High Plains Drifter

I've seen some pretty rad movies lately. One of them was High Plains Drifter.

It's a Western starring and directed by Clint Eastwood from 1973. If you remember, a lot was made of Unforgiven in 1992, how Clint was deconstructing the Western and the characters he played. That's all well and good -- I love Unforgiven -- but he was doing that twenty years earlier in Drifter.

It plays on a lot of the same themes as High Noon. But High Noon is, by and large, a traditional Western, but with great acting and some deeper themes going on. Drifter is darker and weirder. Halfway through, I was thinking this flick is the anti-High Noon. By the end of it, I realized it was the opposite... Drifter is very similar to High Noon, just filtered through the culture and American independant cinema of the '60s and '70s.

Also, Clint Eastwood plays a ghost. A "spirit of vengeance," as it were.

Drifter starts out like a lot of Westerns, with a mysterious stranger (Clint) showing up at a town in the middle of nowhere. The opening shot under credits is a long take of nothing but heat distortion over the desert. Clint comes out of it like the desert created him. As he rides through town, everybody stops and stares. He lets this play for a long time. There's no dialogue.

Clint rolls into the saloon for a beer. He gets hassled by three nogoodnicks. Clint walks across the street to get a shave. (This is one of those Westerns where Clint looks like a fuzzy Muppet head on top of this really skinny body). They follow him, with the intention of giving Clint a hard time. In return, Clint gives them three bullets.

The townsfolk gather to discuss the backstory: exactly one year ago, three outlaws (not the guys from the bar) murdered Marshall Duncan. In an unusual move, they bullwhip him to death. We see it in flashback several times throughout the movie. It's a really creepy, disturbing scene. Duncan writhes around in the dust, beggging for help. He gets none. The townsfolk are too cowardly to do anything but watch from the shadows. This is the High Noon aspect.

More backstory: they buried the Marshall in an unmarked grave. The three outlaws went to prison. They're getting out, and everybody knows they're gonna come back for revenge. It's only a matter of time until they show up. (More High Noon). The townsfolk know they can't fight these guys, so they hired three more outlaws to fight the first three outlaws. Making six outlaws in total, three attacking the town, and three defending the town.

That is, until Clint shows up and smokes the three dudes who were hired to protect the town. That's right, the yojimbos are the nogoodnicks from the bar.

Now the town has no protection. And the three outlaws are on the way. Doh!

The town elders have a meeting and decide Clint is their only hope. Clint says no, he doesn't care, he's just passing through. Desperate, the town offers him anything. Clint considers this, and says: "Anything...?"

This is where the movie starts getting weird.

Clint tests this whole "anything" thing by buying a pair of boots. As the bootmaker's about to name his price, the mayor sticks his head in and says, "No charge!" Clint next goes to the saloon and buys a round on the house. "No charge!"

This blonde saloon gal doesn't trust Clint. She purposely bumps into him in the street, screeches at him, says he ruined her dress and demands to know who he is, why he's there, etc. Clint tries to extricate himself, but she doesn't let up. So Clint says something like, "You could use a lesson in manners," grabs her, drags her into a barn...

...and rapes her. In broad daylight. Everyone in town knows what's going on, but they do nothing to stop it. (See a pattern?) The kooky town midget watches from the shadows and cackles. "Bizarre" doesn't even cover this scene.

Later, Clint's taking a hot bath at the barber shop. The blonde comes in with a gun. Clint duck underwater to hide. She pumps four rounds at point-blank range into the tub. The townsfolk drag her away. She's pretty upset about the whole rape thing, but the townsfolk won't let their only protector be harmed. They let it slide.

After she's gone, Clint resurfaces. Unharmed. Except now his cigar is wet. Hmmmmm...

Clint organizes the townsfolk into a militia. He arranges an ambush for the outlaws. It's very Seven Samurai, with a lot of training sequences.

Clint has the townsfolk make up a sign for the outlaws that says: "Welcome Home, Boys!" He tells a couple of Mexican laborers to tear down this guy's barn and use the lumber to make picnic tables. Clint wants to barbeque up an entire steer for the picnic. He never specifies they're going to have the picnic for the outlaws, or if it's going to be a celebration after they kill the outlaws.

Clint makes the cackling midget the sheriff and the mayor. The simpering ex-sheriff asks Clint if he wants a woman. "A squaw or a Mex, your choice."

Clint moves into the hotel, and kicks out everyone else. He doesn't want "distractions." He lets one woman stay, the wife of the dude with the torn-down barn. Clint makes her stay in his room, if you get my drift. She's pretty disillusioned with the townsfolk, and doesn't seem to mind.

The townsfolk start to resent Clint. Free boots and whiskey is one thing, but fucking their women and making crazy demands is another. Also, dialogue reveals the townspeople actually hired the outlaws to kill Marshall Duncan. They're all profiting from a secret mine, which is on federal land. Marshall Duncan was going to stop it. They stopped him, first.

