High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood’s Western, Now Streaming Free on YouTube

Throughout the 1960s, Clint Eastwood made a hard leap. He went from supporting player on a TV show to headliner in movies. The show was the Western series Rawhide, and his films were mostly Westerns too. The best known are the three that make up “The Man with No Name Trilogy”: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

In the 1970s he made an even harder transition, from actor to director. He learned the craft on films like Hang ‘Em High. Then he debuted as a director in his own right with the 1971 thriller Play Misty for Me, in which he played a radio DJ.

That first film was not a Western. Eastwood may have wanted to show he wasn’t just a Western guy, something he would keep doing throughout his career. For his second film, though, he went back to the genre he is still most associated with. He added some genre-defying elements that keep the movie a standout.

High Plains Drifter

The 1973 film High Plains Drifter follows an unnamed gunslinger known only as “The Stranger” (Eastwood). He rides out of the hazy desert into the small mining town of Lago. He shows his skill with a gun right away by killing three gunmen who threaten him. The townsfolk never learn his name or anything about him. Still, they hire him to protect them from two outlaws who will soon be released from prison. The town knows the outlaws will come to Lago for revenge.

The film fills in the backstory. The townsfolk had earlier hired the outlaws to kill the town sheriff, Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn). Duncan had discovered that the mining operation, and with it the town’s whole livelihood, sat on federal land. He planned to report it, which would have bankrupted the town. After the outlaws killed him, the townsfolk framed them for a robbery and they went to prison.

The Stranger is new to town, yet he seems to know all of this already. He even dreams of it. He plainly dislikes the town and its people, but he agrees to protect them. He appears to have a score of his own to settle with the outlaws.

Why Eastwood’s second film is still so good

More than 50 years after its release, High Plains Drifter still captivates because of its ambiguity. You might take the Stranger for yet another “Man with No Name,” but he isn’t. He is far scarier and more ruthless. Viewers also debate who he really is.

Some read the film as a ghost story. In that reading the Stranger is an apparition or revenant of the sheriff himself. His dreams of the sheriff and his ghostly arrival out of the desert support the idea. Others say the Stranger is the sheriff’s entirely mortal brother, who takes vengeance on his behalf.

Eastwood spoke about it in a 2003 interview for Inside the Actors Studio. He said the original script, written by The French Connection screenwriter Ernest Tidyman, stated outright that the character was the brother. Eastwood changed that. In his words, “I made it very ambiguous so that the audience can draw their own conclusions.”

Several elements push the film out of traditional Western territory and into horror. Religious overtones run through it. The Stranger seems almost superhuman at times, and he appears to get shot without consequence. Dee Barton’s score also leans more toward suspenseful horror films than a classic Western soundtrack.

The result is a genuinely eerie film that still feels fairly modern. One issue has aged exceptionally badly.

Very early in the film, the Stranger rapes a local woman. Worse, the film suggests that she enjoys it despite the force. The scene is placed early to show that the Stranger is no noble hero. It shouldn’t have been acceptable then, and it is certainly unacceptable now. It casts the Stranger, and maybe the whole film, in a light that may be hard to overcome in a modern context.

For some viewers, the scene will be a barrier to entry. If you can stomach it, or fast forward through it, the movie is otherwise rewarding thanks to Eastwood’s mysterious performance and genre-defying direction. It is some of the best work he did as an actor and director. It is worth checking out, as long as you can get past its one gigantic and possibly unforgivable flaw.

Source: Polygon