Bands of Brothers

Forty years after the release of The Long Riders, the actor-writer-producers, cast members and legendary director Walter Hill reflect on the making of a Western classic.

- HENRY C. PARKE

Forty years ago, an audacious casting inspiration—real acting brothers portraying the outlaw brothers who made up the James–Younger gang—triggered the making of a classic Western, The Long Riders. Surprisingly, the brothers who thought of it, Stacy and James Keach, credit another pair of brothers with inspiring it. In 1972, they’d costarred in a TV movie called Orville and Wilbur and, Stacy recalls, “We said, well, we’ve done the Wright brothers. Now let’s do the wrong brothers: the James brothers.” The sons of actor and Tales of the Texas Rangers creator Stacy Keach Sr., they were no strangers to the genre: Stacy had been nominated for a Tony in 1969 for playing Buffalo Bill in Indians, and starred as the consumptive dentist in Doc. James remembers, “I wrote a show called The Bandit Kings, a musical about Frank and Jesse James. We did it off-Broadway.”

“It was not very good,” Stacy admits, “but it was spirited, and we decided we should do it as a movie rather than a play.” They headed for California, dropped the songs, rewrote it as a screenplay, and tried for nearly nine years to get it made. Then came the Keaches’ stroke of genius, the casting: the Keaches as the James boys, David, Keith, and Robert Carradine as the Youngers, Randy and the then-unknown Dennis Quaid as the Millers, and Beau and Jeff Bridges as the dirty little cowards, the Fords. When the studios wouldn’t believe they were all on board, James remembers, “We got all the brothers together, and we took a picture. And that was our calling card for anybody who couldn’t believe we could get all these guys together.”