High Plains Drifter
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Movie Reviews of High Plains Drifter
Movie Review: Hell is a town named Lago...
Summary: 5 Stars
"High Plains Drifter" was only Clint Eastwood's second directorial effort, but already we can see that a master is at work, and if that wasn't enough, he also stared in, and produced the film, through his own "Malpaso" company. The film is very straightforward, at least on the surface. The small, isolated coastal town of Lago doesn't much take to strangers, rather like the desert town in Spencer Tracy's "Bad Day At Black Rock," and for a similar reason; Lago hides dark and dismal secrets that have damned it's residents to a living Hell. Then one day, from out of the desert's shimmering heat-haze, rides "The Stranger," and as it says on the jacket, "They'll never forget the day he drifted into town."The Stranger, nameless and taciturn, is an obvious twist on the "Man With No Name," but taken here to it's logical extreme; Eastwood has given us, in the character of The Stranger, a figure that is undoubtedly one of the most brutally amoral anti-heroes in film history. With a running time of only 84 minutes, Eastwood doesn't waste a minute of that screen-time in getting the story into high gear. Starting with an eerily atmospheric, deceptively calm, opening sequence, The Stranger arrives in Lago. Within minutes he has gunned down 3 thugs who baited and goaded him, thinking they had an easy mark, and in the films most controversial scene, `rapes' a woman he meets in the street!
I said that "High Plains Drifter" was a straightforward film, at least on the surface, but to truly understand the actions of The Stranger you have to look beyond the obvious. "High Plains Drifter" plays as a revenger, but it's more than that, it's a psychological western, and one, I think, that stands alongside Brando's "One Eyed Jacks;" The Stranger is as a mirror to the rotten and corrupted soul of Lago.
The town is fearfully awaiting the arrival of three ghosts from its past, convicted killers who were set up and imprisoned on trumped-up charges; soon to be released, their first order of business will be to head back to Lago and extract their pound of flesh from each and every one of the people who betrayed them. And that brings us full-circle, the thugs The Stranger gunned down were hired by the town to protect them from the returning killers!
Most of the townspeople, but especially the mayor and his cronies, are hypocrites and gutless cowards, both morally and physically; unable to live with their past actions, they use weasel words and spurious justifications to salve their collective conscience, and in doing so, Lago itself becomes their prison. After witnessing the speed and accuracy of The Stranger, they beg him to stay and protect them. At first he's not interested, `til they offer him "anything," an "open check," for his services... he takes them at their word. 3 pairs of hand-tooled boots, a gun belt, a silver-tooled saddle, unlimited gut-rot, beer, and cigars later, The Stranger tells them he won't do their dirty work for them, but he'll teach them how to do it for themselves.
I said that you have to look beyond the obvious to understand the actions of The Stranger. While in the store he gives two jars of candy and a stack of blankets to an old Indian and his grandchildren, not out of any act of kindness towards them, but because he knows it'll upset the racist store owner. Similarly he watches as the boot-maker delightedly calculates his check for the boots etc, only to smile as the man is told it's all free of charge, the bar owner is overjoyed as The Stranger buys him a cigar and orders a round for everyone, only to be crushed by the same news. He then humiliates the mayor and sheriff in front of the whole town by giving their positions to the town joke, a midget named Mordecai. And that brings us to the `rape' scene that has upset so many people. As I said, The Stranger is a mirror to the towns rotten soul; it's blatantly obvious that the woman wants this powerful and masculine man, but on HER terms, well, she gets what she wants, but on HIS terms. In fact the only character that manages to surprise The Stranger is the Preacher, who shows, in one cynically comical scene, that he's quite capable of serving God and mammon both! An ambush of the killers is planned, and as a final act of degradation, The Stranger has the residents paint the whole town red, renames it "Hell," and sets up a "Welcome Home Boys" street party for the returning killers... needless to say, they return to one HELL of a party!
"High Plains Drifter" is a wonderful film that works on many different levels; watch it for the fun in seeing The Stranger blowing away the bad guys and humiliating the craven townspeople, or delve deep inside the character of The Stranger and see just how far "revenge" can be taken... HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Movie Review: Hell On Earth
Summary: 5 Stars
"How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses that you'd find swine? The world's a hell."No, those lines are not from Clint Eastwood's 1973 masterpiece "High Plains Drifter." Actually, they were spoken by Joseph Cotten in Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 suspense movie, "Shadow of a Doubt." But no other words can better capture the essence of this darkest and bleakest of Westerns.
