1. Movie night a few weeks back was Ride the High Country, one of the great ‘twilight westerns’ made at a time when everyone knew that the genre was a dying breed. The stars who were most associated with it were getting older and the country was losing the classical values that had animated it. The result was a number of films made about this very fact with the aging stars of the vanishing western. John Wayne’s The Shootist is probably the best and most famous example, but far from the only one. In this case it was Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott playing a pair of aging frontier lawmen who find themselves washed up and broke after spending their youth to civilize the west. McCrea takes a job escorting a shipment of gold from a mine to a bank (the banker is played by John ‘Piglet’ Fiedler) and he hires his friend Scott and Scott’s brash young protege to be his backup. Only, the disillusioned Scott intends to steal the gold.

Things get even more complicated when they pick up future TV star Mariette Hartley on her way to an ill-advised marriage into a family of psychotic mountain boys.

2. It’s a great film, full of top-notch performances and gorgeous western landscapes. This was the last film for Scott, who decided he was never going to top his performance, and one of the last for McCrea, and a great swan-song for the western as a whole. The whole conflict is between the old-fashioned values of McCrea – doing a hard job honestly even with no reward – and the more self-centered desires of Scott – taking what you judge to be your due whatever it takes, leading to a fittingly poignant conclusion.

3. Mariette Hartley (who makes her debut here) actually caught my attention before this when I saw her on an episode of Columbo – the one where Jack Cassidy kills Mickey Spillane – mostly for her striking voice; she has this unexpectedly deep, rich tone that I found very appealing. Beautiful women are a dime-a-dozen on TV and in movies, but ones with that kind of interesting voice tend to catch my notice.

As I say, she went on to be a pretty frequent presence on television from the 60s onward, including the woman Dr. David Banner briefly marries in an Incredible Hulk two-parter and a spot in a classic Twilight Zone episode.

4. Joel McCrea, meanwhile, had an early success as the lead of The Most Dangerous Game, made at the same time, and with many of the same cast and crew, as King Kong, including leading lady Fay Wray (this time in her natural brunette form), Robert Armstrong, and Noble Johnson (here in white makeup to play a Cossack henchman). It also featured a number of the same jungle sets, meaning the McCrea and Wray flee across the same log bridge that Kong will later shake the luckless Venture crew off of. It’s another great little adventure film, thanks in large part to the marvelous Leslie Banks as the villain.

5. Banks had a rather limited cinematic career, though a very successful theatrical one, and Dangerous Game is his signature role, though he also had two turns under Alfred Hitchcock (Jamaica Inn and the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much). He’s helped along here by a partially-paralyzed face earned in the trenches of World War One that gives him a somewhat unnatural appearance. He would favor his right profile to the camera for heroic roles and his left for villainous ones.

6. Happened to stumble on an idea to colonize, or at least explore Venus via large blimps or airships. While I can get behind the idea that Venus is actually a better colonization prospect than Mars (e.g. it actually has a substantial atmosphere), I would have to wonder about the winds, since Venus, from what I understand, has near-constant winds roughly comparable to the strongest hurricanes ever recorded. And the sulfuric acid clouds.

Generally speaking, one of my conditions for a reasonable colonization proposal is, “a simple mechanical failure will not kill everyone involved.”

Still, a cool idea for a setting.

7. Though, if colonizing space is an option, I can’t help thinking that colonizing the ocean might be a better place to start. We could get a lot more liebensraum just from underwater settlements, and perhaps set up some kind of undersea agriculture while we’re at it. And surely there’s a way to extract oxygen from seawater, right?

Overall, the sea is a lot more practical than the stars if we’re looking to expand beyond our natural environments.