High Plains Drifter is a 1973 Western film, with a hint of the supernatural, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. The film was influenced by the work of Eastwood's two major collaborators Sergio Leone and Don Siegel (Eastwood has noted that the graveyard set featured in the film's finale had tombstones reading "Sergio Leone" and "Don Siegel," intended as a comical "dedication" to both directors).[1]
High Plains Drifter was filmed on location on the shores of Mono Lake, California. The screenplay was written by Ernest Tidyman and an uncredited Dean Riesner, with Tidyman authoring the novelization. Dee Barton provided the film's eerie musical score.
Plot
A lone man on horseback emerges from a shimmering desert horizon and heads into the fictional town of Lago, in a setting like the Arizona territory. After passing a cemetery on the town's outskirts, he rides slowly down the main street, where the townspeople eye him warily. He exchanges a stare with three gun-toting men on the boardwalk of the saloon; then his attention is drawn sharply by the crack of a teamster's whip. Dismounting, this Stranger (Eastwood) goes to the saloon, for a beer and a bottle of whiskey. Coming in and baiting him as a "flea-bitten range bum", the gunslingers inquire whether he's "fast enough" for Lago. Baiting them in return, he speaks quietly, "A lot faster than you'll ever live to be." He exits and walks across the street to the barbershop. Though unnerved by him, the barber gamely begins giving him a shave.
Panorama of Lago, as the tall, lone stranger approaches the town at the beginning of the film.
Within minutes, the gunslingers enter, surround the Stranger, and attempt to lay hands on him. He surprises them with his gun drawn and ready, masked by the apron the barber had tied around his neck. He shoots all three dead in seconds. Impressed, a dwarf named Mordecai approaches from the saloon and lights the Stranger's cigar. "What did you say your name was again?" the dwarf asks. "I didn't," the Stranger replies. As the Stranger walks away from the carnage, an attractive townswoman named Callie Travers seems to desire his attention. Rather than gain it politely, she accosts and insults him. When he tries to walk on, she badgers him, until he drags her into the livery stable and rapes her, apparently to her ultimate satisfaction. Leaving her without a word, he checks taciturnly into the local hotel, where he declines to sign the register. As he lies in bed, in his room, he is troubled by a vision: Three men with bullwhips flog a fourth man helplessly on a nighttime street, while faceless persons watch from shadows.
The next day, while the Stranger is bathing at the barbershop, the town's feckless sheriff comes by and timidly acknowledges that the Stranger will face no charges for killing the three louts. When a vengeful Callie enters and fires at the Stranger with a pistol, the Stranger survives miraculously, by ducking briefly beneath his bathwater. "Wonder what took her so long to get mad?" the Stranger says, as the sheriff drags Callie out. "Because maybe you didn't go back for more", replies Mordecai, who had prepared the bath. Meanwhile, at a meeting, the townsmen are discussing a pressing problem: Three felons due to be released from jail that day are expected to come to Lago to "burn it to the ground". The gunmen slain by the Stranger had been in the pay of Lago’s mining company, to protect both it and the town — "whose interests are identical". Despite the hotelier's concern that the Stranger is completely unknown to the townspeople, a decision is reached to invite the Stranger to be Lago’s new protector. Presenting the offer to the Stranger, the sheriff explains that the three felons who threaten the place had been "troubleshooters" for the mining company until they were caught stealing from it. When the Stranger expresses skepticism about the theft's supposed details, the sheriff acknowledges that the felons themselves had claimed they were being railroaded. Advised by the Stranger to protect the town on his own, the sheriff says he gained his unsuitable office only after "young Marshal Duncan" was whipped to death in the street — though "not by anybody from this town". After the sheriff says the town will pay the Stranger "anything he wants," the Stranger accepts the offer.
In exercising his carte blanche, the Stranger subverts the townspeople's self-satisfaction. In the general store run by the mayor, he gives candies and blankets to a Native American family who have been insulted by the mayor as they have shopped. After running up a bill of his own at a leather shop, he orders a round at the saloon for the townsfolk — at the surprised barkeep’s expense. When the sheriff and the mayor chortle at this, he strips them of their positions, which he assigns to the town outcast, Mordecai. In preparation for the felons’ return, the Stranger has the townsmen engage in target practice on moving targets. These are hauled by wagons of the teamster, who objects impotently to the damage thus inflicted on his property. After advising some Mexican carpenters to construct large tables – "like for a church picnic" – the Stranger instructs them to tear down the hotelier’s barn for the necessary lumber. When the hotel man objects, the Stranger instructs him to clear all of his other customers out of his hotel.
The stranger riding into town.
