High Plains Drifter **** (1973, Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill) – Classic Movie Review 2530

Director-star Clint Eastwood’s surreal and brooding 1973 revenge Western High Plains Drifter is rich and strange, and proves one of his finest films. It is his first Western as director and second film as director after his debut with Play Misty for Me (1971). There is an archetypal man with no name-type role for the star as an enigmatic drifter, the gun-fighting Stranger who rides into the small mining settlement town of Lago to avenge the killing of its honest marshal.

A shootout leaves the town’s hired-gun protectors dead, and the town’s leaders petition the Stranger to stay and try to protect the townsfolk from three ruthless outlaws just out of jail and on their way to dish out death and destruction.

Eastwood is a charismatic presence in his tight-lipped, cigar-chewing avenging angel part, one of his best. Also starring are Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill and Mitchell Ryan.

There is impressive screenplay writing by Ernest Tidyman, balancing black humour, supernatural atmosphere, parody and genre thrills, and stirring direction by Eastwood in the operatic style of his mentor Sergio Leone. (One of the headstones in the Boot Hill graveyard bears the name Sergio Leone as a tribute.) And Bruce Surtees’s strangely coloured Technicolor cinematography is another major factor in the film’s success, as are Dee Barton’s eerie score and Henry Bumstead’s impeccable art direction.

It is a tough-toned film with plenty of typical Eastwood Western violence. John Wayne denounced the film for its violence and revisionist portrayal of the Old West.

Eastwood finds a role for his old Rawhide co-star, Paul Brinegar, as Lutie Naylor. Also in the cast are Jack Ging, Stefan Gierasch as Mayor Jason Hobart, Billy Curtis, Ted Hartley, Geoffrey Lewis, Scott Walker, Walter Barnes, Richard Bull, Robert Donner (preacher), John Hillerman (bootmaker), Anthony James, William O’Connell, John Quade, Jane Aull, Dan Vadis and James Goss.

Eastwood had a whole town built in the desert near Mono Lake in the California Sierras, 300 miles away from Hollywood, with many complete buildings, so that interiors could be shot on location. A crew of 46 technicians and 10 labourers worked 10 hours a day for 18 days constructing 14 houses and a two-storey hotel, which were burned down when the film was finished.

Additional scenes were filmed at Reno, Nevada’s Winnemucca Lake and California’s Inyo National Forest. 380 gallons of paint were used to paint the town red. It was all filmed in sequence in six weeks, under budget and two days ahead of schedule.

Other headstones bear the names of Don Siegel (Eastwood’s director on five films) and Brian G Hutton, director of Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970). ‘I buried my directors,’ Eastwood said.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2530

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com