excuse to restage that Northfield raid in as bloody a way as possible. This hollow and tedious outlaw saga may feature an unprecedented number of brothers—four sets, no less—in the leading roles, but it's no family film, that's for sure." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post declared that the film "seems a flawlessly felt and visualized western, true to the subject matter and the aspirations the filmmakers probably held for it." David Ansen of Newsweek wrote: "the story seems more re-enacted than acted and one is finally more impressed than moved. Only David Carradine's cool, mangy macho as Cole Younger and Pamela Reed's jaundiced wit as Belle Starr cut through the tempered, elegiac surface. The screenplay (by Bill Bryden, Steven Phillip Smith, Stacy and James Keach) is basically an assemblage of bits and pieces that doesn't build toward any real emotional payoff. Yet 'The Long Riders' is still the best Western in many years — it has the laconic elegance of a ritual." Film historian Leonard Maltin described this picture as "Stylish, if extremely bloody...All In the Family Out West" and gave it 3 out of a possible 4 stars in his annual Movie & Video Guide (no longer published). On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 81% based on , with a weighted average rating of 6.6/10. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews". Box office The Long Riders was a box office disappointment upon its initial release. According to Film Comment it made $5,891,149 in the USA, in part due to "a terrible campaign that emphasized how alike all the players looked without exploiting the family theme that might have aided box office." In June 1981 James Keach wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times in response to an article on the poor box office performance of Westerns. Keach claimed The Long Riders "wasn't a Star Wars at the box office" but recouped its full $9 million investment and earned United Artists a profit. Stacy Keach wrote in his memoirs that "I believe to this day that the movie made money even though the studio claimed it only broke even." Proposed prequel In May 1981 David Carradine said a prequel, set during the Civil War, was in development. In February 1982 Stacy