Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The Culpepper Cattle Company finds young Gary Grimes rather bored with life in his small farming community so he goes off to what he imagines from dime novels as the glamorous life of a cowboy. A lot of the same ground was covered in the Glenn Ford/Jack Lemmon western Cowboy done in the 50s.This film makes that one look glamorous. He signs on with Billy Green Bush's trail drive and one thing is certain, Grimes just does not have the right stuff. He also finds that cowboying is dirty, dusty work day after day which can be filled with danger from the elements or from your fellow man.One thing is certain, there ain't no law out there so to speak so one makes one's own. In the end actually trying to act like movie cowboy heroes gets a lot of people killed.Such familiar folks on the drive as Bo Hopkins, Geoffrey Lewis, and Luke Askew are among the trail hands. There's one really nasty and psychotic villain in John McLiam who emerges in the last third of the film.In the near future Grimes would be featured in a John Wayne western, Cahill, US Marshal. But The Culpepper Cattle Company is about as far away from a Wayne film as you can get.But it's a sleeper of a good western.

Since a family friend gave the DVD a few years ago,I have always planned to take a look at the film,but somehow always ended up putting it at the back of the line.With my dad having recently sold the DVD on Ebay,I decided that it was time to at last meet Culpepper.The plot:Dreaming about being a cowboy, Ben Mockridge nervously goes up to legendary cowboy Frank Culpepper,and ask if he can join him and his gangs latest cattle drive.Despite having his doubts,Culpepper decides to give Mockridge a job working with the cook.Being nicknamed "little Mary.",Mockridge is pushed around by Culpepper and his gang,who see Mockridge as nothing but a play thing.Getting their cattle back from some rustlers,Mockridge is given the task of guarding the heard for the night. Patrolling the heard,Mockridge runs into a man.Frozen to death,the outlaw knocks out Mockridge and takes the cattle.Finding his cattle stolen,Culpepper and his gang set off to find the outlaw who took them,as Mockridge sets his sights on finally showing to Culpepper that he is one of the gang.View on the film:Making his directing debut,co-writer/ (along with Eric Bercovici & Gregory Prentiss)director Dick Richards delivers a strikingly earthy,poetic Western.Placing the viewer in the middle of Culpepper's gang,Richards uses short,sudden tracking shots to brilliantly express the sense of unease that Mockridge is caught up in. Subtly angling the camera so that Mockridge is having to "look up" at Culpepper,Richards counters the elegantly stylised,stark wide shots with a down to earth grit,which covers Mockridge cowboy dreams in mud,dust and deep red blood.Keeping Mockridge away from ever fulfilling his cowboy fantasy,the screenplay by Richards/Eric Bercovici & Gregory Prentiss gives Culpepper and his gang a harsh outlook on the west,with the dialogue having a sharp brittleness which hit Mockridge with a real wake up call to reality.Smartly making each of the shoot-outs short and blunt with violence,the writers avoid giving Mockridge's rites of passage any moment of solo heroism,which leads to the title ending on a wonderfully dark,bitter noteNever being able to truly fit in with "the boys", Gary Grimes gives an excellent performance as Mockridge,thanks to Grimes making Mockridge's innocent awe towards the cowboy life crash hard against the shoving & pushing of Culpepper's gang.Wrapped in a demonic beard straight from a Gothic Horror movie, Billy Green Bush gives a superb performance as Culpepper,whose flying bullets are joined by the hard bite that Culpepers displays in giving orders to his gang,as Culpepper peppers the wounds of Mockridge's dreams.

The Culpepper Cattle Co. is a splinter of the Western genre that was tagged as revisionist. Often the makers of such Oaters went for a more grizzled look at the West, even demythologising the Hollywood Westerns that had proved so popular for decades. Directed by Dick Richards, The Culpepper Cattle Co. is one such picture.Young Ben Mockridge (Gary Grimes) wants to be a cowboy, to work on the drives and hone his gun play skills. When trail drive boss Frank Culpepper (Billy Green Bush) is in town, Ben begs him for work and is thrilled to be hired as the cook's Little Mary. What he isn't so thrilled about is actually what it's really like out there on a drive...And so it comes to pass, young Ben is at the bottom of the cowboy ladder and Richards and his writing team ensure there is no glamour to be found. The drive is beset with thievery and rustling, killings, stampedes, inner fighting and very hard work for very little pay. The men on the trail all look the same, they dress the same, they smell the same, they are all worked hard and understand the same weary banter.What camaraderie there is is kept to a minimum, they are a team in a working sense, but their loyalty only comes to the fore when they are tasked with fighting and killing' enemies. The bars are not all bright and sparkly, with a well suited man playing a piano, no these are dingy holes with dirty glasses. No bordello babes either, just a hapless lassie loaned out for services by a barkeep who has in his own mind some tenuous right to have her in his keep.This is purposely downbeat, with the photography by Lawrence Edward Williams and Ralph Woolsey emphasising this fact by stripping back the colours for authenticity. While Jerry Goldsmith and Ralph Woolsey's musical score is deftly restrained, perfectly so. The story moves to its final conclusion, a confrontation that excites and depresses equally so, for even in the whirl of bullets and thundering hooves, the realisation dawns on Ben, and us, that nothing changes the life of the cowboys out there on the drives. It's live, work and die. Cowboyin is something you do when you can't do nothing else - Indeed! 9/10

This picture hit the theaters on April 16 1972 starring Gary Grimes as Ben Mockridge, Billy Green Bush as Frank Culpepper and Luke Askew as Luke. Ben Mockridge, is a 16-year-old boy who has long dreamed of living the life of a cowboy. Frank Culpepper is getting ready to take one the biggest cattle drives across Texas land that no one has seen before. Ben goes to Frank's ranch to beg him for a job and he's willing to just about anything as long as he's part of this cattle drive. However, Ben finds out that being a cowboy on cattle drive is not what he thought it was. Dealing with, loneliness, exhausting work from sun up to sun down and then some. Ben also for the first time has to use a gun to defend himself and the feeling he's left with is not a good one. Ben soon realizes that being a cowboy is only a job for those who can't find anything else to do with there lives. I grew up on a farm, I love cows, and that's why I give this movie 8 weasel stars for the cattle, country, and land that the movie was filmed on.