Clint Eastwood reprises his most famous role, "The Man With No Name" that made him a household name in such Sergio Leone movies as "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Some people claim this movie as a "revisionist Western," but to me it is a little more complicated than that. "High Plains Drifter" is a harrowing admixture of elements from such disparate works as "High Noon," "Peyton Place," "The Count of Monte Cristo" and Dante's "Inferno."
When the Man With No Name comes riding into the Texas hamlet of Lago, he immediately strikes fear in the hearts of the local townspeople. Hiding behind the facade of piety and the pioneer work-ethic lies a craven, dark secret which the town will keep shrouded at any cost.
Peopled only by bullies and cowards, the town is immediately torn apart by Eastwood -- executing the local goon squad who try to rough him up, raping the town prostitute, setting neighbour against neighbour and exposing the town preacher as a craven, hypocritical fraud.
It soon becomes evident to the town that the stranger has come to avenege the death of their marshal, who was bullwhipped to death in the town square as everyone watched, none of the men lifting a finger to help him or to stop the killers.
So, when the stranger shows up, the Marshal's killers are about to be released from prison. The cowardly town Sheriff tries to hire the newcomer as a gunfighter to face down the killers, but Eastwood turns the tables on him and the town and soon has conscripted the town's spineless men in a local volunteer regiment to ambush the killers when they ride into town. This is a neat twist on "High Noon," in which Gary Cooper's Sheriff Will Kane had to face the men who swore to kill him alone, because no one in the town had the guts to help him; in "High Plains Drifter," no-one has the guts to refuse the Man With No Name, for fear _he'd_ kill them.
What is so compelling about "High Plains Drifter" is Eastwood's complex portrayal of executioner and avenging angel: Unlike in "Shadow of a Doubt," Eastwood is no sociopathic murderer, as was Cotten's Charlie Oakley; Rather, the town of Lago *deserves* its violent demise, and -- as in "The Count of Monte Cristo" -- the Man With No Name icily exacts his revenge on the town ruthlessly, methodically.
In ripping the facade of religiosity and respectability away from the town, he makes the only man with any courage in Lago -- the town midget, played by Bill Curtis -- the Mayor and Sheriff. The sets -- designed and built by Hitchcock set designers Henry Bumstead and George Milo -- play a key role in this movie. Like any other frontier town in any Western, the buildings are standard issue: General store, hotel, church, saloon, livery stable, etc. But, they are all constructed of bare wooden planks, without a drop of paint on them, save for the signs denoting their function. Clearly, these buildings are naked citadels of greed, earmarked for gouging every last dollar and squeezing every last penny out of their customers and parishoners. Only the mining office -- which hides the town's dark secret -- is whitewashed over to cover its sins. It's a brilliant example of Bumstead's minimalistic Expressionism.
The Man With No Name takes note of this, and before the killers' return, he orders the townsfolk to paint it a shocking, scarlet red. The hotel owner protests, exclaiming "it's going to look like Hell!" Of course, all Eastwood does in response is squint and form an impish, ironic smile with his parched lips.
The final scene is a brilliant deja-vu montage which recalls the Marshal's murder: On a pitch-black night, the stranger horsewhips one of the killers to death, and guns his two partners down in intensely emotionless vengeance. The stranger slowly walks away, finally cleansing Lago of its sin as the entire town burns in flames in a baptism by fire.
I consider this movie to be Eastwood's greatest directorial effort, slightly above "Bird" and "The Unforgiven." Singular in purpose, relentless in its dark vision of humanity, "High Plains Drifter" is the ultimate revenge tale.
Movie Review: A stranger rides into Lago, bringing a surrealistic vision of Hell...
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been a huge Clint Eastwood fan and have recently been revisiting some of the films that I hadn't seen for years, and there's no better place to start than with this, his second film and first western as director.
The plot couldn't be simpler, in many ways harking back to A "Fistful of Dollars" in its elegant, stripped storyline: A stranger (Clint) rides into the town of Lago, quickly getting into a shootout that he didn't start and besting the three gunfighters that the town had hired to protect them. The townspeople are afraid of another trio who had once been on the payroll also, doing time in prison for a crime committed a year before that the town is complicit in, and due back to wreak vengeance. Seeing as how their protectors are dead, they agree to hire the stranger at any cost, and he proceeds to wreak havok on the town in more ways than one before proceeding on his way after filling his bargain in apocalyptic fashion.
