HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Universal, 1973) Kino Lorber

I am at a loss to explain the enduring appeal of High Plains Drifter (1973) – Clint Eastwood’s self-directed, R-rated revenge western. Not only does Ernest Tidyman’s screenplay possess a certain lack for the niceties, incorporating some fairly blue scenarios and dialogue that, perhaps only in retrospect, distinctly situate the picture as a byproduct of that classless decade in movie-land pop culture in which it was made, but Eastwood’s blood-thirsty anti-hero manages to murder 3 men, and, rape one hellcat of a woman in just the first 15-minutes of screen time – and without very much provocation either. It’s oft been suggested High Plains Drifter is Eastwood’s homage to all those spaghetti westerns he made for Sergio Leone. And while there are similarities, any direct comparison between that legacy and this movie ought to end with the following disclaimer: Eastwood plays a man of few words who rides a horse and kills a lot of people.  By 1973, Eastwood was ready to get back in the saddle. And while High Plains Drifter is frequently cited as the last ‘American western’ to be made until Eastwood’s own Unforgiven resurrected the genre in 1992, I really cannot bring myself to consider it as a great film. Taking his cue from personal experiences accrued under Leone’s expert tutelage, and perhaps borrowing a page from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), High Plains Drifter is as merciless as it remains raw and fierce. Eastwood channels the revisionist precepts of the classic Hollywood western and its newfound deification of the antihero into an uncanny spectacle with unanticipated viciousness and cynicism – on par with the seventies’ bitterness and verve for suggesting America was going to hell in a handbasket. Tidyman’s screenplay is not particularly interested in revenge per say - rather, the machinations gone into its intricate plotting and ultimate poisoning of reason, perhaps, feeding off of an old Chinese proverb; something about digging two graves before embarking on any form of vengeance. There is an ethereal, yet haunted characteristic to Eastwood’s nameless ‘stranger’ – materializing from the early morning heat of these desolate plains like one of the four horsemen from the apocalypse having lost his way.

Making short shrift of some baddies, the Stranger is clearly up to no good as he accepts a commission to act as the town’s enforcer against a trio of advancing gunslingers. Why any man, though predominantly one as clever and skilled as ‘the stranger’, should care what happens to this nearly forgotten outpost remains a mystery undisclosed.  The inhabitants are mostly ungrateful, if restrained in their hostility, resenting the stranger’s intervention, yet two-faced in their eagerness for him to stir chaos from the calm. An equal amount of dread is generated by Billy Curtis’ Mordecai, the absolute worst of these demoralized peoples, whom the stranger elects as his sheriff and mayor. Although running true, at least to the form, High Plains Drifter virtually abandons traditions and content of the western genre. Eastwood’s direction/performance and Tidyman’s screenplay attempt a sort of Old Testament scenario, but decide instead to terrorize us with the horrors of mankind. The Stranger’s modus operandi is dreary, though unclear, except to say he is committed to transforming a disparate rabble into cold-blooded murderers.  What’s in it for ‘the stranger’?  Free reign for one; also, absolute dominion over a town who did him wrong in a former life.  Now, I am getting ahead of myself. Besides, this latter ‘reveal’ is dispensed with rather heartlessly. At the outset, Eastwood’s tatty ruffian engages in an orgasmic nirvana with a sex-starved female, transformed into his love-sick rag doll, seemingly to relish his vigorous penetration. The unflattering complexity of this episode is never bravely addressed, either by Eastwood or Tidyman. It just is another ugly little vignette, essentially suggested as just par for the course of any frontier woman’s lot in life.

Interestingly, the last act of High Plains Drifter is not about protecting Lago from an external threat from these advancing angels of death who have adopted a scorched earth policy as they make their way across the plains; rather, a standoff between the stranger and the town’s undisciplined pessimists, watching rather helplessly as he deliberately allows for this community’s descend into a purgatory of chaos and paralyzing fear. High Plains Drifter teems with subtext, whether analyzing the dystopian breakdown of a community into authoritarianism met with divisive mob rule or the societal devolution of a presumably God-less conclave, inhumane and clay-footed by their own design. Yet, if the picture appears to have much more going for it than this deceptively transparent central narrative about a solitary reaper passing through town, the whole enterprise gets weighted down in Tidyman’s verve for foul dialogue and situations, anchoring it to the 1970’s. So, characters act and behave as they would in ‘then’ contemporary society, creating a bizarre wax works merely garbed in period attire.

