Pale Rider (1985)

Film: Pale Rider (1985)

Stars: Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, Carrie Snodgress, Richard Dysart, Chris Penn, Sydney Penny

Director: Clint Eastwood

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

Clint Eastwood, to use Gen Z social media parlance, will "always be famous."  In the years after High Plains Drifter, Eastwood would have a few highs (specifically The Outlaw Josey Wales), but would arguably hit one of the bigger nadirs of his career.  The western went out of fashion in the wake of Heaven's Gate failing spectacularly, and so he was back to doing crime films, some of which would make money, but none of which are particularly memorable today.  His best-regarded of the movies that he'd make during the 1980's would be our film today (the first major Hollywood western to come after Heaven's Gate basically ended the genre as a Hollywood staple), but it wasn't until 1992, when Eastwood would make Unforgiven, his magnum opus as a director and one of the great westerns of all-time, that he'd fully cement his stardom for the ages, making one of the biggest movies of the year and gaining Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, & Actor (he'd win the former two).  But I've seen Unforgiven (it's absolutely brilliant), so to finish off our month with Eastwood, we're going to talk about the one major western he made in the 1980's, and one of his last takes on the "man with no name" subgenre, Pale Rider.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows the Preacher (Eastwood), a man who sits atop a pale white horse (hence the title), who comes into the lives of a group of prospectors who are up against Coy LaHood (Dysart), a mining baron who is trying to drive out independent prospectors, led by Hull Barret (Moriarty), who recruits the Preacher to help them with their cause.  The Preacher, whose ties to the cloth aren't particularly strong (it feels more costume than reality as the film wears on), not only starts to ingratiate himself into the community, but also into the hearts of several characters, including widow Sarah Wheeler (Snodgress), who is in love with both he & Hull, and her daughter Megan (Penny), who has a strange infatuation with the Preacher.  As the film goes on, you learn a little bit more about the Preacher, but mostly you get involved into the same plot we've seen most of this month-strange man comes to town, surrounded in myth, and saves the villagers from the evil atop their mount.

Pale Rider is the least of the five films we've watched of Eastwood's this month, and it's mostly because by 1985, Eastwood had been milking the "Man With No Name" routine for decades, and there wasn't a lot more to say.  While this film borrows heavily from High Plains Drifter, it also clearly wants to be Shane by introducing the character of Megan to the formula.  It forgets, however, that most of the magic of Shane is that Joey doesn't really understand what's happening (particularly the wrench that Shane is throwing into his parents' auto pilot marriage), and makes it far too opaque, with the Megan character becoming romantically infatuated with the Preacher rather than just having her want to become him like him as in Shane.

Eastwood's performance here also isn't as strong as High Plains Drifter.  Perhaps not wanting to take risks like United Artists did coming off of the disaster of Heaven's Gate, Warner Brothers kept things simple here, but without the villainous undertones of High Plains Drifter, Eastwood can't really sell the subplot romance with Snodgress, and it's not as clear here that he has a handle on the complicated backstory he's bringing to his part.  As you can tell this month, I'm a fan of Eastwood's, but I'm not a stan, and this one...he's been better.

And indeed, he would be better in the decades to come.  After Unforgiven, Eastwood would almost exclusively work with himself as a director (the last time he did a significant role in a film he didn't direct was Wolfgang Peterson's In the Line of Fire in 1993).   He'd make a number of Oscar-cited films (The Bridges of Madison County, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima, American Sniper), many of them hits, and make an unfortunate move into partisan politics.  Always a Republican, his appearance at the 2012 Republican National Committee where he would debate Barack Obama in the guise of an empty chair, drew confusion from his fans & partisan allies alike (Eastwood would later say he regretted this speech).  Even today, he's still making movies-in 2021, Eastwood at the age of 91 became the oldest person ever to direct a major studio film with Warner Brothers' Cry Macho.  Next month, we're going to shift to another icon of the 1960's & 70's cinema, one who would appear in several key westerns, but would get a very long, lauded second life as a film director.