High Plains Drifter

You don't stand a ghost of a chance.

Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter is a superior exercise in subversive style and frightening narrative. It is a gothic horror story disguised as a western; it takes the template of the mysterious Eastwood stranger (see my essay on The Beguiled for further discussion on this important Hollywood icon), who always seems so supernatural in his ability to materialize out of thin air and outshoot anyone, and literalizes his ghostly qualities. Because we follow the film’s storyline and characters with western archetypes in mind, we do not realize how disturbed and horrified we are until we are well into the exercise, at which point we have long accepted the outlandish premise that Eastwood accomplishes through his enigmatic screen personality. I suppose his western character is outlandish in all his Old West movies, but High Plains Drifter takes the absurdity as far as it can go and gets away with it with as much bold audacity as the character demonstrates over the small outpost in this film.

The story concerns… eh, never mind. If you are watching a Clint Eastwood western, you know what the story concerns. It always concerns a drifter who wanders into a small town filled with the prototype “good” people—the mayor, the sheriff, the barber, the saloonkeeper, the prostitute, the preacher, etc.—who are in fear of the incoming “bad” people fresh out of jail and with some sort of ax to grind (in this case, an incoming siege of bandits to whom the town is indebted). Eastwood’s enigmatic character always has an ax to grind too, either for profit or for revenge. We think we’re watching a traditional western at first, so we follow his actions and wait for the required conventions to play themselves out.

Through the course of the film, the town turns to the Stranger for certain mercenary services and relinquishes control of the entire outpost to his macabre brainstorm; in doing so, they unwittingly unleash a supernatural, bloodthirsty spirit that makes demands on the town that gradually transform it onto a living nightmare. Here’s an example: the Stranger literally paints red and renames it Hell; this is absolutely a horror film, because that’s not the most chilling revision that occurs; more terrifying are the little ironies that the Stranger achieves to turn the hidden hypocrisies of the town into raw, bleeding wounds. I shall leave for you to discover what these secrets are, and how the Stranger literally rips them open.

What’s primarily fascinating about High Plains Drifter is how star/director Eastwood and writer Ernest Tidyman lead our expectations on and eventually undercut them. It’s always impossible to tell where Eastwood’s character, called only the Stranger, is tunneling, though because of some carefully-placed flashbacks we have a pretty good idea why he’s digging: We follow the film’s variation of Eastwood’s western persona as he first typically seems to desire profit, then later watch his actions that suggest revenge, and eventually (and atypically) witness his resolutions that commands neither; it becomes increasingly clear that all of these standard driving forces are mere red herrings for a more disturbing, unspoken truth about this not-so-innocent town.

That Eastwood plays a ghost is not a spoiler—it’s a fact pretty much established in the first frame, when he materializes out of thin air and rides into town to the tune of creepy whistles that seem left over from an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. As I’ve already said, his cowboy character is so apparition-like in his prowess in all the films that feature him that it is appropriate that Eastwood finally just went ahead and imagined the role into an actual phantom (as he also might have done for 1985’s Pale Rider, a mystical remake of Shane; though that film features more of an avenging angel than the sinister demon presented here). Why is he a ghost, and why is he riding through this small town? From the first frame onward, High Plain Drifter slowly and meticulously discloses secrets and whispers within the town that eventually answer these questions. The fact that he is a specter obviously means that someone has wronged him and he fully intends to wrong back, but his frontier justice is not perpetrated out of revenge per se: As cruel and unusual as his tactics are, his extreme methods and ideas create scenarios within the town’s borders that ultimately seem to be doing these guild-ridden people a collective favor. They frankly need an opportunity to confess, and he provides it.

Most western towns look custom-made from Hollywood’s back lots, and they are almost always inhabited by stereotypical sketches for supporting characters; this film twists and distorts the archetypes so that they become disturbing even as they remain familiar. The town itself rests not in the typical desert but rather by the open sea, and its borders stretch on into an abyss of deep and troubled waters. Besides the Stranger, the most important character is Mordecai (Billy Curtis), a reflective midget who effectively services as a Greek Chorus for the town. He cackles and scampers about prophetically, but he is tellingly the most normal (and pure-hearted) member of the community. All the other characters emit a weird sort of energy that suggests madness and distorted personalities—particularly Marianna Hill as a woman who is first forcibly violated by the Stranger, immediately tries to kill him in retaliation, and later utterly begs him to violate her again. These people are sick—unsettlingly wrong in an indefinable way, except that they are perverse characters in a film that interprets western conventions as horrifically dreadful.

The effect isn’t as outrageously over-the-top as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) which, with its blind gunslingers and whole midget colonies, quickly abandons reality and enters into the world of surreal; the characters here look normal, but they betray erratic behaviors that suggest they’re not entirely in control of their own senses or fears. It is like they are all hypnotized and doomed to repeat that same day over and over again; their lives are upset by the Stranger’s entrance, and he quickly sends their house of cards tumbling around them. They are characters from a western acting like they are in a horror movie, or perhaps vice versa.

