punchy Ed Miller (Dennis Quaid) blasts a teller and triggers a shoot out. Jesse James (James Keach) kicks him out of the gang and returns to the family farm in Missouri with his brother Frank (Stacy Keach) and Ed’s brother Clell (Randy Quaid). The Youngers – Cole (David Carradine, who receives top billing), Jim (Keith Carradine) and Bob (Robert Carradine) – also return to Missouri to woo their respective women.

The gang robs a stagecoach and a train in quick succession, provoking the Pinkerton Detective Agency to dispatch a well intentioned Yankee agent. He discovers the men have family and sympathizers spread out across Missouri and may be difficult to find. The detectives kill a cousin of the Youngers who is not even in the gang, then accidentally firebomb the James farm and kill Jesse’s dim witted teenage brother.

The gang retaliates against the detectives, then go their separate ways. Cole Younger heads to Texas to find his prostitute girlfriend Belle Starr, played by Pamela Reed, whose spitfire performance almost steals the movie out from under David Carradine. Jesse and Frank settle down with their wives. The gang then reunite to take on what would be their last job, a fortified bank in Northfield, Minnesota.

Written by Bill Bryden, Steven Phillip Smith and James & Stacy Keach, The Long Riders is a favorite among many cinephiles. You have the unique casting of four sets of actor brothers (Christopher and Nicholas Guest portray the treacherous Ford brothers, roles originally offered to Jeff and Beau Bridges) as well as a style that recalls Sam Peckinpah, who had stopped making watchable movies some eight years previous.

Ry Cooder, a prolific session guitarist who played with The Rolling Stones, composed the film’s outstanding score. Far from treating it as mere background, Hill uses Cooder’s authentic, down home folk music as fabric. To suggest how tempers were running in Missouri after the Civil War, there’s a scene where Randy Quaid threatens to cut off the hands of a bandleader unless he stop playing “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and replace it with “I’m A Good Ole Rebel.”

There was a great movie here about how guerilla fighters for the Confederacy resorted to robbing Yankee banks and railroads after the war, and became heroes for those trying to live through Reconstruction. The cultural divide between the law and the locals shows how wounds from the Civil War would in many ways fester for another century. But as co-written and executive produced by the Keach brothers, the film never commits to being about anything that substantial.

Instead, Hill seems more interested in his casting, his music and doing a tribute to Sam Peckinpah. The Long Riders features slow-motion blood letting in key moments, and has a laid back style that seems to want to evoke The Wild Bunch. Hill does a good job imitating Peckinpah’s look and feel, but is missing the intelligence and the poetry in dialogue that made Peckinpah’s best work so masterful.

James Keach doesn’t seem up to playing Jesse James and remains an enigma in the film. David Carradine, a star at the time, has charisma to spare and uses it. Carradine is to this movie what Val Kilmer was to Tombstone. He punches up the proceedings with his wit, handles his stuntwork extremely well, and is especially good in his barbed scenes with Pamela Reed, who holds her own with him as the lady of infamously ill repute. Their scenes together are the best thing in the film.