If the plot's simple, the characters, style and symbolism of the piece are a little less so. The Stranger it seems is haunted by dreams - memories or visions, who can say for sure? of a man who seems to be him, the town's former marshall, whipped to death by those same three men riding back for their own vengeance. "Lago" means "lake" and the town sits on an unnamed body of water; the town seems brand-new, most of the buildings are still under construction and unpainted, though from what we learn it's been around for over a year; the townspeople are greedy and cowardly, and The Stranger is cold, merciless, in the end even demonic. Is he a figure of vengeance, a revenant or demon sent from the real Hell that he names the town after, and that the marshall is seen in one flashback as damning it to, as he orders it painted completely red before the killers arrive in town?
Though nearly everybody in the town is unpleasant, a couple of more positive images do stand out - Verna Bloom in one of the two significant female roles is the hotel-keeper's wife, who seems at first to despise The Stranger but seemingly just because he's another brutal [...] - when she realizes that he's the only man in the town with guts she softens, and he beds her just before the showdown. A dwarf, Mordecai (Billy Curtis), is also treated more softly, with The Stranger proclaiming him sherriff and mayor, pumping him up to the point where he alone of all the townsmen shows any guts at the eventual gun battle. I suppose it could be said that Clint's vengeful figure is capable of some charity and feeling towards the only two positive and "good" characters in the film. Significantly enough the other female character, a single woman (perhaps a whore? it's never very clear) named Callie (Marianna Hill) who he rapes shortly after entering town, develops an ambiguous love-hate attitude towards him and it's left quite ambiguous as to how much has to do with the rape (which both The Stranger and other townspeople deny) or because he then ignores her for the most part, even after she betrays him at one point.
A town that seemed promising and new, fresh and full of vitality at the beginning of the film, perched on a cool lake and apparently prosperous, at the end has been half-burnt and decimated through a supernatural wrath, a vengeance for the greed and cowardice that killed a marshall and cowers before his redeemer - this is old-Testament filmmaking of a pure kind that Eastwood never really returned to in such an obvious way. There are certainly obvious odes to his spaghetti years, in the dirt and violence and unpleasantness of the townspeople and their souls, in Dee Barton's wonderfully eclectic, eerie score and of course in Eastwood's character; I also think it shares some kinship with the Don Siegel-directed Civil War film The Beguiled from 1971, another film with more than a touch of the supernatural, and few redeeming characters. But Clint makes it his own through the economy and his refusal to make things any more flashy or outré than the screenplay calls for (which is plenty). The cast is terrific, mostly made up of names that were second-tier at best at the time and are largely forgotten now. Bloom and Curtis are especially good
Perhaps not one of the very best 70s westerns, and I'd certainly still put it behind "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Unforgiven" in Eastwood's western-ography, but it's definitely one of the weirder and more fascinating examples of the genre from America during the period.
Movie Review: "Urghh, He Sure Had A Lot of Blood Left In Him, Didn't He?"
Summary: 5 Stars
'High Plains Drifter' is my very favourite Eastwood movie (and that's saying something). I especially like the dark humour and ambiguity, but in truth, there's not much I don't like.
You just know something bad is gonna happen the moment you see him appearing through the desert heat-haze in the eerie title sequence, and by the time the film ends with the same shot in reverse (a la 'the Searchers'), something bad has!
In between, we're treated to much violence, sexism, adultery, hypocrisy and general wretchedness from the Lago townsfolk - and they're supposed to be the victims!
These people are dire, far worse than the actual villains (who are gold-star nasty in a traditional sense); they stood and watched as their sheriff - the only honest character in the film - was whipped to death in the street.
In essence, 'High Plains Drifter' is a cross between 'Witchfinder General,' 'High Noon' and 'the Omen' only with lashings more unpleasantness. The significant difference is that there's people to cheer for in those films - there's no-one here. Even the 'hero' appears a cruel, merciless killer, who is himself in no moral position to deliver salvation OR retribution to the cowering townsfolk.