These characters and the ghostly Stranger taking dominion of their town lead to a decidedly menacing atmosphere of dread and discomfort. We are surprised that we are so disturbed, because the use of western conventions and stock characters make it difficult at first to discern that this is indeed a horror movie. In a way, westerns and horror films are not altogether dissimilar; both concern good vs. evil and use established motifs that are uniquely their own to tell some sort of moral and point out the commendable and/or depraved nature of humanity. It is therefore not a difficult task to combine the genres, but what makes High Plains Drifter so compelling is that it allows the genres to reflect each other and provides insight into their individual functions and effectiveness. Eastwood’s mysterious cowboy persona has often been dangerous and menacing, but he has never before been so demonic; seeing him pushed to such a ferocious extreme informs the dark edges around the eyes of this archetype’s eyes and drives it as far into hellish oblivion as possible. The cowboy becomes a demon, and it’s a surprisingly comfortable fit.

Likewise, to see a western town through the exaggerated filter of a horror scenario pushes the envelope of the bigotry and intolerance of the West—it’s lawless nature and the images of greedy entrepreneurs—beyond we have previously seen of such a place, even in the darkest of westerns (see Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, two of the best westerns I’ve ever seen), and makes it as uninhabitable as any haunted house. In return, the film makes horror less of a genre and more of a terror-filter that you can place on any given genre, probing it uncomfortably and examining its most shadowed corners.

          Eastwood directs with an impeccable sense of horror timing, allowing the unspoken sins of the townsfolk and the mysterious motivations of his own character to generate quiet dread that often grows uncomfortably agonizing. Watch the flashback sequences and observe, as violent as they are, how their consequences hover over all the characters with unnerving silence; it is not the dread of a standard western revenge plot in which guilty parties know retribution is at hand and will be delivered through the barrel of a gun, but is rather the raw terror of an invisible, lurking monster that will strike unrepentantly and when we are least expecting. The final showdown has characters behaving in a way that would seem idiotic in a regular western (the bad guys stand around in slack-jawed amazement and wait to be picked off one at a time), yet it somehow works here because of Eastwood’s directorial tone and the nature of his Stranger. These antagonists try to follow western conventions of a traditional shootout and instead find themselves trapped in horror staples, in which their idea of a showdown is not an option. They become trapped at the mercy of wraithlike Stranger, who moves through the night as an angel of death that corners them helplessly at his own suspenseful pace.

            This was not the first western that Eastwood starred in after his three landmark collaborations with Sergio Leone, but it was notably the first one that he directed. It is impossible not to notice Leone’s influence, with the extreme close-ups that thoughtfully linger on sweat and dust, coupled with sudden bursts of surprising violence. Certainly Eastwood has also seen Sergio Garrone’s obscure spaghetti western Django, the Bastard (1969), which utilizes a similar mystical storyline about a cowboy ghost out for revenge. But Eastwood does not cling on these inspirations for his film and generates a style and rhythm that is very much his own—primarily in the general weirdness and cruel irony that saturates the entire piece. The film could be classified as an acid-western, a subgenre that emerged in the mid-1970s emphasizing metaphysical chaos and societal breakdown within the western framework. Also on that list is Jodorowsky’s head-trip El Topo, Monte Hellman’s minimalist The Shooting, and Enzo G. Castellari’s mystical Keoma. And while High Plains Drifter indeed fulfills the requirements of this postmodern reimagining of the Old West, it resonates beyond the social concerns addressed in those films. Eastwood reaches farther, probes on a more terrifying level that looks past the ruminations of society and justice that the West usually explores and asks us to believe in an evil dwelling in the human soul that is beyond redemption. He calls this evil to our attention, acknowledges how powerless we are to its delicious charms, and ultimately scares the hell out of us with it. He thus fashions a parable that turns his usually reliable Stranger into one of the most terrifying presences in the movies.

Cast:
Clint Eastwood: The Stranger
Billy Curtis: Mordecai
Marianna Hill: Callie Travers
Verna Bloom: Sarah Belding
Ted Hartley: Lewis Belding
Stefan Gierasch: Mayor Jason Hobart

A Universal Pictures release. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Ernest Tidyman. Rated R, for graphic violence, shootouts, language, and a rape scene. Running time: 105 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: August 22, 1973.

Note: I wrote this article on October 31, 2007, while wearing my Halloween costume. I am dressed as Santa Claus getting ready for Global Warming—complete with a red Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and a Christmas-colored life preserver (you just never know when those polar ice caps are finally going to melt). The sleigh bells attached to my jacket jingled constantly as I write; I have thus learned that it is impossible to sneak up on anyone when you are Santa Claus.