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High Plains Drifter (1973)

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High Pains Grifter, 21 April 2008

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Dee Barton's ominous score heralds an angel of death materializing from the high desert haze: Clint Eastwood rides from the blasted plains into the sun-soaked seaside town of Lago, as townsfolk stare through the sandy heat at him atop his dusty horse, clopping steely-eyed down the main street. The Stranger from Leone's spaghettis – reincarnated to rewrite the American West.

Within ten minutes, this Stranger has had a beer, gunned down three misfits and raped a woman. Super cool. Super cruel.

High Plains Drifter (written by Ernest Tidyman and Dean Riesner) has been called deconstructionist; formulaic, a dark study of the soul and a simple western… Exactly what this movie is, only history can judge – one thing is certain: High Plains Drifter is a scorching classic: Clint Eastwood's first true American "avenger" film, re-writing the book on the quintessential cowboy; no longer the singing fop or the John Wayne do-gooder; the cowboy was now a sociopath, a recluse, an "anti" hero.

The second directorial effort by Eastwood (after Play Misty For Me, 1971) is a revolution in film-making. We may well say "they just don't make 'em like that anymore" but the fact is: they didn't even make 'em like that back then! Note all the departures from Gene Autry/John Wayne convention: The Stranger is the Cowboy Star of this show, yet his horse is not white, but a dirty mottled appaloosa; he is unshaven, with a dusty longcoat (and he doesn't get any cleaner), he speaks without unclenching his teeth, like he holds all and sundry in utmost contempt (which he does), he doesn't wait for the "bad guys" to draw first (he'll shoot 'em in the back, or in the dark, or without warning – as long as he kills them); even his hat was not the usual "cowboy hat" with upturned sides, but flat-brimmed; and since when do "heroes" rape? The Stranger oozed "bad guy," which is what he would have been in previous movies of this genre. Yet The Stranger is The Hero.

Or is he?

Though this movie is about a twisted kind of redemption, The Stranger didn't even have the mandatory "character arc" that defines every movie about redemption; instead, everyone around The Stranger arced, while he stayed the laconic, stone-hearted, anti-authoritarian maverick. This may be how the term "anti-hero" got coined: since it is taken for granted that every hero should have a defining arc and since The Stranger didn't, maybe he was not the hero of the movie, even though we invested our emotions and aspirations in that character. Not that anyone else was the hero. Maybe this movie didn't really have a hero! Who made the rules that every movie should? Hence: "anti" hero. (Almost every Eastwood movie featuring a character like The Stranger would boast the same absence of Hero Arc, from then to now.)

The Stranger displays such calculated cool in gunning down the misfits that the town sheriff (Walter Barnes, channeling Skipper from Gilligan's Island) begs him to become the town protector against three outlaws who held a vendetta against the town and were on their way to Lago for revenge. In return for his promised protection, The Stranger manipulates the townsfolk into granting him free reign of the town and its resources, then proceeds to twist their panties with his insouciance and raw decisions – tearing down people's barns to make picnic tables, making the town midget the mayor and sheriff; giving over supplies to Native Americans for free, eventually forcing the townsfolk to paint all their buildings red and rename the town "Hell" – and we realize that The Stranger himself is exacting some kind of revenge on the townsfolk.

In the town's dark past, these duplicitous, distrusting townsfolk stood by and watched as their Marshal, Jim Duncan (Clint's actual stand-in, Buddy van Horn), was whipped to death by the three outlaws. Was it coincidence that The Stranger breezed into town at exactly the moment that the outlaws would return?

By movie's end… NONE of these questions are answered!

The cast and crew of this movie would become Clint's long-standing film team: Bruce Surtees (DP), Henry Bumstead (Art Director), James Fargo (assistant director), with a cavalcade of familiar character actors: Dan Vadis, John Quade, William O'Connell, Geoffrey Lewis, Anthony James…

Mordecai: "What did you say your name was again?" The Stranger: "I didn't."

In unbidden irony, before we can speculate on whether The Stranger is Marshal Jim Duncan's brother, or an avenging spirit, or Jim Duncan himself, he has faded like a wraith back into the high plains haze from whence he came….as The Man With No Name character is made more solid in American Western culture than Leone could ever have imagined.

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