The vision recurs, this time in the mind of Mordecai. The whip handlers are revealed as the three felons, whom, by this time, we have seen released from the territorial prison and en route to Lago. The whipping is seen to have taken place right outside Lago's hotel, from which the victim — "Marshal!" — is called onto the street by the assailants. Of the shadowy onlookers, now revealed as the townspeople, only two are troubled. One, Sarah Belding, wife of the hotelier, is prevented by her husband from going to the marshal's assistance. The other, Mordecai, shudders silently at the crime, while he peers out at it from beneath the hotel's boardwalk. As in the first vision, the victim pleads futilely for help and — before he is now seen to perish — damns the unassisting townspeople to hell.
Resentment of the Stranger having grown, the managers of the mine have argued whether he is more trouble than he's worth. With the conspiratorial assistance of the sluttish Callie, whom the Stranger invites to his bed, one of them leads a group to kill the Stranger in his sleep. The canny Stranger turns this try on his life into — or has cunningly brought about — an opportunity not only to kill several of the attackers but to dynamite the hotel. Though the establishment is a "total loss," whose only surviving room is that of the owner and his wife, the blast "doesn't even touch" the adjoining general store. In remarking with distress on the damage, the hotelier inadvertently admits, in front of the Stranger, complicity in the thwarted attack. Acting to make use of the one room his deeds have spared, the Stranger seizes the angered Sarah, who pleads for her husband (the hotelier) to save her from him. The hotelier does nothing to intervene in her behalf, while the Stranger hauls her up the hotel stairs. Though initially feigning a strong defense of her honor with a pair of scissors, she succumbs to the Stranger's charms in her marital bed.
In the morning, as the Stranger is leaving the bedroom, Sarah is moved to mention Marshal Duncan, who, she says, is in an unmarked grave, in the cemetery. After retailing the belief that "the dead don't rest without a marker of some kind", she says Duncan is "the reason this town's afraid of strangers." She advises the Stranger to be careful. "You’re a man who makes people afraid," she says, "and that’s dangerous." "Well," the Stranger replies, "it’s what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid." The felons' arrival impending, the Stranger issues his penultimate, bizarre command: Lago's every structure is to be painted red. He himself has just used red paint to write a new name over the town's sign: Hell. When Sarah informs her cuckolded husband that she is leaving him, we learn the marshal was killed at the town's instigation. He, the marshal, was intent on reporting his discovery that Lago's mine was on U.S. Government land. After his murder, as we subsequently learn, the townsmen framed the felons for theft.
With the town duly painted, picnic tables in the main street, and the felons nearing, the Stranger calls, finally, for the raising of a street-wide banner: "Welcome Home Boys". In response to an inquiry from the Mexican carpenters, he informs them they may not attend "the fiesta". To the townsfolk’s distress, he rides quietly out of the town's back end just as the felons approach. Incapable of ambushing their enemies without the Stranger’s assistance, the people see Lago indeed ravaged and set on fire by the three criminals. Only that night, when the townspeople are huddled helplessly in the felons’ grip, does the Stranger mysteriously return, to destroy the three men. He whips one to death in the flame-lit street and hangs another with a whip. Last, he shoots the leader, Stacey Bridges, whose dying words to him are "Who are you? — Who are you?"
The town of Lago is painted red and the name changed to Hell before the felons return and receive their comeuppance.
The felons dispatched, the hotelier attempts to shoot the Stranger from behind but is shot to death himself by Mordecai. The dwarf uses a large pistol the Stranger obtained for him with his carte blanche, after Mordecai had been made sheriff. Only as the Stranger is leaving the town, the next day, is the question of his identity addressed — cryptically. He passes Sarah, who is packing her suitcases into a wagon on which she herself will be leaving; then he passes Mordecai, who is at the cemetery. Apparently at the Stranger’s instruction, Mordecai is just finishing the inscription on a grave marker. "I never did know your name," Mordecai says. "Yes, you do," the Stranger replies. As the Stranger continues on, a reverse angle reveals that the marker bears the name of Marshal Jim Duncan — "Rest in Peace." The Stranger rides away, fading into the shimmering horizon from whence he came.
Cast
Production notes
- Eastwood had an entire town built on the shores of Mono Lake for the project.
- Filming was completed in only six weeks.
- The character of Marshal Duncan was played by stuntman Buddy Van Horn, a long-time stunt coordinator for Clint Eastwood, in order to create some ambiguity as to whether he and the Stranger are one and the same.
- During an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Eastwood commented that earlier versions of the script made the Stranger the dead marshal's brother. He favored a less explicit and more supernatural interpretation, however, and excised the reference[citation needed], although the Italian, Spanish, French and German dubbings retain it.
See also
References
Other source
- Guérif, François (1986). Clint Eastwood, p. 94. St Martins Pr. ISB
External links
