Hi-Lo Country Movie Premieres
In The Land Of Story's Birth

By David Bowser

SANTA FE, N.M. — The Los Angeles Times headlined their story, "John Ford Country Meets Hi-Lo Country."

Not so, countered author Max Evans at the New Mexico premier of the movie, The Hi-Lo Country. "It's not John Ford country, it's God's country. I named it."

Book and movie were based on Evans' cowboying and ranching adventures in Northeastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle prior to and immediately following World War II.

Although premiered in Los Angeles and New York in December, it opened in the ornate Lensic Theater in Santa Fe in January as a benefit for the Taos Talking Pictures Film Society. The same day, New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson proclaimed Max Evans Day across the state.

Johnson said Evans was honored for helping establish the first state film commission in the country.

"Max Evans, as a writer, painter and storyteller," Johnson continued, "has demonstrated a tireless commitment to recording for all time the complex, changing landscape of the American Southwest."

Evans' novels, "Blue Feather Fellini," "The Rounders," "The Hi-Lo Country" and "Xavier's Folly," capture with passion, grace and power, Johnson said, the spirit of New Mexico.

If John Ford, the movie director best known for his westerns starring John Wayne, had been with the studio scouting for locations across northeastern New Mexico a couple of years ago when the Southwest was hit by one of the most severe drouths in a half century, Evans said, he would have packed up and gone back to Monument Valley where so many of his western movies were shot.

Screenwriter Walon Green, who adapted Evans' book to the screen, says he's not really a John Ford fan.

"I don't believe they ever raised cattle in Monument Valley," Green pointed out. "I'd like to see a movie that takes place where that actually happened."

Green said he likes the landscapes of New Mexico and always wanted to set a movie here.

The movie was shot in about a 100-mile radius of Santa Fe. It includes three ranches around Las Vegas and the Cook Ranch south of Santa Fe. A scene at a hunting cabin was shot near Espanola. The fiesta scenes were shot in San Jose.

"It's a beautiful village, one of the few left in the world that looks today like it did when I was a kid trying to be a cowboy," Evans said.

In casting the roles, Evans was consulted on a couple of characters. Frears asked particularly about the role of a young Jim Ed Love. Evans says he initially suggested Morgan Woodward, though he thought Woodward was too old for the part of Love in this movie. But Frears asked Evans to write down five names of others that might do well in the part.

"I don't remember the others because the next name was Sam Elliott," Evans said. "He cast him."

The other part was of a veteran rancher named Hoover who befriends the young heroes. That part went to veteran character actor James Gammon.

"In the film, he wears the hat my friend was wearing when he was shot and killed," Evans said.

Gammon was also wearing a pair of leggings that belonged to Evans' uncle, who taught Evans to cowboy.

Following the screening of the movie, Evans and Green answered questions from the audience about the movie and its making.

"I just loved the movie," Evans said.

Green said the most difficult part about writing the screenplay was deciding not to use a lot of good scenes from the book because he couldn't figure out a way to adapt them to the storyline.

"There's probably more than one movie in the book," he said. "There's wonderful anecdotal material that I just couldn't figure out how to use. When you love the book, the challenge is really to get what you think the best of the book is on the screen."

Green added a scene where Jim Ed Love, the big rancher, is looking at Brahman cattle in the pens after reading a story in a 1946 Life Magazine about cattlemen bringing in new breeds they hadn't used before. Green said he didn't know how the film project was going to turn out.

"The book was so good," Green explained, "the material so real, my fear was could I do it justice? It's true I put the words on screen, the story and suggestion of images, but I really want to acknowledge Director Stephen Frears and a fantastic cast and a fantastic crew."

With regard to producer Martin Scorsese's choice of Stephen Frears, a British director, to make a western, Evans said he doesn't care where a man's from.

"Mr. Scorsese had hired him before for The Grifters, which in my mind is the greatest con artist picture ever made in this country," Evans said. "He's worked in this country. He knew what he could do here. Oddly enough, it all made sense to me. I love The Grifters, and I deeply admire Mr. Scorsese."

"I don't think the nationality matters a lot in terms of the vision," Green added.

An extra in the Amarillo nightclub scene was most complimentary of Frears, noting that he even treated the extras as he did the main actors.

