“High Plains Drifter” is a 1973 American Dark Western film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, the film blends traditional Western tropes with darker, more surreal and even horror-like aspects. Eastwood plays a mysterious stranger who metes out justice in a corrupt frontier mining town. The film was influenced by the work of Eastwood’s two major collaborators, film directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. In addition to Eastwood, the film also co-stars Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, Mitchell Ryan, Jack Ging, and Stefan Gierasch.
Eastwood reportedly liked the offbeat quality of the film’s original nine-page treatment and approached Universal with the idea of directing it. It is the first Western film that he both directed and starred in. The film was shot on location on the southern shores of Mono Lake, California. Dee Barton wrote the film score. The film was critically acclaimed at the time of its initial release and remains popular.
The ‘ghost story’ interpretation of the film favored by Eastwood is hinted at strongly throughout the movie, suggesting that the Stranger may be the ghost of slain Federal Marshal Jim Duncan, returning for vengeance and justice; the beginning and end of the film sees the Stranger mysteriously emerge, apparition-like, as he rides into and out of Lago through a shimmering heat-haze. Upon arriving, the Stranger has a lucid and graphic dream about Jim Duncan’s death, in which Duncan declares damnation upon the townspeople for not saving his life. The Stranger’s instructions that all buildings should be painted red and the town’s name of Lago be replaced by a sign labelled ‘HELL’ echoes Duncan’s dying words that the residents would suffer in Hell for failing to prevent his death. Meanwhile, after spending a night in a hotel bed together, Sarah Belding tells the Stranger of her belief that Jim Duncan cannot rest in peace nor depart the physical realm because he was buried in an unmarked grave. Then, upon the Stranger’s final departure from Lago, the dwarf Mordecai is seen tending to an unmarked grave which now bears the name Jim Duncan.
“High Plains Drifter” takes the framework of a revenge Western and infuses it with gothic elements, creating a compelling and unsettling cinematic experience that explores themes of violence, guilt, and the supernatural.
