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HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, Universal, 1973.
Dir. Clint Eastwood, Perf. Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, and Mitch Ryan.
Review by Dominic
In the opening scene of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, a stranger (Eastwood) rides out of the desert toward the isolated town of Lago, wherein he butts heads with a few townsfolk, and tentatively sides with a few others. When summarized briefly the scenario presented here is certainly familiar. However, the opening shots of Eastwood’s film, rendered in a distorted, heat-rippled haze, and the bizarre soundtrack—a ghostlike whine that transforms gradually into an otherworldly chiming, both acoustic and psychedelic—ensures we recognize that the director is toying with conventions rather than pandering to them.
The complex and self-reflexive use of genre that occurs in High Plains Drifter is characteristic of other Eastwood films such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Unforgiven (1992). The film also represents a particularly intriguing example of the mixture of psychology, mythicism and theology Eastwood brings to his vision of the West in Unforgiven, addressing similar themes of sin, self-loathing and retribution. The focus on guilt and atonement in High Plains Drifter, for example, seems to go some way to explaining why the town of Lago apparently contains no children—typically symbols of innocence in adult cinema.
Unlike any of Eastwood’s other films, however, High Plains Drifter captures these themes in a disorientatingly expressionistic style; the world of the film is dreamlike, absurd and impossible, and because of this High Plains Drifter is perhaps the most unique and challenging film in Eastwood’s Western oeuvre.
The drifter rides solemnly into town, and as he grabs a drink he is fiercely eyed-off by a group of three gunmen, whose attempts to intimidate the stranger succeed only in shaking their own confidence, and eventually costing them their lives. As the drifter hangs his head at the local hotel, a ghostly wailing over the soundtrack as he dreams of a man being savagely whipped to death by three hired goons. We later discover that the man in the dream is the former Marshal, who was the victim of the townsfolk’s conspiracy to retain control of an illegal mining operation.
With significant echoes of both The Magnificent Seven (1960) and High Noon (1952), the drifter is hired to both train and defend the townsfolk against the return of the Marshal’s three killers. For his work he is given the run of the town, and after making an affable midget the new Marshal and commandeering the hotel, he has the entire town painted red and renamed “Hell” in anticipation of its malevolent visitors.
Eastwood’s film employs the Western form in a difficult and ambitious way, and steadfastly resists being swept up into the greater crowd of easily digestible genre fare, and its ambiguity won’t sit well with all viewers of a genre so steeped in formalism. For this reviewer, though, Eastwood’s vision is wonderfully developed. The town itself, a sparse and windswept scattering of buildings by the ocean, is purposely unrealistic, and the director makes excellent use of natural sound to emphasize a temporal stasis that amplifies the inhabitants’ concealed sense of moral decay.
As the townsfolk watch the dusty wayfarer trot ominously through town at the start of the film his face cast in shadow, they are largely motionless, as if frozen in time. And time itself, the return of past sins, is a key point of focus. The townsfolk here surely secretly believe that they deserve their punishment—hence their willingness to go along with the drifter’s excesses once he is given the run of the town.
The film is driven along by instinctive, aggressive and powerful performances, and its climax—though predictable—is disturbingly played out, staying with one well after the drifter has vanished into the hills from whence he came.
10/10