High Plains Drifter was, in fact, the first western Eastwood directed and starred in, approaching Universal with nothing more than a 9-page proposal. Tidyman, who had already won an Oscar for his work on The French Connection (1971) took his inspiration for High Plains Drifter from the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964, an incident that eyewitnesses reportedly stood by and watched. From this kernel of an idea, Tidyman elected to plump out the particulars with some fairly macabre allegory. While Universal was eager to have Eastwood, they were not keen on carting off star, cast and crew on location. Eastwood’s clout ensured he would get his way. Thus, the production relocated to Mono Lake where 50 technicians and construction workers toiled to build the plywood town of Lago, complete with a church, 2-story hotel, 14 houses and a main street of false front businesses in only 15 days. Eastwood also gained clearance to shoot in Reno, Nevada's Winnemucca Lake and California's Inyo National Forest. Given the logistical nightmare of working far away from the comforts of home, it remains rather impressive Eastwood brought the production in at 6-weeks, finishing two days ahead of schedule, and, under budget.

High Plains Drifter opens with Dee Barton’s thoroughly bizarre orchestral main titles and a solitary figure emerging on horseback from the shimmering heat rising off the plains. The unnamed rider enters the isolated mining outpost of Lago in Inyo County, California.  Almost immediately, he is dogged by three of the town’s lesser-intelligent scumbags, who taunt in the saloon and then follow him across the street to the barbershop to pursue their campaign of bullying to their own detriment. Effortlessly, the stranger exercises his particularly ruthless brand of frontier justice. Next, he is confronted by a saucy town woman, Callie Travers (Mariana Hill) who is just itching for…well… After a heated exchange, the stranger drags Travers into a nearby stable and rapes her, much to their eventual ‘mutual’ pleasure. Renting a room in the hotel across the street, the stranger suffers a curious nightmare, recalling a brutal whipping while a contingent of honorable men and women, all depicted in shadow, look on without lifting a finger to help. This regression then morphs into another ‘flashback’ in which Marshall Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn) is whipped to death in front of the hotel by outlaws, Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and brothers, Dan (Dan Vadis) and Cole Carlin (Anthony James) – again, as the citizens quietly observe. In the original screenplay, it was explained Duncan and the stranger were brothers – thus, crystalizing the Stranger’s resolve to seek revenge. Eastwood preferred moral ambiguity here, and left all references to this blood relation on the cutting room floor, although for foreign dubs, several lines of dialogue were inserted to clarify.

The next day, Sheriff Sam Shaw (Walter Barnes) reluctantly offers the Stranger the post previously held by the men he killed, defending the town from Bridges and the Carlins, about to be released from jail and likely to return and exact revenge. The Stranger resists, forcing Shaw to offer him unlimited autonomy. Reconsidering the offer, the Stranger later unearths how the townspeople were complicit in Duncan's murder. They hired the outlaws to kill him after he learned the town's only source of income - the mine - was on government property. The townsfolk then double-crossed these paid assassins by turning them in to the law. So much for the bucolic belt and Bible-fearing folk! Given carte blanche, the Stranger appoints Mordecai as the new sheriff and acting mayor. He orders a shop keep to furnish a Native American with every luxury he requires at no expense, and takes over the local hotel as his base of operations, kicking out all of the other guests. Naturally, the proprietor, Lewis Belding (Ted Hartley), and his wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom) object. Still sore – literally and figuratively – over her unexpected romp in the hay with the Stranger, Callie gathers support among the more resentful townsfolk. Later, she skulks off to the stranger’s bedroom to have sex with him, then, assuming he is asleep, quietly sneaks out to alert her cohorts he is ripe for the killing. The angry mob bursts into the room, unaware they are attacking a dummy beneath the sheets. Instead, the Stranger tosses a lit stick of dynamite after them, thus decimating much of the hotel, and, putting a period to any and all opposition to his future plans – save one. Seeking out Callie, the Stranger again drags her kicking and screaming – this time, into her bedroom where they again have a spirited romp at his pleasure. As they say, ‘third time’s the charm’ and, the next morning a seemingly reformed Sarah informs the Stranger the late Sheriff Duncan cannot rest in peace since his remains are buried in an unmarked grave just beyond the town.

The Stranger attempts to train the townspeople in defensive tactics. Sadly, they are an incompetent lot. He also orders the entire town be painted blood red, replacing the sign post that reads ‘Lago’ with the word, ‘Hell’.  Now, the Stranger rides out of town, inflicting a preliminary threat on Bridges and the Carlins as they advance. He sets off dynamite charges and startles them with an assault by rifle.  Retreating to Lago, the Stranger finds his orders have all been carried out. The menfolk are positioned on every rooftop and a table has been laden with food and drink, over which hangs a prominent banner inscribed, ‘Welcome Home Boys’.  Once again, the stranger rides out of town. Bridges and the Carlins arrive and are effective at rounding up the citizenry inside the saloon, murdering various civic leaders who sent them to prison. By nightfall, the remaining folk are held captive while the town of Lago is set afire. The Stranger hooks Cole Carlin with his whip around the throat, dragging him into the street and whipping him to death. Soon afterward, the body of Dan Carlin is discovered dangling from another whip. As Bridges investigates, the Stranger suddenly appears, draws and shoots him dead. By dawn’s early light, the terrified citizenry emerges from the saloon to survey the wreckage. The Stranger, having departed on horseback, pauses momentarily at the cemetery to observe Mordecai finishing a new marker. “I never did know your name,” Mordecai suggests. “Yes, you did,” the Stranger insists, leaving a perplexed Mordecai to ponder as the camera pauses on the new marker, inscribed, Marshal Jim Duncan – Rest in Peace.

