Overlooked Movies: The Deadly Companions (1961)

Sam Peckinpah’s first feature film, THE DEADLY COMPANIONS, is another Western movie I somehow managed to miss seeing on TV when I was a kid. Based on a novel by A.S. Fleischman, who also wrote the screenplay, it opens with three outlaws (Brian Keith, Steve Cochran, and Chill Wills) planning to rob a bank. Keith’s character, known as Yellowleg because he’s a former Union Army officer and still wears his uniform trousers, has a secret and an agenda of his own, however, beyond mere robbery. But things go awry and a boy winds up dead. The youngster is the son of a beautiful redhead who owns the local dance hall (a miscast but still lovely Maureen O’Hara). She wants to bury the boy next to his late father, in an abandoned cemetery located in a ghost town that happens to be smack-dab in the middle of Apache territory. The three outlaws, who didn’t rob the bank after all, wind up accompanying her.

Although there are a few action scenes, for the most part this is a slow-moving, psychological Western that bears little resemblance to Peckinpah’s earlier TV work or his later movies. It’s also humorless and pretty grueling to watch. The fact that it has one of the worst and most obtrusive musical scores I’ve ever heard certainly doesn’t help matters any. It was also filmed pretty cheaply and looks it.

However, Maureen O’Hara is, well, Maureen O’Hara, one of the most beautiful women ever in the movies and a good actress, to boot. I’ve always liked Brian Keith, too, and despite playing a more flawed character than usual, he’s solid in this film. Chills Wills hams it up in his usual entertaining fashion. Another great character actor, Strother Martin, puts in a brief appearance as a frontier preacher. Fleischman’s screenplay has some nice lines in it, too.

Watching THE DEADLY COMPANIONS, it’s hard to believe that only a year later, Peckinpah made RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, one of the best Western movies ever. THE DEADLY COMPANIONS isn’t terrible, by any means, and I’m glad we watched it, but considering the talent involved with it, it’s disappointing and also frustrating because it could have been a lot better with a little more effort.