High Plains Drifter (1973)

Film: High Plains Drifter (1973)

Stars: Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, Billy Curtis

Director: Clint Eastwood

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Clint Eastwood: click here to learn more about Mr. Eastwood (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Inevitably with Clint Eastwood, we were going to get to the films that the actor turned into a director.  Eastwood for modern film audiences is known as a proper movie star, of course, but also as a much-lauded director.  In fact, not counting cameos, Eastwood hasn't starred in a film for another director since 1993's In the Line of Fire (with Wolfgang Peterson).  Eastwood first started directing in the early 1970's, with the thriller Play Misty for Me, but that didn't stop him from wanting to lean into his most iconic genre (the western), and indeed his second directorial effort was the 1973 cowboy flick High Plains Drifter.  The film was a hit, but was noted for being a departure from many of the films that had made Eastwood famous, and indeed, was a step further into the violence that westerns had started to allow in the late-1960's.  John Wayne once said of this film, "this isn't what the West was all about."  The movie came at a turning point in Eastwood's career-two years earlier, he'd made Dirty Harry, which would spawn four sequels and would become the defining role of his career.  In 1973, less-than-a-decade after Rawhide was pulled off of the air mid-season due to low ratings, Eastwood had suddenly become one of the most bankable names in Hollywood.  All of this meant that there were a lot of expectations (for me, and for Clint) going into High Plains Drifter...how could Eastwood find something new to say about the western, now that he was allowed to do so in his own voice?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie features the Stranger (Eastwood), a drifter of sorts who comes into the town of Lago, and quickly kills three men who are protecting the town with little issue.  We see, but the other characters don't, that the Stranger is haunted by the death of a US Marshal named Jim Duncan, who is being whipped to death by several outlaws.  As the film progresses, we understand that Duncan was not a villain but a hero, and the town hired the outlaws to kill him after he threatened to tell that the local gold mine they were getting rich off of was illegally dug on government-owned land.  The town is wracked with guilt, and in trouble because they never paid those outlaws, so they hire Duncan to protect them & kill the outlaws, but for a price...they have to give him whatever he wants, and increasingly we find that he wants chaos, and to destroy the town itself.  As the film continues, several of the townsmen are killed or have their livelihoods destroyed, but in the end both the outlaws (and several townspeople) are killed, with the Stranger telling his only real friend in the town (a little person named Mordecai, played by veteran character actor Billy Curtis who was at one point one of the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, as well as Mayor McCheese) when he's asked "what is your name?" and he responds "you know my name."

The ending makes the film.  In original drafts of the script, it was strongly implied that the Stranger is Duncan's brother, out for revenge, but Eastwood was smart enough to change that so it was more ambiguous, and as written, it reads more like he's Duncan's ghost or spirit come back to haunt the town for betraying him for doing what was right.  This gives the performance a different level, and honestly, it improves it.  Eastwood is not noted as a great actor in the same way that he is a great director, but I personally think he's a strong actor, and this is a good testament as to why-he's able to give this character a sense of enigma that other actors would've wanted to solve in the film, ruining the picture.  He also would've made him more redemptive.  The Stranger, unlike Jim Duncan, is not a good man.  He rapes multiple women, violently ruins the lives of several townspeople, and seems to delight in killing.  He is not a hero, and Eastwood plays him as a villain (barely even an antihero)...someone who is literally coming from hell to punish other wickedness, not to dismiss his own.  You could read the ending as him riding back into the abyss in the closing moments of the picture.

The film itself, with apologies to John Wayne, is therefore pretty darn good.  I loved the framing device of him being evil, and quite enjoyed how unique this film is.  It's also an unusual picture in Eastwood's directorial efforts, given that Jim Duncan, the only truly good person in the movie, is killed for defending the government.  Eastwood, who would enter politics (he'd become the Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, and endorse the Republican presidential candidacies of John McCain & Mitt Romney) is most noted not necessarily for being a conservative figure in Hollywood, but for being a principled libertarian figure (for example, he is a supporter of gay marriage).  As a result, most of his films are critical of the government, but High Plains Drifter still holds it in relatively high regard, with the "people" being the ones at fault here.  That would not be the case as you'd move further into his filmography.