High Plains Drifter possesses much of the uber-violence of a mid-sixties’ revisionist western, though none of its finesse. While the picture has the look of a period western, thanks to some stark, yet gorgeous cinematography a la Bruce Surtees, what tanks the movie’s staying power is Tidyman’s screenplay, too telescopically focused on the seventies’ yen for crude dialogue but only the most threadbare of connective tissue to anchor the story in a sort of timeless vacuum for which all of the very best western dramas/adventures are noted. High Plains Drifter feels like the seventies – the nineteen-seventies, not the eighteen-seventies. Eastwood, cribbing from his reputation as ‘the man with no name’ in Leone’s classics, is even more cryptic and less likeable here. At least in the Leone movies, Eastwood’s stoicism had an edge, plus a thin veneer of irony, and, a few choice examples of broadly played humor. Fair enough, there is little to laugh about in High Plains Drifter. Alas, the perverse nature of Eastwood’s ‘stranger’ – his inability to even exorcise the demons from his past in a satisfactory way results in a real anti-climactic finale. The rest of the cast are a troop of nondescripts failing to make even a ripple in this nightmarish tale. Instead of real/reel people, we get stick-figure archetypes. Instead of genuine reactions, we get a lot of expertly staged, though thoroughly artificial byplay, frequently peppered in blue language, presumably, to make us chuckle as we cringe.  It doesn’t really work.

The David Lean-esque emergence of this nameless gunslinger from a shimmering desert horizon, our awkward introduction to the callousness of ‘the stranger’ as he murders three dumb yahoos with more balls than brain power, the rape of the little spitfire just for getting in his way; none of these acts seems to add up to more than an ugly and very bleak exercise in seventies’ gumbo-styled picture-making, craven in its verve to dismantle the last, lingering vestiges of Hollywood’s lionized western genre, and also, the one-time mythologized visions of the great American west.  If anything, High Plains Drifter skews toward horror and sci-fi, the ending, a sullied little jab at the supernatural. After all, isn’t the stranger the sheriff who died? I suspect this ‘big reveal’ is meant to be ‘deep’ in an otherwise altogether shallow story that substitutes violence for perspective and foul language for any sort of competent stab at advancing the plot via dialogue. Indeed, once the stranger rides into town, High Plains Drifter enters its own purgatory – a narrative stalemate with no purpose other than to prime the audience for its third act. Eastwood goes well beyond the usual strain in seventies’ anti-heroism. There is nothing even remotely redeemable about his disturbingly equivocal phantom of the west whose sole function is either to demean and/or threaten everyone. Forget ‘drifter’ – Eastwood’s steely-eyed brute is single-mindedly bent to wring in the wrath, departing a town in tatters, with blood-spattered corpses left to rot in its streets. Why any of this carnage should be considered ‘compelling’ is left far too open-ended to shore up the wounds. High Plains Drifter is thus, strangely, a footnote in Eastwood’s career – dark, oppressive and rotten to its core. As I grow older, life presents far too many real opportunities to experience the atrocities inflicted by man on his brethren. I don’t really need the movies for that!

Nor does anyone actually need Kino Lorber’s 4K reissue. Comparisons between the 1080p Blu and 4K presentations illustrate a shift in color tone and saturation. There’s also a marginal ‘teal’ push to the blues that on the Blu-ray appeared blue and more natural in appearance. The new ‘grading’ also allows reds that were red on the Blu, to lean toward ruddy brown. Color density is consistent. Contrast is solid. There’s a wonderful organic appeal to the grain. Audio is limited to the same two tracks from the Blu – a 2.0 DTS and a 5.1 DTS. Ironically, the 2.0 is preferred here – the robustness of the original theatrical mix outclassing the rechanneled 5.1, which sounds tinny by comparison. The 4K houses 2 audio commentaries, one from Alex Cox, the other by critics, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson. Each has its merits, though I think the Mitchell/Thompson track etches ahead for comprehensive coverage. The standard Blu, included herein, also contains these commentaries, and ads trailers, TV and radio spots, two separate, 3 min. ‘Trailers from Hell’, barely 8 mins. on Eastwood, 17 mins. with co-star, William O’Connell, 9 mins. with co-star, Mitchell Ryan, and 15 mins. with Marianna Hill. Kino pads out the extras with trailers for other movies it is attempting to market to the consumer. Bottom line: High Plains Drifter is a gritty little western that looked far better on standard Blu-ray than it does in 4K. Pass and be glad that you did!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

4K - 3

Blu-ray - 4.5

EXTRAS

2.5