And who is he? The murdered sheriff's avenging kin? His ghost? The devil? The plot leads us up all the various avenues and alleyways but in the end it doesn't really matter. We're just glad that everyone who deserves retribution - gets it! The doing-good-via-bad cliché is hammered home, but again, we don't really care. We know right will out eventually, however perversely(and hopefully brutally!), because Eastwood's with the programme.
Visually, the films superb. The town appears condensed, like a vacuum, especially when Eastwood demands it be painted red.
It's not the traditional homely Western hamlet which deserves to be defended by brave men for whom it's worthwhile giving their lives. It's a bleak, soul-less outpost, desperate and afraid of it's own shadowy secrets and the fact they're returning to haunt it when it thought they were buried with the sheriff.
Bruce Surtees camerawork effortlessly conveys this - and more (let's not give Eastwood ALL the credit). We get a very real sense of the artless, cuboid structures and the creepy inhabitants fully deserving each other.
Performance-wise, Eastwood plays Eastwood (as he always does) with a twisted comic bravado (he knows he's distorting the western myth, by subverting the very iconography and legend that built it in the first place). He prowls the streets like Ann Coulter on the look-out for liberals; a cold glint as another low-life bites the dust.
Geoffrey Lewis is grotesquely brilliant as the drunken, heartless, leering chief villain, and the rare Verna Bloom is handsome and sassy as the rebellious wife of one of Lago's slimy conspirators.
There's blood by the bucket, roaring gun-fights, an inevitable,(but well-staged) all consuming fire, seriously nasty whippings and there's even a squalid, squeaky-voiced dwarf who, along with some 'pesky injun savages', are the only people to benefit from the 'drifter's' brief tenure.
'High Plains Drifter' is a delirious amalgam of all that's small and sleazy in our sugar-veneered world. A cynical, yet not completely hopeless vision of mankind in general, which is as valid and relevant now as when Eastwood shot it.
Movie Review: Supernatural western 5 stars for content 2 for quality
Summary: 5 Stars
An odd supernatural western with a number of twists, Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter is now recognized as a pivotal and important western. When it was released it was blasted by many critics for its violence since then its critical reputation has risen. Eastwood plays a stranger who arrives in an odd town called Lago. The residents are wary of any stranger and the gunslingers hired to protect the mining operation (among other things)immediately want to take him down a peg or two. They have no idea who they're dealing with. There's a dark secret involving murder eating at the heart of Lago and its residents. Its corrupting effects are hidden by pleasant facades of the buildings.
The residents want to hire The Stranger who defend them against outlaws who have a grudge against the towns people. He's initially reluctant but agrees after given carte blanc to the town. He does lives up to his end of the bargain but not before exacting a brutal revenge.
The film certainly merits five stars. It's an assured second film from Eastwood as a director. The script by Ernest Tidyman (with uncredited rewrites by Dean Reisner)marvelously captures many of the elements that made Sergio Leone's westerns so popular and manages to invert many of them at the same time. Reportedly inspired by a subgenre of samurai films revenge films, Eastwood chose to make the film when the treatment intrigued him. Tidyman's (The French Connection)screenplay is lean and compact providing a perfect frame work that echoes and compliments the films that Eastwood made for Leone. The haunting musical score also echoes Morricone's scores for Leone's films without imitating them.
Universal has given this classic western shoddy treatment. The cover you see here isn't the cover on the current version. It's a much less dramatic photographic image. Additionally, it's clear that this is just a re-release of the original 1997 bare bones DVD. The film has not been remastered and there's loads of analog artifacts as well as some interlacing problems in a couple of scenes. The film deserves to be restruck from the original negative and remastered with 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. It also deserves a commentary track from star/director Eastman as well as a documentary on this magnificent film. There is a promotional film floating around that was made at the time of the film and the least Universal could have done with this reissue was put it on disc. That, along with a retrospective documentary and interviews is really what this terrific film deserves. Sadly, Universal has chosen to release it with little fan fare at a budget price but without any of the extras that would make it worthwhile. There is the original trailer (in pan and scan format) and production notes.
One other minor flaw is that the transfer is cropped incorrectly in this widescreen presentation. As a result, some of the credits appear at the very edge of the screen. While this isn't a major issue, the film isn't presented in quite the way it should be.
Eastwood deserves kudos for this fine western which was a pivotal film in his career as both director and star. Universal deserves a round of boos and hisses for the shoddy presentation of this reissue. Hopefully, this film, like Unforgiven, will receive the deluxe presentation it deserves.