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Dec 10, 2020 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

By the time he directed his first Western in 1973, Clint Eastwood had already starred in nine of them, becoming an international superstar in the mid-1960s with the Man With No Name Trilogy. This made him something of an expert in a changing genre, one that was forsaking the optimism and myth-making of the Hollywood Golden Age and embracing the violence and moral degradation that came with the Hollywood New Wave, the collapse of the Production Code and the ongoing charnel pit that was the war in Vietnam. High Plains Drifter isn’t an allegory for any of these sweeping historical movements; it’s a grubby, nasty revenge tale, one that would likely qualify as an exploitation film if it didn’t star a white guy. But Eastwood himself, already a fixture of the genre, knew enough about it to make it his own and twist the genre’s propensity for myth-making in a hellish new direction.

High Plains Drifter begins like so many Westerns, with a stranger riding into town. But in this case, Eastwood’s nameless protagonist is credited as The Stranger and he literally appears out of the desert haze like a mirage. This film is anything but subtle, but Eastwood’s filmmaking and the no-frills script by Ernest Tidyman - fresh off an Oscar win for his screenplay for The French Connection - are always purposeful and hard-hitting. Beginning with blood-red opening credits and The Stranger entering the town of Lago on a pale horse, the apocalyptic and biblical imagery of the film are immediately apparent. The film proceeds like so many westerns before it; The Stranger immediately antagonizes three thugs in a bar and they follow him to a barbershop where he swiftly and calmly guns them down. Turns out the three thugs had been hired by the town to protect them from a trio of vengeful outlaws who’ve just been released from prison. The Stranger takes advantage of the job opening he’s created and uses it to slowly take over the town.

The structure of a town awaiting the arrival of a trio of outlaws and one man standing up to them is a surprisingly recurring one in Westerns. Henry King’s The Gunfighter and Fred Zimmerman’s High Noon are both built on this premise. But while both of those films use the scenario to interrogate the morals and decisions of their protagonists, High Plains Drifter uses it as a vehicle to explore a community that is rotted to the core. Everyone in the town of Lago is some combination of pathetic, cruel or cowardly. Even the characters we’re meant to sympathize with - such as Mordecai, the dwarf treated as the town jester, or Sarah Belding, the hard-bitten wife of the local hotel owner - are introduced to us as humiliatingly subservient or viciously antagonistic. All of this reflects off The Stranger like bullets off Superman; Eastwood’s protagonist takes the stoic persona of his previous western characters and turns them into a sweaty, stubbly mirror that reflects the sins of the townspeople back on them. This reaches an extreme almost immediately when he forces himself on Callie Travers, the cruel, vain wife of a local bigshot. The sleaze and discomfort that radiates off this scene in waves can’t be understated, but serves the purpose of slapping the audience across the face and reminding them that this isn’t a story of redemption, but one of punishment and revenge.

Although High Plains Drifter is only Eastwood’s second directorial effort - following the 1971 stalker thriller Play Misty For Me - his command of space and mood is already evident. Whether it’s the way his hat brim tilts up as he sits at the bar to reveal the thugs staring at him at the other end, or just how damn sweaty everyone is through the whole film, there’s much here to indicate the long directorial career he would have over the subsequent five decades and counting. The film slightly overplays its hand regarding the potentially supernatural elements at work in the story, but even that is done with cleverness. It becomes clear early on that the town has collectively covered up the murder of their previous marshal, who was whipped to death by the three outlaws while the populace looked on with helplessness or disinterest. The film heavily indicates that The Stranger is either a relative of the slain marshal or perhaps the ghost of the man himself. This aspect of the narrative is nicely complicated by having Eastwood’s longtime stunt double Buddy Van Horn play the marshal in the flashbacks to his murder. Is The Stranger the man’s similar looking brother, come calling for revenge, or is he the man’s restless shade, visually warped by death and the desert heat?

By the time The Stranger forces the townspeople to literally paint the entire town red in preparation for the outlaws’ arrival, scrawling the word HELL across the town sign, any subtlety regarding the film’s intent gets thrown out the window in terrific fashion. Accompanied by Dee Barton’s theremin-tinged score and a final shootout that plays more like a slasher film than a western, one wonders how effective Eastwood would have been if he ever tried his hand at an overt horror movie. Even his shooting location seems to inform the parallel. Filmed on the banks of California’s Mono Lake, a saline lake with alkalinity so high that fish can’t survive in it, even the environment of the town seems to presage death and rot.

Eastwood would revisit the “possibly supernatural stranger roles into town” plot line with his 1985 director/star effort Pale Rider, although that film veers the material closer to a family drama in the vein of Shane. The true sister film to High Plains Drifter in Eastwood’s filmography is his apocalyptic final western, 1992’s Academy Award-winning Unforgiven. That film subsumes the supernatural elements of the story even more than High Plains Drifter, making theme thematic rather than potentially textual, but both films explore the effect of a man who is emotionally dead on the lives of those still tethered to humanity in all its imperfection and cruelty.

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