They send in the blonde to seduce Clint. When she's sure he's asleep, she leaves and lets the townsfolk know. Six guys grab axe handles and sneak into the room to give Clint the Full Metal Jacket treatment. But -- surprise! -- it's the old pillows-under-the-blanket ruse made popular by Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. Clint throws dynamite into the room, which blows up the guys and demolishes most of the hotel.

Clint moves into the one remaining, undamaged room.

The next day, Clint makes everyone paint the entire town bright red. He rides out to the little signpost showing the town's name (Lago). He paints the word "HELL" over it.

And he vanishes.

The three outlaws show up. The townsfolk take their positions, just like Clint taught them. But the second the outlaws shoot back, the townsfolk lose their nerve and surrender, even though they outnumber the outlaws a dozen-to-one.

The outlaws menace the townsfolk. Just when all seems lost, Clint comes back. The resulting showdown is a lot of fun. The town catches on fire and, when Clint attacks, we get these really sweet fucking shots where he's silhouetted in flames.

The outlaws die, town saved.

As Clint rides out of town the next morning, he passes the kooky midget, who's carving a grave marker. The midget says they never quite got Clint's name. Clint replies: "You already know it." He rides away, and camera reveals the name on the grave marker: "MARSHALL DUNCAN."

This offers two possibilities:

a) Clint is Marshall Duncan. He somehow survived the bullwhipping, and subsequent burial. I guess he crawled out of the grave, replaced the dirt, went off to heal, and came back later to seek his revenge a la Conan. All well and good, classic revenge stuff.

But it doesn't answer why no one in town recognizes Marshall Duncan. When he arrives in town, the reaction is: "Who is this guy?" Not: "Holy shit, it's Marshall Duncan back from the grave." During the whipping flashbacks, we see he has whip marks on his face. But it's not like they whipped his face completely off or anything. Very strange.

b) Clint is a ghost.

This is never overt -- he doesn't have a flaming skull or fly around or anything. But it explains why the blonde doesn't kill him in the tub.

The ending seems to point to the idea that Clint is Marshall Duncan's ghost. ("You already know it.") But, again, why don't they recognize him? Does the ghost manifest itself with a different face, so it can do its thing without everyone over-reacting?

Or, is Clint a spirit of vengeance summoned up from the desert by the sins of the town? This would imply that Marshall Duncan isn't his name, so much as the name of the person's death which drew the spirit's attention.

I like the latter idea. It's just cool. And strangely mirrors another flick I recently watched, Dust Devil, which also features a spirit drawn out of the desert that takes human form. (This movie is worth its own lengthy blog... very odd).

The parallel between High Plains Drifter and High Noon are clear: they're both movies about one tough guy who has to face down an approaching gang of vengeful outlaws by himself because everybody else in town is too chickenshit to help out.

High Noon ends with Gary Cooper surrounded by grateful townsfolk. Like in Drifter, they beg for his help and are happy to slap his back and buy him a drink, just so long as they don't actually have to do anything, or put their asses on the line.

Difference being, Gary looks around at the smiling faces, and he's disillusioned. He's disappointed in these people. He doesn't like them anymore.

That's all deep and shit, but it's just an emotional reaction. There's no real response from Gary. In Drifter, this is a world in which cowardice is a punishable offense. Clint goes completely out of his way to make these people miserable. He fucks with them in every way, at every turn. When they get mad and try to punish Clint -- again, in a cowardly manner -- he doesn't leave. Clint sticks around and makes their lives even harder.

(It's also a story about the price people are willing to pay for security, which seems like an especially resonant theme these days).

I was also thinking about Seven Samurai. As in Drifter, the villagers reveal they're not quite the innocent peasants they make themselves out to be. They haul out a pile of weapons and armor to fight the bandits. When the heroes ask where all this stuff came from, the villagers reluctantly fess up that they... ahem... murder passing samurai and steal their shit. The samurai want to bounce. Who can blame them? But a passionate monologue from Toshiro Mifune convinces them to stay. He explains that samurai steal from the peasants and rape their women, it's only right for the peasants to get a little payback now and again.

In Seven Samurai, the villagers aren't punished. At the end, the remaining samurai watch the villagers plant the next rice harvest. "They're the only winners," the old guy says.

It's interesting that Clint also played The Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, which is a Western remake of Yojimbo, another Kurosawa/Mifune pairing. In a way, Drifter is deconstructing both Westerns and samurai films, two genres very, very influenced by one another.

There are a lot of great Westerns. Some of them are just for fun: Django, Tombstone, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, etc. And some, like Unforgiven and High Plains Drifter, are using the horses and hats to tell really dark, brutal morality plays. There's violence, but these aren't "action movies," per se. It's reminiscent of the best horror and sci-fi, using visceral genre tropes to lure audiences into serious discussions of humanity and society.

Good stuff.