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Unless Clint is in it.

Eastwood got his start in westerns, and even though he has gone on to create a diverse body of work as both an actor and a director, he's the only guy left where the audience just assumes comfort with (and knowledge of) the genre. So it's interesting to consider that High Plains Drifter, the first western where he was the director as well as the star, seems to be where everything about the genre changed. Part of this is just because of when it was released: Film was evolving in the 1970s, becoming more realistic and less idealized, and this film from '73 sucks the romance right out of the Western, finishing the deconstruction that the spaghetti westerns had started. The film's setting is a dirty, violent town populated by nasty people with dark secrets; there's not a hero to be found here. Drifter also seems to be a fairly early example of the genre-bending trend.

Not that it was the first movie to be "more than just a western"; there had been comedy-westerns (Support Your Local Sherriff), musical-westerns (Paint Your Wagon), and anachronistic-adventure-westerns (TV's The Wild, Wild West). And Eastwood doesn't explicitly lay out that he's crossing genre barriers - some in my audience didn't quite grasp that High Plains Drifter is gothic in more than just tone. Combining this different aesthetic with a different kind of story could have yielded a mess; instead, it results in a movie that combines the intimacy of a gothic thriller with the expansiveness of the West.

The movie opens with an unnamed stranger (Eastwood) riding into the town of Lago. Even before he arrives, the town is on edge. Three gunmen try to murder him while he visits the bar and barber; the stranger calmly dispatches them. That is, admittedly, defensible, but the manner in which he has his way with Callie Travers (Marianna Hill) marks him as dangerous and of questionable morality. Still, his skill with a gun is valuable, and Lago's most prominent citizens - including the mayor (Stefan Gierasch), sheriff (Walter Barnes), and the representative of the mining company that employs most of the town (Jack Ging) offer him a job: There's three outlaws being released from jail, and Lago will be their first stop. The town would sure appreciate it if they were dead. The stranger reluctantly agrees to take the job, after the men promise him "anything he wants".

That the townsfolk aren't giving the stranger the whole story is a given, although he isn't exactly forthcoming with details about himself. We get to see his dreams, though, and it's through those sequences that we realize he is more than some random drifter, but is in fact intimately involved in the town's story. Eastwood gives a remarkable performance, taking a character than many actors would have made a pure symbol of justice or revenge and making him multifaceted. He makes his character cold and apparently heartless, with even his rare jokes infused with a casual cruelty. The only person in the town he really seems to get along with is the bullied midget, Mordecai (Billy Curtis), and even that appears to serve mainly as a way to torment the other townspeople, while setting Mordecai up for nasty retribution. The only indication of kindness in him is when he tells the Mexican workers to stay away from a town gathering.

Most of the cast will come off as unpleasant during the course of the movie. Even Mordecai seems to be a little suck-up, taking too much joy in his new position as the stranger's sidekick. The outlaws are at least up front about their goals and methods, though they're too violent to be likeable as honest crooks. Any sympathy we may have for Calie comes from her being violated by Eastwood's character, and even then... Well, one should never say a woman has that coming, but she's a part of the town's systemic rot, and the type of bully who relies on there being lines a man will not cross. As much as rape is indefensible, there is some satisfaction in seeing her taken down a peg. That we're able to feel somewhat conflicted about that is what drags the audience down into this world's murky morality. We're forced to confront the question of which repugnant acts are justice, which are revenge, and which are what is necessary to survive in a harsh world. The audience ponders it much more than the characters do, for certain - only the innkeeper's wife (Verna Bloom) ever seems to worry about what is wrong, as opposed to what hurts her personally.

This is the second feature Eastwood directed, but he's clearly learned well from the directors he worked for as an actor. The unforced style he's come to be known for is already present; there's never a point where the characters feel less than authentic. He also knows how to make his visuals work. There are several shots of Lago from above that are low enough to let the audience see the town's geography but wide enough to emphasize its isolation, which allows the audience to believe that these things could happen without accountability. The dream sequences are suitably unreal without the overt use of visual tricks. The red-tinged finale is apocalyptic without ever feeling unreal.

The American Western, with its romanticized frontier and good guys in white hats, was already dying by the time Eastwood made "High Plains Drifter". Eastwood's dark, R-rated quasi-ghost story wasn't its death knell, but after watching it, a viewer might be hard-pressed to go back to the hammier, less challenging westerns Hollywood was making just ten years earlier.

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originally posted: 06/16/05 15:48:36
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