High Plains Drifter (1973) Universal/Western RT: 106 minutes Rated R (strong violence, rape, language, sexual content) Director: Clint Eastwood Screenplay: Ernest Tidyman Music: Dee Barton Cinematography: Bruce Surtees Release date: August 22, 1973 (US) Cast: Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill, Mitchell Ryan, Jack Ging, Stefan Gierasch, Ted Hartley, Billy Curtis, Geoffrey Lewis, Scott Walker, Walter Barnes, Paul Brinegar, Richard Bull, Robert Donner, John Hillerman, Anthony James, William O’Connell, John Quade, Jane Aull, Dan Vadis, Reid Cruickshanks, Jim Gosa, Jack Kosslyn, Russ McCubbin, Belle Mitchell, John Mitchum. Box Office: $15.7M (US)
Rating: ****
Clint Eastwood is back in the saddle again in High Plains Drifter playing another gunslinger with no name. This time, he’s no hero or anti-hero. It’s not even certain he’s a real person. He could be an apparition, the personification of wrath incurred by an entire town, an avenging spirit come to collect a debt owed in blood. What I’m trying to say is High Plains Drifter isn’t what it seems. It’s a surreal piece, a supernatural revenge story, an eerie ghost story disguised as a blood-soaked western. In his second directorial effort, Eastwood subverts the western genre in a way that prompted an angry letter from John Wayne. You know you’ve done something right if you piss off The Duke.
The opening images of Eastwood’s character, credited as “The Stranger”, materializing from the shimmering desert haze is every bit as iconic as Dirty Harry aiming his .44 Magnum at some random punk unlucky enough to cross his path. He resembles the taciturn, cigar-chomping anti-hero of Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy, but the similarities begin and end at outward appearance. He is one bad dude! He proves this within an hour of riding into the dirty, dusty, miserable town of Lago, a corrupt mining town populated by the worst folks humanity has to offer. He starts off by effortlessly killing three men that challenge him to a gunfight. He follows that up by dragging the town tramp (Hill, The Baby) into a barn and raping her in a truly ugly scene. Randolph Scott, he is NOT!
It seems the bad people of Lago have an even bigger problem than the violent stranger in their midst. The notorious outlaw Stacey Bridges (Lewis, Every Which Way But Loose) and his two-man gang, former residents of Lago, are about to be released from jail. They’re understandably angry about going to prison for a crime in which everybody in town was complicit. Fearing their return, the townspeople plead with The Stranger to stick around and protect them. He accepts the job and proceeds to take advantage of everybody, taking whatever he wants without paying and appointing a dwarf (Curtis, The Terror of Tiny Town) as the new sheriff and mayor.
So what’s the Stranger’s deal? It has to do with the aforementioned crime. At some point in the recent past, the entire town stood by and watched as Bridges and his guys brutally whipped a federal marshal to death. They did nothing to stop it either. They buried the murdered lawman in an unmarked grave and tried to put it out of their minds. The Stranger frequently flashes back to the incident. It’s implied that he’s the ghost of the late marshal come to take revenge.
High Plains Drifter is easily one of the strangest, trippiest westerns I’ve seen this side of El Topo. Eastwood, displaying influences of Leone and Don Siegel (Dirty Harry), once again proves his mettle as an up-and-coming filmmaker with a bold piece of work that takes the genre in a completely unexpected direction. It isn’t just another revisionist western. He goes deeper with this allegorical piece set in a place that is quite literally hell. It lies on the border between life and death. Eastwood’s character exists in a purgatorial state of limbo that he can’t get out of until proper justice is served. The townspeople look to him for help, but there’s no salvation for them. They must pay for their callousness and cowardice in blood, a motif illustrated by the citizens of Lago painting the entire town red on the orders of their so-called protector.
Interestingly, writer Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection) based his screenplay on the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, NY in ’64. The 28YO bartender was stabbed right outside her apartment building while several of her neighbors watched and did nothing. To this day, it’s still a horrifying case. It clearly says something about the society in which we live. Eastwood takes it and grafts it onto a genre with which he’s intimately familiar.
On a technical level, High Plains Drifter is a true work of art that benefits greatly from Bruce Surtees’ fever-dream cinematography, Dee Barton’s haunting score and great performances all around. In a real stroke of genius, Eastwood cast longtime stunt double Buddy Van Horn as the murdered marshal further suggesting he and the Stranger are one in the same. The flashback sequences play out like surreal nightmares. Eastwood maintains a consistent sense of unease throughout. High Plains Drifter is simultaneously entertaining and unsettling. It’s actually one of my favorite Clint westerns. It’s so damn weird; I can’t help but love it.
