L'Homme des hautes plaines

I really had no idea what to expect when I grabbed High Plains Drifter from the video store shelf. I recently saw The Outlaw Josey Wales, and really enjoying that film, I figured I couldn't go wrong; I was right. High Plains Drifter is more than just another western with the standard assortment of gun fights, bar scenes, and shots of horseback riding on wide-open prairie. To be sure, it does have its share of the said events, it is a western after all, but what I particularly liked was the film's character development and well thought out story.

I don't want to ruin any of the film's enjoyment for any potential viewers, so I won't go into describing any of the characters. Suffice it to say though that they all have a very realistic quality to them, especially Clint Eastwood's character. No stereotyped good guys/bad guys here, thank you very much.

As I mentioned, the story is also very nicely developed. It has multiple layers which are peeled away as the movie progresses, remaining entertained throughout.

High Plains Drifter is an excellent western. If you're a fan of the genre, you'll no doubt find it to be an entertaining watch.

One of the great western plots is the outsider stranger who comes to a town and one way or another rids it of its bad elements. A cliché best typified by Shane. In High Plains Drifter we have the town of Lago which sure doesn't look like much. A mysterious stranger comes to town played by Clint Eastwood and he's certainly up for the role of town savior. But as the film unfolds is Lago a town worth saving?

The funny thing is that Eastwood himself did a variation on the plot of Shane in Pale Rider. He's as noble there as Alan Ladd was in Shane. But in High Plains Drifter his gunfighter skills are almost superhuman. And he's far from noble. His brooding presence frightens the town people but he might be their savior so like it or not, they put up with it though they don't like it.

In fact the town's leading citizens are really a scurvy lot and the town has a lot of secrets. As you watch High Plains Drifter you wonder if the crowd is worth saving.

It all works out the same as it does for Shane, but with one supernatural twist. In fact there's not another Clint Eastwood movie let alone western film where the supernatural comes in. It truly is a star vehicle for Eastwood, most of the supporting cast don't have enough to work with to create memorable characters. An exception is Barry Curtis, a midget who Eastwood elevates to prime importance and is really the only true friend the High Plains Drifter has.

In fact High Plains Drifter has a ride into the sunset like no other.

In the coastal town of Lago, a drifter (Clint Eastwood) arrives and is bullied by three "bad guys". He kills them and soon he is invited by the locals to protect the city against three outlaws that would leave a nearby prison in a couple of days. One year ago, these criminals killed Marshal Jim Duncan using whips. The marshal asked for help and the coward towners did not help him. The killers were sent to jail and promised to come back to burn the city when they leave the jail. The citizens offer anything the stranger want "free of charge" for the protection against the rage of the criminals. Who might be the stranger with no name?

"High Plains Drifter" is a great movie about revenge. The viewer never knows whether the "stranger with no name" is a brother or a friend of Marshal Jim Duncan, or whether he is the avenger angel of Jim Duncan himself looking for revenge. In the last scene, when Mordecai asks for the name of the stranger while carving the gravestone of Jin Duncanin the cemetery telling that he did not know his name, the drifter responds that Mordecai does know his name. In the gravestone is written "Marshall Jim Duncan - Rest in Peace". Fans of western movies will not be disappointed with this film, no matter whether he is a cowboy or a supernatural character. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Estranho sem Nome" ("The Stranger without a Name")

Note: On 01 Sep 2020, I saw this film again.

A lone gunman with no name and seemingly with no past, rides into the dusky town of Lago. The residents of Lago at first view the stranger with suspicion, but when news that some outlaws that are out for blood are on their way to town, they ask the stranger for his help.

This is Clint Eastwood's first Western film that he directed, and it's clear and evident that the guy not only loves the genre that made his name, he also knows what makes it work. Obviously having worked for Sergio Leone, Eastwood was making notes because High Plains Drifter oozes the mythical aura of many of Leone's finest genre offerings. To which, with thanks, the result is one of the best offerings in the 70s for the Oater enthusiast.

The film opens with our mysterious drifter slowly coming out of the beautiful sprawling haze and into Lago, it's ethereal, then there's just the sound of the horse breathing and the clop of its hooves that can be heard (the sound mix here is incredible), it's a gloriously mysterious opening that sets the tone perfectly. Yet Eastwood is just toying with us though, for a quick jolt of sex and violence snaps us out of the beatific warmth and into a quite hauntingly cold and morally challenged place. From here on in the stranger will demand all manner of odd things from the residents of Lago, he seems to be toying with them and revelling in their discomfort, with Lago quickly resembling an arid hellhole. You see, Lago has a dark secret, and our mysterious stranger has a purpose, and it's this purpose that makes High Plains Drifter an intriguing and gripping experience.

A well known fact now is that the great man of the genre, John Wayne, wrote Eastwood to strongly complain about his harsh vision of the West, one can only think the Duke failed to grasp the post Vietnam feel of a 70s made Western. It's a great directorial effort from Eastwood, more so when you marry up his acting performance to his directorial duties. Very much the perfect role, it lets Eastwood accentuate his rugged Western leanings. Eastwood would direct the similarly themed Pale Rider in the 80s and then the genre crown topper Unforgiven in the 90s. A Western great in each decade? Well that will always be debatable, but what we do know is that the Western genre was considerably lucky to have had such a man to keep the genre going for the newer interested wanderers into the Wild West.

