![]() ![]() It’s not the only time that Eastwood tips his Stetson to the directors that inspired him as he worked with them – the town graveyard has headstones inscribed Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. In fact, the title, as evocative as Barton’s score, is misleading – what are these “high plains” that the stranger supposedly “drifts? And of course, drifting is the very last thing on his mind – he’s a man on a mission, single-mindedly pursuing his revenge even that means dragging everyone, himself included, into a figurative and literal hell on earth.Īfter the stranger arrives in the lakeshore town of Lago, it’s a full 7 minutes before we hear the first word uttered (“beer”), a tip of the hat perhaps to Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) which opens with a similarly uncommunicative sequence. It sets out a statement that this isn’t going to be a straightforward western, that the supernatural is never going to be far away and that the stranger is more than a simple lone gunslinger drifting aimlessly from town to town. It begins with a glorious opening shot, Eastwood’s “the stranger” (we only find out his name – possibly – in the closing scene) emerging from a heat haze accompanied by the strange keening wails of Dee Barton’s evocative score. ![]() And in 1973, for his second film, he brought a fantastical edge to his old stamping ground the western in High Plains Drifter, an allegorical revenge western that also functions as a ghost story. We could, at a pinch, include Dirty Harry (1971), with its deranged serial killer Scorpio, as at least a borderline horror film. He had uncredited roles in Revenge of the Creature (1955), Francis in the Navy (1955) and Tarantula (1955) very early in his career, played himself in an episode of Mister Ed (1958-1966) and had recently appeared in Southern Gothic The Beguiled (1971) and had made his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me (1971). Clint Eastwood was no stranger to the genres covered by EOFFTV by the early 1970s.
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