High Plains Drifter (1973)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
A gunfighting stranger comes to the small settlement of Lago. After gunning down three gunmen who tried to kill him, the townsfolk decide to hire the Stranger to hold off three outlaws who are on their way.
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What critics compared High Plains Drifter to
It’s fun in the sense that you can reward yourself for spotting the references (Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter are given visual nods, while the raw style of Sergio Leone also looms large at several points).
It’s fitting casting as Statham channels Clint Eastwood in “High Plains Drifter” (1973) or “Pale Rider” (1985) as an immortal being unleashing divine payback in a film marked with chapter titles like “A Scorched Earth.”
Reeves’ channels Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (with an attempt at “High Plains Drifter”) and he gets it fifty percent right, which is good enough for this flick.
Her new one, “The Dressmaker,” is like some hellborn alloy of film noir, campy melodrama, “High Plains Drifter” and the Darwin Awards for people who die in moronic accidents.
Based on a novel by Rosalie Ham, “The Dressmaker” proceeds down a number of subsequent plot paths – some of which are farcically comical, one of which involves a shocking death – rejecting each before transforming into a woman’s version of the Eastwood revenge film “High Plains Drifter.”
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In a way, she�s like Clint Eastwood�s anti-hero in High Plains Drifter, kicking up the dust that has settled over the lies.
Though occasionally amusing, in ways similar to A Fistful of Dollars and Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, in which tough protagonists also manipulate weaker townspeople to humorous effect, High Plains Drifter is a brooding, surprisingly artistic Western, accented by a haunting score.
It lands the pampered pet in a desert nightmare but frees him to answer when destiny calls him to a town named Dirt, that looks a lot like something out of "High Plains Drifter," complete with the saloon.
Clint Eastwood bolted to stardom as a tight-lipped lethal gunman in stark, highly stylized Westerns like “High Plains Drifter.”
He's been even more explicit about this otherworldliness in previous westerns, such as High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider.
He is the Eastwood icon, established in the Sergio Leone westerns that made Eastwood a star (A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) and thoroughly deconstructed decades later in Eastwood's Unforgiven .
And he had shown, as a director, a strong interest in crafting unusual westerns: look at High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales (which offers the surprising sight of Clint Eastwood crying, though everyone thought it was a big deal when he shed a tear or two in In the Line of Fire), Pale Rider, and even the oddball, heartfelt non-hits Bronco Billy (Eastwood as a New Jersey salesman who poses as a sharpshooter) and Honkytonk Man (Clint as a dying country-western singer).
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Apparently having taken plenty of notes while making movies for directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, Clint Eastwood made his own directorial debut with 1971's Play Misty for Me and followed that by helming his first Western behind the camera.
Clint Eastwood ("Play Misty for Me"-1971), in his second directorial attempt, offers a loving farewell to the Sergio Leone western (Leone made him a star) in this ghostly revenge tale involving a mysterious vengeful nameless gunslinging drifter, who is forcefully played by Eastwood.