High Plains Drifter (1973)

(On TV, June 2019) At first, there is a bafflingly familiar quality to High Plains Drifter that may make you question why the film exists, so closely does it feel like half a dozen other Clint Eastwood westerns. Here we have a loner coming to town, shooting a few people up to no good, and asked to stick around to protect the town from a bigger evil. But even at the same time, there’s something not quite right with the movie, something that sets it apart: Our protagonist rapes a woman in the film’s first ten minutes and before long we understand that the villagers are clearly plotting among themselves to keep a secret from the hero. High Plains Drifter gets weirder the longer it goes on, as more secrets are revealed and the “innocent” villagers’ true allegiances are revealed. Throughout it all, we also realize how there’s a strong probability that the film is not entirely realistic. The dark-red climax gets positively occult as evidence of supernatural happenings accumulate. Noteworthy for being one of Eastwood’s first solo directing efforts (clearly inspired by Leone and Siegel), the film includes—of all things—what could be interpreted as one of cinema’s earliest first-person-shooter sequences. While the film may or may not belong to the supernatural horror genre, it’s the explanation that makes the most sense and interest given the clues given by the film. Eastwood fans may want to compare High Plains Drifter with Pale Rider, which seems to come to a similarly ambiguous situation from the other side of the good/evil coin.