Clint Eastwood's mostly ghostly Western.
In the tiny town of Lago (means lake), at the edge of the world where gulls caw, a lone rider in the hazy heat shimmers into view like a horseman from hell.
Small, isolated town though it be, Lago has officials. Nervous, sweaty officials considering hiring a gunslinger to protect them from three outlaws on their way to settle a score. So when a mysterious stranger (Eastwood) appears and shows his handiness with arms, the townspeople (who carry a dark secret) decide to give the stranger whatever he wants in order to protect them.
But the stranger has his own agenda.
High Plains Drifter (1973) is the second motion picture directed by the iconic actor, and his first Western. (In 1971 he directed and starred in the excellent thriller Play Misty For Me.)
The cinematic premise of the gunslinger ostensibly defending the town while actually looking out for his own needs goes back to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), wherein a crafty masterless samurai played by Toshiro Mifune plays rival towns against each other. That was re-made in Italy by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and starred Eastwood as the Man With No Name character who appeared twice more in sequels--For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Eerie music with a sort of "tortured soul choir" lends a spectral atmosphere unique to the genre. Several aspects of the film set Drifter apart from the Western herd. Prior to the emergence of Clint (in the late-'50s he played Rowdy Yates on TV's Rawhide), the lead in a Western was much more "white hat-ish".
We see the events which account for the mysterious gunslinger's vengeful spirit through flashbacks of a Marshall Duncan receiving a group bullwhipping in the street at night.
"Damn you all...to hell," he barely manages to hiss. Sometimes, that's all it takes.
Death by group bullwhipping, the most tragic way to go. Strangely, although we are able to see it's Clint being disciplined, somehow none of the townspeople recognize him. Not even the little person, Mordecai (Curtis), whom the stranger makes sheriff. And mayor.
"What did you say your name was again?" Mordecai asks lighting a match for the stranger. (Mordecai is a Hebrew boy's name meaning "warrior", by the way, and Duncan is an Anglicized form of a Gaelic name which can be taken to mean "dark warrior".)
To which the stranger hisses, "I didn't."
Well, he doesn't do a lot of things. For instance, he doesn't last more than literally 40 seconds with a woman he abuses in a barn. Sleazy downer scene aside, most of the film is entertaining as hell.
For one thing, everybody except for Clint shines from excessive sweat. None more so than the barber with the shaky hands and the greasy strands of combover slicked across his sweaty head.
Gradually the tight-knit dysfunctional townspeople realize that their new solution may be worse than the original problem. But at that point it doesn't matter, because the stranger's decided to paint the town red!
Look for Eastwood's latest film The Mule, which he directs and stars in, about a 90 year-old horticulturalist who becomes a mule for a Mexican drug cartel. In theaters now.
HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER
Starring Clint Eastwood,
Verna Bloom,
Mitchell Ryan,
Billy Curtis,
Geoffrey Lewis,
Stefan Gierasch,
Jack Ging,
Marianna Hill,
John Hillerman,
William O'Connell
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Ernest Tidyman
Runtime 105 minutes
Rated R
Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE
Click link to books:
https://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC
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