"High Plains Drifter": review

Unlimited beer and a pocketful of cigarillos: the stranger gets whatever he wants.

[WARNING: major spoilers for an old film.]

1973's "High Plains Drifter" arrives hard on the heels of the "spaghetti" Westerns, best associated with two names: director Sergio Leone and actor Clint Eastwood (1964's "A Fistful of Dollars," 1965's "For a Few Dollars More," and 1966's "The Good the Bad, and the Ugly"). As a genre, the spaghetti Western (so called because the filmmakers were mostly Italian) dominated from the mid-60s to the early 70s. "High Plains Drifter" is the first Western that Clint Eastwood had directed (the first film he'd ever directed was 1971's thriller "Play Misty for Me"), and in what would become something of a tradition, Eastwood and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman (beOscared for 1971's "The French Connection") created a revisionist Western—one in which morals were not primary-colored, and ugly antiheroes were at the fore. Set in the lakeside mining town of Lago (\ˈlaɡo\, Spanish for "lake" and pronounced \ˈleɡo\ by only one character who says it that way only once), the story revolves around a drifter (Eastwood) who rides in one day and, over time, learns about the town's dark history, especially as relates to its previous marshal, Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn), about whose dying moments—the marshal was whipped to death—the stranger dreams. What unfolds is an eerily spiritual story.

The townspeople are nervous because three people, Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis, a longtime Eastwood collaborator), Dan Carlin (Dan Vadis), and his brother Cole Carlin (Anthony James, with that unforgettable face) are soon to be released from prison, and the people of Lago know these bandits will be arriving in town for vengeance. The reason for the vengefulness eventually becomes clear: the bandits had been hired to kill Marshal Duncan after he discovered an illegal mine whose gold provided Lago its wealth, and with the marshal gone, the town reneged on paying the bandits, having them thrown in prison instead. So this is a different setup from the usual "please, O Kind Stranger, protect us" scenario found in so many Westerns. The townspeople are far from innocent here. 

And the stranger is anything but kind. When Callie, the local beauty (Mariana Hill), speaks saucily to the stranger at the story's outset, he takes her into a stable and rapes her. Later, while the stranger is taking a bath at the local barber's, Callie returns with a gun and tries to shoot him point-blank. The stranger simply ducks under the water and reemerges unscathed—our first sign that something about him might be more than it seems. The townspeople hire the stranger to protect them, but he demands they give him everything he wants—free drinks, free smokes, and exclusive use of the local hotel. The stranger even makes the local dwarf, Mordecai (Billy Curtis), into a sheriff/mayor. In quiet moments, the stranger dreams of Marshal Duncan's death. A hotel co-owner, Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom), tries haranguing and attacking the stranger, but he overcomes her, and rather preposterously, the two make love. Later, Sarah asks the stranger whether he believes in ghost stories—one of which is a legend that a soul is restless if its owner's body is buried in an unmarked grave.

Eventually, the bandits are set to arrive in Lago, and the stranger orders the townspeople to paint their buildings a garish red. The sign with the town's name is repainted with the word "Hell." What happens next is what we expect from almost every Clint Eastwood movie: the bandits get taken down one by one, with the stranger even whipping Cole Carlin to death. Most of the town has burned down in the fight, but the most significant moment comes at the end, with Mordecai working at a gravesite and watching as the stranger is about to ride out of town. Mordecai says he still doesn't know the stranger's name, but the stranger replies that he does, and the camera pans over to the grave: "Marshal Jim Duncan, Rest in Peace." The implication should be obvious by now: the marshal was never given a proper burial, and Eastwood's stranger is his revenant, karma incarnate. And now, with justice done and a properly marked grave, the marshal is at peace.

The story digs deep into the lore of folk tales and ghost stories, the uneasy boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. The trope of an agitated revenant, a restless and angry spirit, an entity with unfinished business, is a common one in many cultures. John Wayne saw "High Plains Drifter" and reportedly wrote Eastwood a letter lamenting that this was a portrayal of a West that Wayne didn't know, but Eastwood may have been going for something metaphysical. He has made a career of playing stalking, spectral, skeletal figures with one foot liminally in the afterworld; his acting in spaghetti Westerns showed he already knew how to embody such a character. It could be that part of Eastwood's spooky charm comes from his close association with the angel of death.

About that "charm": the stranger rapes one woman, then overpowers and makes love to another one. These days, the label toxic masculinity would be used to describe Eastwood's character, but the movie could be saying something deeper. While there's no excusing Callie's rape, we eventually see that this is part and parcel with the stranger's overall demeanor: he already knows what the town is guilty of, so the townspeople's honor and dignity are already forfeit, and ultimately, the town is burned to the ground for its collective sins after the stranger has fully tasted of its goods. The sex with Sarah Belding, however, sends a different message: Sarah is married to a timid, unmanly husband, and only someone radiating masculinity, as the stranger does, can satisfy her. But the stranger embodies unrealistic masculine traits and ideals precisely because he is an unearthly being. Through sex, Sarah gets her strange communion with the divine, and at the end of the story, she doesn't stick around for the rebuilding of Lago: instead, she leaves town to find her own fortune.

It could be that we see some biblical tropes flitting around in the background. Mordecai the dwarf is promoted by the stranger to marshal and mayor of Lago: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Also cruelly biblical is the stranger's rapine of Lago, destroying the town he has agreed to protect. Renaming the town Hell, then burning it to the ground, could easily represent some sort of divine retribution—a theme in so many Eastwood films ("We've all got it comin', kid"). At the same time, if we're using "Unforgiven" as a revisionist template, Eastwood also says in that movie that "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." Applying this metric to "High Plains Drifter," Eastwood's character could be seen as an indiscriminate force of nature, reaping both the guilty and the innocent: paint the entire town red and burn the entire town down. Karma, whether it's seen as a moral force or as a neutral force, has long been a through-line for Eastwood's works.

My buddy Mike and I were discussing awesome Westerns recently, and we settled on "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (see #13) as well as "High Plains Drifter," which I hadn't seen at the time. In the end, I think "Josey Wales" is a slightly better film, but "High Plains Drifter" stands as an unsettling story that masterfully uses the technique of show, don't tell to perfection. So much about the narrative is not explicitly stated by the film itself, but it seeps into your consciousness as your mind inexorably puts two and two together. "High Plains Drifter" sits with you, a tea worth steeping.