https://demonsresume.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/movie-of-the-day-high-plains-drifter-1973
Believe it or not, the Hollywood titan began his directing career with a Horror spin on the classic Western.
This review contains spoilers.
A bleak desert landscape. Nothing moves amidst the scattered rubble but the heat waves off hardpan, yet through the shimmer appears a lone rider on a horse. Clint Eastwood is: The High Plains Drifter. The Stranger, as he’s credited, arrives in the little mining town of Lago, barely more than a string of shacks along the shoreline of Mono Lake in California. He broods as he saunters down the main thoroughfare, as shifty eyed townsfolk stare daggers at the new arrival.
We’ve seen much of this before, particularly Eastwood as the wanderer, an antihero with no name, It’s not long, however, before High Plains Drifter begins to crank up the nasty. The town of Lago is as grimy as it gets and its denizens aren’t much better. Vile mercenaries, a sheriff as corrupt as he is corpulent, and a sinful secret the town left buried that haunts their dreams. The clock is ticking, because the outlaw Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and his brothers are on their way to Lago to settle an old score. Even the town barber looks evil.
Two parts Western and one part ghost story, High Plains Drifter does an incredible job of blending its genres, predating everyone’s favourite horror/western, Bone Tomahawk (2015) by forty years. The film captures the haunting misery of life at the fringes of the old west. Life in Lago is as bleak as it is hot, and the more we see of the town council plotting their next moves, the more we grow to revile the sleepy little wooden village.
You might expect a grizzled gunfighter with a soft heart to be just the thing needed to clean up this evil town, but by the end of the film you’re wondering if Lago wouldn’t have been better off if The Stranger had never shown up. Eastwood pushes his archetypal ‘ultimate badass’ protagonist to disturbing new lengths and the result is more like a slasher villain than a legend of the west. A spectre and a force of destruction, The Stranger murders, destroys, and even rapes without any remorse. After being hired by the desperate townsfolk to fend off the outlaws, The Stranger revels in stringing them along, only to casually wander off before the final confrontation without so much as a word, which leaves the soon-to-be corpses gawping in shock. It’s a moment that’s as chilling as it is blackly comic.
The film ends on an ambiguous note, suggesting that The Stranger may even be an avenging spirit who, after plunging the town into hell, vanishes in the same heat shimmer he materialised from, as the droning, mosquito-buzz score just builds and builds.
Eastwood is reported to have been enthusiastic about the script when he read it, so much so that he chose to direct it himself, making it the second directing credit in one of the most prolific careers in Hollywood. It’s fascinating that he was attracted to a film like High Plains Drifter. The film is more vicious than what we typically see out of the genre. any sense of heroism is downplayed and the final product feels more akin to a Blood Meridian adaptation than a continuation of The Dollars Trilogy. Eastwood is playing the scummiest incarnation of his legendary gunslinger role, kicking off the story with cold blooded murder and a graphic depiction of rape. Not only that, but Eastwood himself was supposedly the one who pushed to keep its more supernatural elements, kyboshing efforts to alter the script into having a less ambiguous ending.
Eastwood gets creative behind the camera, and this is where the film really comes together. Likely inspired by the bold style of the spaghetti westerns that made him famous, the director manages to turn the squalid little hovel of Lago into a visual feast with his shooting style. A POV shot of a cold blooded murder (predating the iconic opening of Halloween (1978)), a crowd of silhouettes silently watching a man as he’s bull-whipped to death, and visions of The Stranger surrounded by vengeful hellfire, are among some the more striking of images that Eastwood brings to the table on this underrated film.
For a genre-bender, High Plains Drifter certainly leans more on the Western side, but it’s the twisted edge that sets it apart from others of its genre. Certain moments stand out as particularly disturbing, such as a gruesome flashback that continually haunts the citizens of Lago, a bone-chilling murder with a tree branch, and the final look of shock on an innocent camper’s face when he turns to discover three murderous outlaws standing right behind him.
For fans of films like Ravenous (1999), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Bone Tomahawk (2015), High Plains Drifter stands tall as an example of the rare magic of combining the Western and Horror genres. Just don’t expect any white hats to ride in to save the day. When The Stranger is asked what will happen after the outlaws are taken care of, he simply responds: ‘You live with it’. Such seems to be the ultimate conclusion of the movie. Once the horror is over, life just moves on…for some.
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