Throughout the 1960s, Clint Eastwood made the difficult leap from being a supporting player in a TV show to starring in movies as a headliner. That TV show was the Western series Rawhide and those movies were also primarily Westerns, most notably the three films which comprise “The Man with No Name Trilogy” — A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Then, in the 1970s, Eastwood made the even more difficult transition from actor to director.
After having learned the ropes of directing on movies like Hang ‘Em High, he debuted as a director in his own right with the 1971 thriller Play Misty for Me, where Eastwood starred as a radio DJ. For his directorial debut, Eastwood did not make a Western, perhaps to prove he’s not just a Western guy (something he’d do throughout his career), but for his second film, he ventured back into the genre he’s still most commonly associated with, but added in some genre-defying elements that still make the movie a standout. 1973’s High Plains Drifter centers around an unnamed gunslinger known only as “The Stranger” (Clint Eastwood), who rides into the small mining town out of Lago out of the hazy desert. He quickly shows his proficiency with a gun when he kills three gunmen who threaten him.
While the townsfolk never learn his name or anything about him, they hire the Stranger to protect them from two outlaws who will soon be released from prison and who the town knows will be heading to Lago for revenge. We learn that, before the events of the film, the outlaws had been hired by the townsfolk to kill the town sheriff, Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn). Duncan had discovered that the town’s mining operation — and thus its entire livelihood — was built on federal land and he was going to report it, which would bankrupt the town.
After the outlaws killed the sheriff, the townsfolk framed them for a robbery, and they were sent to prison. The Stranger, despite being new to the town, seems to know about this already and even dreams of it. Despite an obvious dislike of the town and its people, the Stranger agrees to protect them, as he seems to have a score to settle with the outlaws that’s all his own.
More than 50 years after its release, what’s still captivating about High Plains Drifter is the ambiguity of it all. While you might think “The Stranger” is yet another “Man with No Name,” he isn’t. He’s far scarier and more ruthless.
There’s also a debate as to who he really is. Some view the film as a ghost story with the Stranger positioned as something of an apparition or revenant of the sheriff himself, which is reinforced by his dreams of the sheriff and his ghostly appearance wandering out of the desert. Others say the Stranger is the entirely mortal brother of the sheriff, who gets vengeance on his brother’s behalf.
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