5/5 A stranger rides into Lago, bringing a surrealistic vision of Hell...
  by Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast)
I've been a huge Clint Eastwood fan and have recently been revisiting some of the films that I hadn't seen for years, and there's no better place to start than with this, his second film and first western as director.

The plot couldn't be simpler, in many ways harking back to A "Fistful of Dollars" in its elegant, stripped storyline: A stranger (Clint) rides into the town of Lago, quickly getting into a shootout that he didn't start and besting the three gunfighters that the town had hired to protect them. The townspeople are afraid of another trio who had once been on the payroll also, doing time in prison for a crime committed a year before that the town is complicit in, and due back to wreak vengeance. Seeing as how their protectors are dead, they agree to hire the stranger at any cost, and he proceeds to wreak havok on the town in more ways than one before proceeding on his way after filling his bargain in apocalyptic fashion.

If the plot's simple, the characters, style and symbolism of the piece are a little less so. The Stranger it seems is haunted by dreams - memories or visions, who can say for sure? of a man who seems to be him, the town's former marshall, whipped to death by those same three men riding back for their own vengeance. "Lago" means "lake" and the town sits on an unnamed body of water; the town seems brand-new, most of the buildings are still under construction and unpainted, though from what we learn it's been around for over a year; the townspeople are greedy and cowardly, and The Stranger is cold, merciless, in the end even demonic. Is he a figure of vengeance, a revenant or demon sent from the real Hell that he names the town after, and that the marshall is seen in one flashback as damning it to, as he orders it painted completely red before the killers arrive in town?

Though nearly everybody in the town is unpleasant, a couple of more positive images do stand out - Verna Bloom in one of the two significant female roles is the hotel-keeper's wife, who seems at first to despise The Stranger but seemingly just because he's another brutal [...] - when she realizes that he's the only man in the town with guts she softens, and he beds her just before the showdown. A dwarf, Mordecai (Billy Curtis), is also treated more softly, with The Stranger proclaiming him sherriff and mayor, pumping him up to the point where he alone of all the townsmen shows any guts at the eventual gun battle. I suppose it could be said that Clint's vengeful figure is capable of some charity and feeling towards the only two positive and "good" characters in the film. Significantly enough the other female character, a single woman (perhaps a whore? it's never very clear) named Callie (Marianna Hill) who he rapes shortly after entering town, develops an ambiguous love-hate attitude towards him and it's left quite ambiguous as to how much has to do with the rape (which both The Stranger and other townspeople deny) or because he then ignores her for the most part, even after she betrays him at one point.

A town that seemed promising and new, fresh and full of vitality at the beginning of the film, perched on a cool lake and apparently prosperous, at the end has been half-burnt and decimated through a supernatural wrath, a vengeance for the greed and cowardice that killed a marshall and cowers before his redeemer - this is old-Testament filmmaking of a pure kind that Eastwood never really returned to in such an obvious way. There are certainly obvious odes to his spaghetti years, in the dirt and violence and unpleasantness of the townspeople and their souls, in Dee Barton's wonderfully eclectic, eerie score and of course in Eastwood's character; I also think it shares some kinship with the Don Siegel-directed Civil War film The Beguiled from 1971, another film with more than a touch of the supernatural, and few redeeming characters. But Clint makes it his own through the economy and his refusal to make things any more flashy or outré than the screenplay calls for (which is plenty). The cast is terrific, mostly made up of names that were second-tier at best at the time and are largely forgotten now. Bloom and Curtis are especially good

Perhaps not one of the very best 70s westerns, and I'd certainly still put it behind "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Unforgiven" in Eastwood's western-ography, but it's definitely one of the weirder and more fascinating examples of the genre from America during the period.


4/5 High Plains Drifter
  by Judy A. Davis
I love the Clint Eastwood westerns and this one did not disappoint me. A good movie to watch; good Clint Eastwood and good western.

5/5 High Plains Drifter
  by J. Archuletta (San Ramon, CA)
I could watch Clint Eastwood any day because he MAKES MY DAY! Gotta love it. Good movie - one of is classics!

4/5 great service
  by Andrew Brewer
shipping was kind of slow but i contacted them about it and they took care of it, great customer service.

4/5 High Plains Drifter - A brutal bit of anarchism with supernatural overtones
  by A. Shane (Chicago, IL USA)
High Noon from Hell. A lean, anarchist, and spooky western. Eastwood's second directorial effort is also one of his best. He's an ex-marshal back from the grave to avenge himself on a corrupt California town and the men who killed him. Or is he? It's wickedly funny too. "Let's paint the town red, baby!"