High Plains Drifter [dir. Clint Eastwood]

High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood's second feature as a director, is a Gothic revenge drama in the garb of a Western. Seeming to materialize out of the heat haze (marvelously captured by Bruce Surtees' cinematography), a lone stranger (Eastwood) rides into town, and almost immediately, he guns down 3 local toughs and rapes a woman (Marianne Hill) that was trying to play a seduction game. The cowardly townsfolk, including its sheriff and mayor, curry favor with the stranger, looking to him as a savior against the threat of some other toughs that had promised to raze the place in return for their prison sentence. But he has other ideas, and they find that they may have struck a bargain too dear, as he makes use of the town's resources (and that includes its people) as he pleases.

Then there are those dreams or flashbacks the stranger has, where someone at least closely resembling him is being whipped mercilessly to his death while the townsfolk hide behind their doors. Who is this man and who is the stranger? Is it mere coincidence that he happened to ride in or does he have a deeper agenda? The film hints at a possible supernatural tint, but doesn't tip its hand either way.

High Plains Drifter pays homage to Eastwood's work in Sergio Leone westerns, but forges its own path. The movie is especially interesting compared to Eastwood's previous westerns in that here he is not even a man that nurses a decent heart inside a tough exterior. His character's sole motive appears to be wreaking bloody vengeance on the townsfolk, and he has no moral compunctions about how he achieves it. The creepy music (Dee Barton) that greets his arrival at the beginning of the film is indicative of this difference in approach, and later there's a brilliant use of a red motif to depict the town's descent into damnation. Seen in this context, the rape scenes are not exploitative, but make sense as the act of a man who lives in a negative space and refutes any attributes of heroism (unlike James Bond forcing himself on Pussy Galore in Goldfinger).