High Plains Drifter (1973)

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Billy Curtis, Stefan Gierasch, Jack Ging, Mariana Hill, Mitchell Ryan, Ted Hartley, Geoffrey Lewis, Anthony James, Robert Donner, Paul Brinegar, Dan Vadis, Walter Barnes, Richard Bull. [R]

Eastwood’s first Western that he also directed is one of his better ones, darkly humorous and allegorical. He plays an unnamed stranger drifting into a small mining town that treats him with hostile suspicion, but he proves more than capable with a gun and gets hired on to protect them from some outlaws that the townsfolk “used” and double-crossed a while back…but the price for the stranger’s help is very steep indeed. As director, Eastwood demonstrates an indebted skill for chilly atmospherics and visual flair, though he stumbles when trying to draw out moody suspense like Sergio Leone; he plays an especially enigmatic antihero, with an emphasis on the “anti” (the sexual politics here have dated very poorly, to say the least). The eerie supernatural qualities and heavy-handed symbolism don’t always work (hmm, what could that red-painted town possibly represent?), and those scenes of flashbacks of late-night beatings do go on; there are more cracks of the whip here than the average “Lash” LaRue double feature! When the picture works, though (which is often), it’s very effective, with critical and deconstructionist elements that would hijack the genre after his later near-masterpiece, Unforgiven; before that, look to his Pale Rider from 1985 for a companion piece of sorts.

76/100