“Nobody knows anything about him other than the fact that he is... dangerous.”
High Plains Drifter was a Western film that was released in 1973, directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Ernest Tidyman, and also starring Clint Eastwood as The Stranger, as well as Verna Bloom as Sarah Belding, Marianna Hill as Callie Travers, and Billy Curtis as Mordecai. It is ultimately about a mysterious, deadly gunfighter who rides into the corrupt mining town of Lago and is quickly hired by the panicked, cowardly citizens to protect them from a trio of ruthless outlaws who are fresh out of prison and looking for bloody revenge.
Moving right along on my journey through Clint Eastwood-directed films, this one is unsurprisingly a Western... something I thought the last movie was going to be, but wasn’t. As someone not very well-versed in Western cinema, I was definitely looking forward to the first Western Eastwood directed, as well as starred in. This movie has something of a fantastic, kind of weird, kind of mysterious premise as this stranger wanders into this old town. Nobody knows anything about him other than the fact that he is... dangerous. Not someone you wanna mess with, and he uses his power over this town as leverage. They want him to protect them, and he agrees to do that only if they first do a bunch of bizarre things for him first.
He legitimately kind of messes with this town. He makes them turn the little short guy into both the mayor and sheriff. He forces a guy to tear down his own barn to help build picnic tables. He makes them literally paint the town red. He’s a weird dude, but he’s such a manipulator, too. And the whole thing revolves around an unspoken act that happened in the town prior to his arrival there. Explaining much more than that would... well... spoil you. Yes, even half a century after its release, there are things that I could spoil.
I think there’s a reason why Eastwood played in so many spaghetti Westerns. He just has a way about him that is just so hard to explain. He’s imposing, and he looks darn good as a cowboy standing in the middle of a ghost town in the Old West. It’s not the only thing he can do, as proven in a million other films, but it’s just what he feels born to play. He does a pretty solid job as The Stranger, but I would argue this film is less about this character as much as it is about the mystery that surrounds this town and, overall, the reason he wound up there in the first place. It was by no mistake. He didn’t just drift in, as the title might like you to think.
But it is a weird film overall. His manipulation of the town is great, yes, but the things he makes them do... I just don’t fully understand the point of it all. I get the overall reason for the manipulation, but I don’t understand the smaller tasks. Those are the moments in the film that feel random and feel like it’s just doing things to pad the runtime. As if the writers asked themselves... what other random thing can this guy do to these people? I wouldn’t have been very surprised if he forced them to run around town in matching Easter Bunny outfits. There just wasn’t very much rhyme or reason behind the actions.
Technically, I think the movie looks pretty great; it feels authentically like what I expect a Western from the ‘70s to feel like. However, I’d be remiss not to say in general... I’m only fine with it. I didn’t love the movie. I didn’t hate it. I think out of all 40 or so movies that he’s directed... this will ultimately be a film that gets left in the dust of the desert it takes place in. It does have a pretty strong premise that makes you kinda, sorta wanna watch the whole thing at least one more time to catch any and all Easter eggs in the film. But even so, I don’t see myself watching it a second time.
Technical/Unbiased Score: 34/50 or 68%
Biased/Entertainment Score: 28/50 or 56%
Total Combined Score: 62/100 or 62% (or 3/5 on Letterboxd)