Beautifully photographed (Bruce Surtees) on the shores of Mono Lake, California, it's a film pungent with sex, sadism, retribution and risks. High Plains Drifter is mystical and magnificent and essential Western fare. 9/10

A heat haze reigns over the high plains, making them look like the valleys of the shadow of death. Emerging from the mistiness a lone rider seems to make one with the shadow, coming to our direction. It's not an entrance as much as an appearance, and in the small town of Lago, not the most welcomed one. From the simple by-standers to the business owners, gazes of bewilderment and barely concealed fears converge to his direction, stares that say "who is he?" "where does he come from?" "what is he doing here?". As usual, Clint Eastwood looks like he doesn't give a d***, and we -viewers- know we'll be lucky if one of the three questions gets an answer.

That's the attitude Eastwood built his legend on, as the emerging Western icon after John Wayne but closer to a Bogart-like figure, Eastwood had that edge over Wayne, he didn't need a story, his 'presence' could make a film. Eastwood emerged with the late 60s and his "Man-With-No-Name" character immediately appealed to a young generation of movie goers longing for outcasts who could reflect their own defiance toward the petty preoccupations of a conservative society, minus the insecurity. Eastwood played rebellious characters but with coolness oozing from his apparent detachment, he made his charisma so effortless that he stole Wayne's thunder.

Speaking of Wayne, that he criticized "High Plain Drifters" in an open letter to Eastwood proves the latter's point, he might have played a "right-wing fantasy" in "Dirty Harry" but when you're criticized by Wayne in 1973, you're not in conflict with the Western icon but with the out-of-touch director of "Green Berets". Eastwood was old-fashioned but in a revolutionary way. And this is why his figure as the lonesome stranger coming from nowhere but not for nothing became an enduring trademark of his own, one that stuck to him until his Oscar-winning "Unforgiven". And twenty years later, Eastwood knew the secret ingredient he had to instill in his movies: making his Stranger's character as quiet and stingy in words as his Leone's counterpart and as effective in words and action as his Don Siegel's Harry.

Some critics saw in the film an attempt to imitate the masters but that's an unfair trial because what Eastwood imitates (not without a few ounces of self-awareness) is the character he created and whom he plagiarizes with insistence, because that's the way you build your own style. As a director, he's rather minimalist and linear, with a few flashbacks cleverly inserted to give a needed boost to the plot, until a climax that looks like nothing seen before, not in old Westerns, not in Leone's: surrealism with a meaning. In "Pale Rider", a similar confrontation would be handled in a less showy manner but "High Plain Drifters" redeems its lack of subtlety by the boldness of his protagonist and his personal motives that give a weird of plausibility in his actions, it might even be Eastwood's way to renovate the Western genre, whipping the dust off with a mystical savagery.

That's Eastwood's touch, to infuse spirituality in seemingly ordinary stories, with mysterious but not unreal protagonists, men with a way with the gun and the ladies and yet accessible to the common folks, never too detached, never too straightforward... there's an element of humor and balance that keep his heroes rooted in reality while their aura evokes supernatural elements. Now, it would ruin the experience to reveal what "High Plain Drifters" is about but let's say it involves a town that is so full of coward people that it makes Hadleyville people look like the Magnificent Seven The film opens with the Stranger killing three thugs who were literally begging for it, as a result, the town asks him for protection against three outlaws who are coming to attack them. He accepts, but not without a price.

As the plot moves on, a few hints are given, the sound of a whip alerts the Stranger, a woman bumps into him in a way to 'make acquaintance' What he does after is condemnable and ugly but what the scene denounces is the apathy and lack of reaction of the men not without reminding of "Dirty Harry" and whose correlation with the Stranger's mission is revealed later. Meanwhile, the film oscillates between moments of ominous quietness, brutality and humor, especially when the town is ready to accept any of the Stranger's wishes including the nomination of the town's midget (Billy Curtis) mayor as sheriff and mayor. The Strangers throws customers out of the hotel, making an enemy out of the owner, and a friend out of his wife (Verna Bloom). Later, some treacheries are revealed among the "good" people of Lago, which broadens even more the notions of good and evil, an issue that became persistent in Eastwood's body of work as soon he started making movies.

"High Plain Drifters" denounces the evilness lying in every human being who acts wrongly but also the lack of reaction of the seemingly good citizen, the more violent scenes involves a nasty public lynching by whipping where we see people staring at a good man being tortured, with a silence that truly gives consent. We never really get to know what ties the flashback with the Stranger, however we know there's a record to settle and that some incidents are so dramatic that it takes a certain dose of poetic justice to fix it, a vision of what is right that doesn't necessarily indulge in being good, that might not be the vision of everyone of the West, but it was Eastwood's and it fit the mood of the 70s and we're disillusioned enough to embrace his poetry almost five decades later.

John Wayne was in position to criticize him but time certainly did justice to the director who did justice in his own movies... when he gets back to the heat haze, we know justice was done and it's satisfying enough.