High Plains Drifter

Rating:
Summary: 4.5 Stars! Great Eastwood western!
Review: This film ranks up there with "The Good, the Bad & the Ugly", and "Unforgiven" as Clint's more entertaining westerns. Clint does his usual great job of keeping you guessing as to who his character is. Great atmosphere!

Buy it!

Rating:
Summary: More sweaty-face close-ups than a gay sauna
Review: "Flea-bitten range bums don't usually stop in Lago," the local saloon thug advises the Man With No Name. "Life here's a little too quick for `em. Maybe you think you're fast enough to keep up with us, huh?" He picked the wrong man to mess with-and you picked the right movie. Favorite part: Eastwood kicks everyone out of the hotel; even little old ladies are homeless, scrambling about in the dust. A preacher confronts the laconic, cigar-chomping Eastwood: "Now look here, brother, you can't put all these people in the street like this. It's inhuman, brother!" "I'm not your brother," Eastwood replies in that raspy voice. "We are all brothers and sisters in the eyes of Gawd-uh!" replies the preacher. Eastwood points to the street. "You mean all these people out there are your brothers and sisters?" "They certainly are!" "Well then you won't mind if they come over and stay at your place..."


Rating:
Summary: What's up with the truncated run time???
Review: The out of print version of this DVD is 106 minutes, IMDB has a run time for High PLains Drifter as 105 minutes. The only available version is much shorter. Can someone comment on this, as there is no way I would ever buy a shorter version of a film, and no one else would either.

Rating:
Summary: HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER--The First True Supernatural Western
Review: Having made an impressive debut as a director (as well as actor) in 1971 with PLAY MISTY FOR ME, Clint Eastwood turned his attention back to the genre that made him famous--the Western. HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER was that movie. And while it does bear a resemblance to the spaghetti westerns Eastwood made in the 1960s with director Sergio Leone as "The Man With No Name", it also takes on some chilling supernatural overtones.

Eastwood here is the mysterious title character who rides into the town of Lago, at the foot of the eastern Sierra Nevada at the edge of Mono Lake. The townsfolk are immediately suspicious of him and scared, and they have every reason to be. Only a year before, they witnessed their previous sheriff murdered by a trio of ruthless gunmen because the sheriff found out that Lago sat on valuable land owned by the federal government. Instead of stopping the murder, they allowed it to happen.

But the more often Eastwood's character gets to have his way with the town, the more the people of Lago begin to turn on one another. When word gets out that the three men (Geoffrey Lewis; Anthony James; Scott Walker) the town hired to kill the sheriff are let out of jail and vow to get revenge on the town, they realize they need Eastwood's help. But Eastwood doesn't let Lago's residents off so easily. Having ordered the town decorated blood red and renamed Hell, Eastwood disappears, while the townsfolk cower in fear at the outlaws return. But the mysterious High Plains Drifter has a surprise for all concerned...

Thanks to a very good screenplay by Ernest Tidyman (SHAFT; THE FRENCH CONNECTION) and Eastwood's directing and acting, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, despite its occasionally graphic violence and a fairly nasty rape scene involving Eastwood's mysterious stranger and one of the few women (Verna Bloom) in Lago, is one of Eastwood's best films, and one of the best westerns of the 1970s. Eastwood's charatcer may very well be an avenging angel, or even, tantalizingly enough, the ghost of the sheriff who was allowed by the town to be brutally murdered, thus giving the movie a creepy quality akin less to the spaghetti westerns and more to the gothic horror genre. The psychological tensions in the town are laid out fairly well, and Lewis and his outlaw partners are appropriately nasty. Billy Curtis' supporting role as the town midget, and the only one sympathetic to Eastwood's cause, is an interesting and offbeat one, and it works.

Eastwood actually filmed HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER on the shores of Mono Lake itself; the whole town of Lago was built from scratch. With superb cinematography by Bruce Surtees and a haunting score by Dee Barton that echoes Ennio Morricone's scores for Leone, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER is a long way away from the John Wayne school, especially in terms of violence, but it remains an impressive mark on Eastwood's long resume as both actor and director.

Rating:
Summary: Vengence rides into town
Review: In "High Plains Drifter", Clint Eastwood stars and directs this really dark western. He plays an amoral drifter known only as 'The Stranger". He rolls into Logo and quickly kills three losers and seemingly rapes a local lady. He is then asked to be sheriff to protect the town cowards (the whole population) from three killers the town wronged years ago. Who the Stranger is is a major part of the mystery of the movie. Eastwood is pretty good as 'the man with no name' taken the millionth degree. He is cold and eccentric as he's givin free reign, then leaves at the moment they need him mst. The town's people are horrible people, who's corruption reaches into the collective conscience; not only is it rotting them to death, they have gladly sold their souls for gold. The vengence at the end is grim, but then so is the whole movie. It is not your John Wayne western; in fact Wayne himself walked out of the movie saying Eastwood owed his fans an apology. But that is not so, it wasn't that bad. But they still don't make movies this grim ofter. Not for everyone, but OK.