It is fair to say that I shouldn't judge a film by its first half until I see the second half. What may seem lazy and self-indulgent at the start can suddenly snap into crystal clear focus and become wickedly purposeful once all of the cards are on the table.
I wasn't feeling High Plains Drifter at the start. Once it was over, I was consumed by it completely.
I normally will tell people to watch the film before I get to far into the plot as I don't want to ruin the experience of discovery that I had watching the film fresh. If you have any inkling at all about wanting to see this film, do not read any further and go watch High Plains Drifter. It is available on HBO Go as of this writing and it is $2.99 to rent on Amazon, Vudu, and Youtube. It will be 3 dollars well spent.
So let's talk a long ride into a small town and see what the hell is going on in High Plains Drifter.
Film #26 High Plains Drifter (1973)
This is one of the worst put together trailers I have ever seen, but I do appreciate the 'Aim to see it!' at the end.
Here is the imdb.com cast listing. Here is the wikipedia page about the production.
The film starts off with The Stranger (Clint Eastwood) riding into the town of Lago. It is a small town that appears to be growing rather quickly with freshly built buildings and some currently being built that are lining the dirt and sand covered main road. As the Stranger rides through town, seemingly everyone is suspiciously staring at him. He passes them in silence. Two men with a wagon and horses start to leave, cracking a whip loudly to get the horses going.
The Stranger gets off his horse and heads into the saloon, ordering a bottle of booze and a beer. Among the men in the bar are three hired gunslingers. For whatever reason, they do not take kindly to the Stranger drinking in the bar. When it appears that the conversation is going to turn violent, the Stranger leaves them in the saloon. He heads across the road to the barber shop for a shave. With a face full of lather, the three hired guns attempt to threaten the Stranger. He immediately shoots all three, not in self defense, as they hadn't pulled their guns yet.
As he is heading to his horse, a local woman gets in his way on purpose to let him know what she thinks about people like him. The Stranger grabs her, drags her to the stable nearby, and rapes her. (Needless to say, the Stranger is not a good man.) He then goes and gets a room at the hotel nearby and quickly falls asleep. He dreams of three men with bull whips, whipping, striking, and strangling a man while the townspeople of Lago watch on silently. He pleads for help and no one comes forward. They dying man tells them they are all going to hell.
The town of Lago does not want the Stranger there, but it now have a bigger problem. The three hired guns were there to protect the town from three other gunslingers that the town had hired previously. The town has a few secrets. A marshall had come to town and found out that the nearby private mine was on government property and was going to tell the proper authorities. The original hired guns whipped the marshall to death. The town then framed them for the theft of a gold ingot and got them sent to prison. Perfectly enough, their sentence is ending today. So the mayor, sheriff, and other leaders in the town decide they need to try and hire the Stranger as he is clearly good with a gun.
The Stranger is not really interested in helping them, but they tell him he can have whatever he wants. Anything? Anything at all. This sets in motion the bizarre tilt the rest of the film takes.
The Stranger does take whatever he wants. Boots, a saddle, a handful of cigars, but then he starts making bigger requests. He orders the saloon owner to buy everyone a drink. The bartender asks for payment and the sheriff tells him its on the house as the Stranger gets whatever he wants. The Stranger makes a small person named Mordecai (Billy Curtis) the new sheriff and mayor. The Stranger tells the owner of the gun store that everyone should get a new rifle as they are all a part of the local militia that he just created. He tells some local Mexican laborers to start making a large table for a feast. When they ask about where they will get the lumber, he tells them to tear down the stable that is owned by the same guy who owns the Hotel. He then tells the hotel owner to remove everyone from his establishment so the Stranger can stay there alone. The Stranger then insists on having a meal with the same woman he raped earlier (She has been trying to kill him, first with a hand gun and then with a knife). He is turning the town upside down simply because he can.
After some more chaos and cruelty (people try to kill him in his hotel room, but he is a step ahead and tosses a stick of dynamite into the room as they enter and he leaves), he ends up taking the hotel owner's wife against her will into their bedroom and rapes her too. She tells him about the marshall that the town has killed and put in an unmarked grave outside of town. She believes he is unable to rest in peace.
The Stranger then orders that the town be painted red. Every building. He has them put up a banner that reads 'Welcome Home Boys' with big red letters, a sign for the three gunslingers when they come to town. As he heads out to see where they are currently, the Stranger paints the word 'Hell' on the sign for Lago.
The Stranger locates the gunslingers and takes a couple of shots at them, just to let them know they are being targeted and then returns to town, knowing they will be there soon.
Soon after, everything comes to a head. The gunslingers enter the town. They start shooting the townspeople. The townspeople start shooting back. Buildings catch on fire. The blood red town is in flames with violence and death everywhere. It has become Hell. The leader of the gunslingers, Stacey (Geoffrey Lewis), seeing that his partners are dead, hears a voice in the darkness, 'Help me. Help me.' It sounds exactly like the man who he whipped to death. As the Stranger faces off with him, Stacey is yelling, 'Who are you?!' He gets no answer, the Stranger just shoots him.
The town is in ruin, the gunslingers are dead, and the Stranger rides out of town. He passes Mordecai as he is putting a proper grave marker up for the killed marshall. When he says to the Stranger, 'I never did know your name.', the Stranger replies, 'Yes, you do.' and then rides off.
