High Plains Drifter

Rating:
Summary: Stark, shocking, and unforgettable
Review: If you're not sure what you're getting into, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER may repulse you. It's shocking, cruel, immoral, violent, and outright sadistic. Man, is it great! Eastwood takes "The Man With No Name" persona and pushes him into a new realm, sucking all essence of humanity out of him and creating a striking, mesmerizing, and unique "hero". The film almost becomes an oblique work of art, and this plus its harshness might turn-off the more conventional film goer. But there's no denying the film's power and quality.

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME movie, one of my favorites
Review: This is a G-R-E-A-T movie. The first 15 minutes are superb!!! (The rest isn't half bad either). Eastwood does a fantastic job of acting in and directing this masterpiece. Put a supernatural twist on the typical western and changed the genre. I would definitly get this movie if I were you.

Rating:
Summary: Scary look at the old west
Review: If you are looking for a happy western where Roy Rogers gets a girl and dances and sings get off the train. Your in Clintville. And this part of Clintville is an unhappy place, where all men are bad and love to kill, even though most deny it. In the first scenes, you see a scragley Eastwood trot into town on his horse. He stops at a Saloon, and is not treated nicley. He goes over to the barber for a shave, and the men from the saloon follow. they call him names and provoke him. But they show no signs of harm to Clint. Clint becomes irritated and blows each of there brains out. Is this our hero? Yep. I won't give away what he does in the next scene but it might make you cut the tape off. Don't. It's a good western that in the end lives a lot of speculation. Who is he? E-mail me to give me your thoughts on it.

Rating:
Summary: If you like Eastwood and Westerns this one is Cool
Review: Like the title said. I love westerns and Eastwood personifies them. If you're not into Westerns or haven't seen one in a while go see "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly"(GBU). If you don't like that you wont like this (and I don't know what's wrong with you if you don't like it). Like GBU the audio is in 2.0 mono track which sounds just fine. Like almost all other Universal DVD's the video is excellent and I believe some restoration was involved with producing this DVD, i'm not sure. The movie and story are both rough on the senses and funny. Eastwood plays a very unusual character in this classic western.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best and most original westerns of all time.
Review: "High Plains Drifter" (1973) is one of the best and most original westerns of all time. It is also of of the best films that Clint Eastwood has ever made. It was only the second film that Eastwood ever directed, yet it is a western masterpiece, as it funnels all of the violent, harsh, and brutal images and themes that were first seen in the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns (which made Eastwood an international star) into one picture. No other film blurrs the lines of good and evil like this one. No other film has humor that is so dark and so black. No other film tests and re-defines the nature of screen heroism, as Eastwood plays his darkest and most enigmatic character ever. This film strips the western to its most brutal, raw, violent, and merciless essence, revealing the old West to be a truly immoral and corrupt land. Eastwood's compulsive, surrealistic imagery is both haunting and powerful, and it works in pefect tandem with Dee Barton's eerie score. Filmed around Mono Lake, California, the hellish locations of the film add to its haunting atmosphere. The western town, constructed by Henry Bumstead out of raw wood is a classic, and helps to reveal the mean-spirited hypocrisy and vicious economic determinism of the townspeople. The film has an unexpected, spontaneous, and completely anarchic quality that eliminates the western's typical predictablity and simple cliches. It is extremely challenging, unnerving, apparitional, allegorical, and curiously memorable. This is Clint Eastwood at his most daring and outrageous, as both an actor and director, testing the audience to see if it will support this most radical of anti-heroes. "High Plains Drifter" is my favorite film of all time, and it is not to be missed! END

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I remember seeing this for the first time back in the day. It was probably the fascination with the "man with no name trilogy" but this film is just as classic as those. The story is your typical "revenge" tail but this adds a bit more to it. First of all the character is dark and aloof which really helps set the mood for this film. Its dark its fun its ultra cool! If you liked the man with no name trilogy, hang em high or pale rider see this!

Rating:
Summary: One of the best and most original westerns of all time.
Review: "High Plains Drifter" (1973) is one of the best and most original westerns of all time. It is also of of the best films that Clint Eastwood has ever made. It was only the second film that Eastwood ever directed, yet it is a western masterpiece, as it funnels all of the violent, harsh, and brutal images and themes that were first seen in the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns (which made Eastwood an international star) into one picture. No other film blurrs the lines of good and evil like this one. No other film has humor that is so dark and so black. No other film tests and re-defines the nature of screen heroism, as Eastwood plays his darkest and most enigmatic character ever. This film strips the western to its most brutal, raw, violent, and merciless essence, revealing the old West to be a truly immoral and corrupt land. Eastwood's compulsive, surrealistic imagery is both haunting and powerful, and it works in pefect tandem with Dee Barton's eerie score. Filmed around Mono Lake, California, the hellish locations of the film add to its haunting atmosphere. The western town, constructed by Henry Bumstead out of raw wood is a classic, and helps to reveal the mean-spirited hypocrisy and vicious economic determinism of the townspeople. The film has an unexpected, spontaneous, and completely anarchic quality that eliminates the western's typical predictablity and simple cliches. It is extremely challenging, unnerving, apparitional, allegorical, and curiously memorable. This is Clint Eastwood at his most daring and outrageous, as both an actor and director, testing the audience to see if it will support this most radical of anti-heroes. "High Plains Drifter" is my favorite film of all time, and it is not to be missed! END

Rating:
Summary: A Dynamic Western Story
Review: Clint Eastwood's second film as a director, "High Plains Drifter," has to be one of the most dynamic Western stories ever to hit the big screen. With a cold, eerie, and ambivalent tone, the movie unfolds like a ghost story from the camp fire.

