A little piece of hell...

High Plains Drifter - Clint Eastwood's second directorial feature - is a sick little piece of what appears at first to be a pretty standard western film. Man wanders into town, kills a few guys, and is hired to help the town defend itself against three bad guys who are about to be released from prison and have vowed revenge on the town.

The movie turns out, of course, to be much more than that and plays about a lot of existential themes, probing the idea that everyone has secrets, that the people in the town of Lago - renamed Hell by the end of the movie - are simply wicked people who are watching out for what's best for them and couldn't possibly care less about those around them. They are willing sell everything they have to keep what little they do have, promising the new stranger in town anything he could want if he'll just kill the three bad guys. Life has no value to these people except in what they can get for it.

Eastwood's character does - in the end - save the townfolk, but he certainly doesn't make things easy on them. He mocks them and punishes them, taking full advantage of their spineless generosity to him, having his way with them socially and - with the two female characters - sexually. He is an iconic anti-hero who can do anything he wants and often does, taking little apparent pleasure in either helping or punishing the people around them. He simply is. He exists and allows those around him to damn themselves as what they see in him reflects who they really are.

The film isn't perfect. Some of the supporting cast seem a little out of place here in this western, ramshackle, lake-front town as their accents seem a little more uppercrust east than we might expect from the frontier, but this is probably the only complaint I could lodge against the movie. In total, this is one of the finest westerns made, ranking right with Eastwood's spaghetti western trilogy Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and his later near-masterpiece Unforgiven. In these films alone, Eastwood deserves to go down as possibly the greatest western actor that the movie industry has known.

In an interesting footnote, many of the members of the supporting cast are classic "that guys". They're the actors that you recognize from minor parts in dozens of other films and television series. When I went to imdb to check which other things they'd been in, I found that the website has pictures of only two of the actors - Eastwood and the lead hard case fresh out of prison. The rest are apparently minorly enough that imdb hasn't taken the time to get their head shots.

To check out more about this film, feel free to head over to Wikipedia, to read an excellent essay about Clin't Man with No Name character, or to check out the movie's entry among thirty great westerns.