I honestly didn't know how to get from A to B in talking about High Plains Drifter without discussing the story. Is the Stranger the marshall himself? Is he the personification of vengeance? Is he the actual Devil, sent to Lago to punish everyone for their sins? The film doesn't tell you and it is equal parts amazing and frustrating. Let me explain a little. I love that the this film doesn't give you an easy answer, because if it did give an explanation then it would take away some of the chaotic feel that the last 20 minutes or so delivers. What is frustrating is that Clint Eastwood cast his stunt double, Buddy Van Horn, as the marshall with the purposeful intent of clouding the waters of who The Stranger actually is. As Buddy Van Horn looks almost exactly like Eastwood, I did not realize that it was a different actor until after I finished the film and read about the cast and production, so that left me a little confused during the run time of the film. Wouldn't the town recognize the guy they watched get murdered in front of them? I was wondering when someone would just straight up identify the Stranger as the marshall. It is hinted that when Mordecai has a flashback to the night of the whipping, so I figured he knows who the Stranger really is and that is why he was so eager to help him. But if the Stranger isn't the marshall, how did he have a dream about the whipping and how did he know to say 'Help me' to Stacey?
Also, if he wasn't the ghost of the marshall or the reanimated body of the marshall (ala The Crow), then his appearance in Lago is weirdly suspect. He did not enter the town to start a fight. The three idiot gunfighters picked a fight with him first. I really don't know if he would have caused much trouble by drinking his beer and getting a shave. I suppose you could argue that if he is the Devil or an agent of chaos, then trouble would always brew around him.
Like I said, I really love the idea of the sins of the past coming back to destroy the very thing you sought to protect, and it is here two fold, with the original crime of the whipping and then framing of the original hired guns to get them sent to prison, but I feel like if it had just hammered out just a smidge more logic in the narrative, it would have been perfect.
What I said at the top about judging a film on the first half isn't fair speaks to how I was feeling about this film until the Stranger's plan to turn Lago into Hell came into view. The first half of this just felt wrong for wrong's sake. The Stranger not saying anything until seven minutes in the film feels like Eastwood was pushing for the Man with No Name vibe again, and while it works, it didn't feel fresh. Eastwood's dialogue was also low and through his teeth, usually with a cigar clenched between them. It is the distinct Clint Eastwood snarl but since most of what he said were macho one liners, it didn't feel genuine to me. It felt like Eastwood playing Eastwood in a film that he directed and produced. When the Stranger shoots the men first before they draw shows you that he doesn't really care about the law and that makes him morally gray, when he rapes the woman immediately after, it just piles on that he is a bad guy, and it felt gratuitous. Once you figure out that he is there to punish the entire town in whatever way he sees fit, his actions make more sense (I get they were going for the point that the woman watched without action as a man was whipped to death in front of her, so that her being violated without no one really caring makes some narrative sense, but I am sure there was a better way of handling that). The wife of the hotel owner says to the Stranger, '"I knew you were cruel but I didn't know how far you could go." He calmly states, "Well you still don't." And we don't either until the very end of the film. In hindsight, the end does support the beginning, thankfully so, or else this would have just been a cruel film with nowhere to go but down.
Much like the dark weirdness of Django Kill ...If You Live, Shoot!, High Plains Drifter keeps bending your expectation of what is going to happen next until it breaks. This is not a bad thing. The last third of both films is so off the rails from how you expect a western would end that it forces you to stop thinking and just dive into the deep end of the madness until the credits roll and then allow yourself to come up for air and sanity.
This film also reminds me of Day of Anger in the way that the main character of the story isn't a good person and they are able to use their position to get what they want out of a town and don't care who they destroy along the way. It makes me wonder how Lee Van Cleef would have played The Stranger and I kind of wish I could have seen him play a character so purely chaotic and dark. Lee Van Cleef as the Western Devil? How did this not happen?
Clint Eastwood directed this film and you can see here that he already had a confidence in his ability to tell a story. There are some wonderfully long tracking shots of him riding through Lago and his handling of the whipping death of the marshall is so matter of fact that it makes the whole thing more gruesome. The close ups on individual townspeople's faces as that is going on tells a number of stories with no words. The night time finale with the buildings on fire and him in the foreground do make the whole town feel and look like it went to Hell. Having this dark twisted story take place along a bright blue lake with cloud dotted skies just makes what's going on feel worse. How can such terrible things go on in a place that looks this damn beautiful? This is God's country, right? Eastwood did a good job of presenting what at first looked like a run of the mill western and then twisting it into a nightmare.
The score by Dee Barton is hypnotizing. It feels like an Ennio Morricone score went to Hell along with the town of Lago. It is darkly beautiful with its surface level angelic strings and chimes but a haunting harmonica joins it along with a rising drumbeat that gives the whole piece a harder edge. It is a really great score that compliments the film very well.
As you can tell, I am conflicted on some of the story beats and decisions made in High Plains Drifter, but I am not conflicted in saying that this was a really interesting film that I did not see coming. The title tells you nothing about what you are getting into and I am glad for that. Had I even the slightest idea of what this film was about, I don't think I would have been as floored as I was in the last twenty minutes. A town literally painted red waiting for their past sins to return.
High Plains Drifter is a hell of a thing.
Western Checklist (nowhere near official or scientific):
- Weird gang member names? Clint Eastwood is billed as The Stranger. Can't get any more weird and badass than that.
- Beautiful landscapes? The lake, Mono Lake, is pretty but I wouldn't recommend drinking the water.
- Any terrified horses? One of the returning gunslingers shoots a horse. Hopefully not for real.
- How many Ernest Borgnines? Robert Donner played the preacher in this film. He was Exidor on Mork & Mindy.
- Any buildings catch on fire? A lot on screen and the rest were burned down as soon as production wrapped.
- Does it have a theme song with the name of the film in the title? No, but here is the score from the beginning of the film. So good.
Rating:
I am going to give the High Plains Drifter 4.5 out of 5 tin stars. The last third of the film really brings it all together but the first part felt like the Clint Eastwood Gravely One Liner Show (with some rape), but when the plan becomes clear, this film elevates to another level. Very recommended!
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