High Plains Drifter

High Plains Drifter (1973) was Clint Eastwood's first Western as a director. It's a rather curious film, strong in moments and unsettling atmosphere but not entirely successful. Of all the post-Sergio Leone American Westerns, this is probably the closest in look and feel to a Spaghetti Western.

A mystery man known only as The Stranger (Clint Eastwood) rides into Lago, an isolated mining town with a nasty secret. The Stranger eradicates a gang of local toughs and rapes bad girl Callie (Marianna Hill) within ten minutes of arrival. The wimpy townspeople learn that psychotic outlaw Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) has been sprung from jail, and enlist The Stranger to protect them. The Stranger's price is high - complete authority over the town - and his actions humiliate the people of Lago: appointing the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) Sheriff, taking the hotel for himself, bedding both Callie and hotel manager's wife Sarah (Verna Bloom), repainting the town red and renaming it Hell. Flashbacks and dialogue hints indicate the Stranger might be something more than human, as appears to be the case when Bridges's gang rolls into town.

High Plains Drifter borrows liberally from any number of Westerns. Besides being a cynical inversion of High Noon and cribbing its plot from Bad Day at Black Rock, it closely resembles a rather bizarre Spaghetti Western, Django the Bastard, with its ghostly gunfighter and revenge plot. Eastwood uses this familiar set-up to send up a variety of Western tropes. The Stranger is no Will Kane, leaving the cowardly townspeople to their fate and allowing the nastier ones to get weeded out before striking back. And Clint turns on his own Man With No Name persona, making him not only a stone-cold killer but a rapist as well.

High Plains Drifter works in moments, with a number of striking images and individual scenes, but it's not quite a cohesive whole. The plot is rather thin and the film struggles to build dramatic tension as the showdown approaches. The townspeople are uniformly scummy and greedy, and none of them are even interesting in their depravity. The women characters are a rather obnoxious macho fantasy; Callie's a straightforward slut and even the slightly more sensitive Sarah is eager to bed The Stranger. The flashback is played twice in full, somewhat diluting its initial impact. And if The Stranger is indeed a ghost, then why is the self we see in flashbacks played by a different actor?

But the sequences that work definitely work. The beginning, with the Stranger materializing out of a mirage, is an inspired visual. The movie has a uniquely nasty atmosphere, helped by Bruce Surtee's hazy photography, Henry Bumstead and George Milo's inspired art direction and Dee Barton's warped electronic score. Images like the red-painted buildings and the POV shots of the Marshal being whipped to death are both horrific and captivating. And the final showdown, with The Stranger using a bullwhip to wreak vengeance on the bad guys, is genuinely grisly and nightmarish.

Clint Eastwood takes his Man With No Name persona to the extreme, making him a far nastier and loathsome character than in his Leone films. The rest of the cast doesn't register much. Marianna Hill (The Godfather Part II) and Verna Bloom (Animal House) get cheap and degrading characters, and the gaggle of townspeople are interchangable. The only bright spots in the supporting cast are Billy Curtis (The Terror of Tiny Town), hilariously off-beat and vulgar as Mordecai, and the always-reliable Geoffrey Lewis (The Wind and the Lion) playing a psychotic villain.

High Plains Drifter is an odd Western that's not a complete success. Still, it's unsettling and creative, and is definitely worth a look for Clint fans.