Keith Walters, a cowboy from Springer, N.M., who was in the movie, also was complimentary about Frears, saying he didn't make a standard shoot'em up, but a contemporary western without trivializing the people but showing the dignity of the Hi-Lo people.

"Max brought Walon and Stephen Frears to Cimarron, N.M., where I live, and had my wife Patty take them around Hi-Lo Country," said Rod Taylor, another cowboy who appeared in the movie.

Taylor said Frears was struck by the wind-blown country.

"That's what the Hi-Lo Country is," Taylor said. "They got it on film."

Evans thought the cow camp was a perfect spot to film part of the movie.

"It was better than any cow camp I ever worked in," Evans joked.

Because of the drouth, all the grass was dead, but Frears decided against using it because to him it still looked too rich.

"It was 10,000 acres he was looking at," Evans recalled, "but it wouldn't carry one cow."

Evans said he was delighted with the choice of Green to do the screen adaptation. Green, among his other credits, has written episodes for TV's NYPD Blue, Law and Order and ER. He also wrote the script for what Evans claims is Sam Peckinpah's greatest film, The Wild Bunch.

Legendary producer Sam Peckinpah, who was also a friend of Evans, spent decades trying to make a movie of Hi-Lo Country. In all, Evans recounted, he's been trying to get it on film for 37 years.

"Thirty-seven years is not a long time if you've lived a thousand," Evans said. "I've lived a 1013."

"Sam was a genius," Evans recalled, but in his later years, as he fought the studios for control over his pictures, it became more and more difficult for Peckinpah to get anything accomplished.

"As much as I love him and we did get along," Evans said, "he deteriorated mentally from the shock of seeing a couple of his films literally butchered."

Major Dundee, Evans says, was Peckinpah's first attempt at The Wild Bunch.

"There were 27 minutes cut out of that film that were significant," Evans said. "They took part of his soul."

Evans notes that Peckinpah fought much of his life to bring Hi-Lo Country to the screen.

"In fact, two weeks before he died he was still trying to figure a way to get it done," Evans said.

The Ropesville, Texas, native and his wife still have the last script that Peckinpah did for Hi-Lo Country. But that version would never have worked, he conceded.

"It would have been a three to three and a half hour film," Evans reckoned.

In addition, Peckinpah had moved the story back in time about 26 or 27 years.

"Then he moved it 400 miles south, near the Mexican border, so he could get the Federales in it and have a big gun fight," Evans said. "He couldn't help it. He loved Mexico. He married a Mexican national woman three different times. Same one."

Evans was inspired to write the novel following the death of his best friend near Des Moines, N.M. When he went to send the manuscript off to his publisher, his wife Pat discovered that there was a chapter out of sequence.

"Without her keen eye," Evans said, "that book would never have been published. That would have been the end of the deal."

Evans still has a difficult time believing the project has come to fruition after so many years.

"When you think of wonderful people, the talented actors, writers, producers — a lot of them con men, con women — it just went through the whole gamut for all those years, script after script, none of them good, and then finally here we are. We've got the film Hi-Lo Country. It touches me deeply."

He said every time he sees the man who was his best friend, Big Boy, killed in the movie, it hurts him again.

"After they buried Big Boy, Pat and I went out to the house," Evans recalled.

His slain friend's mother tried to give Evans Big Boy's horse, hat and rifle.

"I said, 'I'd be very honored to take the hat and the rifle, but I don't want that damned horse,'" Evans said. "She grinned and understood that right there."

After that, Evans said, he called his friend's brother aside and spoke the words in the closing scene of the movie to him.

"You can imagine how that makes me feel every time I see this film," Evans said.

Despite the violence in the movie, Evans says it's not a mythical or shoot'em up western. It's a contemporary western set primarily in post-war New Mexico with a cameo appearance by Amarillo.

"The cowboy's not gone," Evans said in conclusion. "This wasn't a film about the last cowboy. The cowboy is still out there working, busting his butt. You just don't see them from a jet airplane. You don't see them driving down the road. But they're out there working."

Their lives aren't quite as isolated as before. They have televisions, telephones and computers.

"But they're also out there riding through that brush and wringing those old horses out and working cattle. They haven't left. They haven't gone anywhere. They're out there on that land working."