Here is essentially the story: Eastwood plays the ghost of a U.S. Marshall who was whipped to death by three outlaws hired by the developing western mining town of Lago. The residents of Lago had Marshall Duncan killed because he was going to report the town's illegal mining activity on Federal property to the government. Duncan's grave was left unmarked to hide the murder. The three outlaws are eventually turned into authorities by the residents of Lago. Now, with the outlaws about to be released from prison to wreak revenge on the town, Duncan's ghost rises from the desert to punish Lago and the three outlaws who killed him. "The Stranger," as the people of Lago call him, do not realize this is the resurrected Duncan, and ask him to protect their town from the outlaws after witnessing his flawless shootout with local ruffians.

"The Stranger" paints the town red, and renames Lago, "Hell."

This film is a must-see for anyone who loves Westerns or twisted plots. I am not a patron of Westerns, and yet I found this film remarkable for its great story and artistic quality. Eastwood demonstrated why he is a legend by directing an excellent and unique picture, and playing the dual role to perfection of the silent "good guy/bad guy."

Rating:
Summary: Not a chick flick
Review: Obviously this was produced before the age of feminist political correctness. The anti-hero with no name--Clint Eastwood, of course, a throwback to his days making spaghetti westerns in Italy with Sergio Leone--comes riding tall in the saddle down into a valley with a mining town by a lake. (The movie was shot around the Mono Lake area of California.) Particularly effective in this unforgettable opening scene is the music sounding like the high whine of the wind off of the desert. This town would be "Lago" later to be renamed "Hell" by Eastwood's character who is identified in the titles as "The Stranger."

The stranger really just wants a shave and a bath and something to drink and eat and place to lay his head for the night. What he gets is a bad time from some roughnecks and a woman (Callie Travers, played by Marianna Hill) who has attraction/avoidance feelings for him. He shoots the three guys and rapes the woman before the movie is twenty minutes old. What I mean by this not being politically correct is that, despite herself, she likes it! That sort of thing is not done in cinema these days. The idea that a woman might be turned on by being raped would not play before today's audiences, nor would a Hollywood producer make such a film.

I won't go any further into the plot but suffice it to say that Eastwood is just beginning to kick tail. It seems that everybody in town is cowardly and without the will to protect themselves from the bad guys, especially the three who just got out of jail and are headed their way. How Eastwood, who directed from a script by Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection [1971]; Shaft [1971] etc.), handles the familar revenge theme is interesting.

First it is no accident that Eastwood's protagonist is named "the Stranger." That is the English title of a famous novel by Albert Camus that surely influenced Eastwood. Camus's stranger is an existential anti-hero, a kind of benign sociopath who really doesn't feel anything for others except as they affect his life. But he is not particularly violent and just lives from one day to the next without any direction or goal. He just "exists."

Eastwood's stranger does more than just exist. He takes action, and he is very good at it. Indeed, I can't recall a western movie in which a gunman could draw faster or shot straighter, or any movie hero who was less afraid of putting his life on the line. So, in a sense what Eastwood has added to Camus's stranger is Nietzsche's superman. And herein lies, I think, the underpinning of Eastwood's philosophy and his "message." Note that the people in the town to a man are cowardly. The only exception is Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) who, like the aforementioned Callie Travers, can't resist the stranger's forceful charm, and falls in love with him. This somehow inspires her to leave the corrupt town.

Yes, the town, like most of human society is corrupt. And yes the average man in the street is cowardly and without the will to defend himself. It is only the ubermensch, that rare breed celebrated in the works of the German philosopher, who has the skill, the strength and the will to bend events to his liking and to take on those who would use violence to achieve their ends.

So what Eastwood does here in his second directorial effort (following Play Misty for Me, 1971) is to diverge from Leone's formula. While there is some very funny and intentionally ridiculous dialogue in such films as, for example, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), or For a Few Dollars More (1965) or A Fistful of Dollars (1964), there is little that is funny, intentionally or otherwise in High Plains Drifter. Furthermore, whereas Leone just wanted to make a buck and saw that tough-minded heroes or anti-heroes involved in action-filled revenge plots was a good way to do it, Eastwood is interested in also making a philosophic (and perhaps political) statement. We are degenerate, we humans, he is saying, except for those rare individuals who take the law into their own hands, make their own rules, and through superior skill and bravery, make their own luck and create their own reality, as does his stranger.

In this film there is also an element of the supernatural, or so it would appear. The stranger "sees" in his head the whipping of a past sheriff of the town. Perhaps it comes from the mind of the dwarf Mordecai (very well played by Billy Curtis, by the way) who witnessed the tortured death while hiding under the saloon. At any rate, the stranger shows that he is just as handy with the whip himself as he is with his six-gun.

By all means see this for an early look at the work of Clint Eastwood as both an actor and a director. You will not be bored I can assure you. But don't invite the girl friend over. If there was ever an anti-"chickflick," this is it.

Rating:
Summary: Stick to Sergio
Review: This was one of Clint's earlier American westerns and was a pretty big dissapointment (to me anyway). I'm a huge fan of "The Man with No Name" trilogy of spaghetti westerns, but this one just didn't live up to their predecessors. What made Sergio Lione's westerns so good was their sense of adventure as well as how much fun they were. In Fistfull, For a Few Dollars More, and TGTBATU Clint is constantly spouting funny and bad-ass one liners, and the other characters are colorful and cool as well (Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes/ Douglas Mortimer, Eli Wallach as Tuco.) Clint, as always, is a great western actor, but the sense of fun is gone and the movie is boring and too dark, the climax is cool, but the annoying midget and the supernatural theme keep this from being a Clint classic. Instead try Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, Unforgiver, "Man With No Name" series, and the BEST western ever, Once Upon A Time In The West