Clint Eastwood

High Plains Drifter

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High Plains Drifter (1973)

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Written by: Ernest Tidyman

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Billy Curtis, Geoffrey Lewis

 

I was introduced to High Plains Drifter when it was described to me by a professor in film school as “the movie in which Clint Eastwood paints a town red and calls it Hell.” While this curt description leaves out some of the nuance of the plot, it is, at its essence, what the film is about. Though we didn’t screen High Plains Drifter in the Film Westerns class during which it was first mentioned to me, the attitude of that particular professor did a great deal to help form my own viewpoints on movies, and watching this particular film always reminds me of him. Prof. Best was as likely to recommend a Kaiju movie as he was Kurosawa, and was more interested in comics than he was in literary classics. His open-minded approach to movies and to art helped to open up my own thinking on what could or should be considered valid as a subject of academic study. If Prof. Best could champion Star Trek, Godzilla, and anime, then why shouldn’t I seek to explore the artistry in whatever text I might see fit. Breaking out of the ivory tower mentality of academia was freeing, but it was also a development that likely pushed me away from continuing to pursue my education beyond my undergraduate studies. When I entered into a graduate program at Pitt, I found that the canonization and attention to classical theory completely turned me off, and I longed for the freedom that I had found studying under Prof. Best. I’m always reminded of him when I watch High Plains Drifter, not just because he was the person who first introduced me to it, but also because it is typical of the type of B-movie that he would have found artistically valid and criminally under-considered.

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High Plains Drifter opens with a lone stranger (Eastwood) riding into the mining town of Lago. Upon his arrival, The Stranger is warned by the town’s saloon keeper that range types such as himself don’t often stop in Lago, finding the town to move too quickly for them. He insinuates that The Stranger ought to keep moving, and a trio of rough types in the saloon follow him across the street to the town barber shop, where they menace The Stranger. He takes the three by surprise, spinning out of the barber’s chair with his pistol drawn, and quickly dispatches of the trio. After having witnessed his lethal capacity, the town’s sheriff offers The Stranger the job previously held by the three roughriders that he killed, defending Lago from Stacy Bridges (Lewis) and his gang of outlaws who previously menaced the town and who are soon set to be released from prison. The Stranger learns that the town’s previous marshal was whipped to death in the street by the Bridges gang, and he is plagued by dreams of the marshal’s torture. The Stranger reluctantly accepts the job of defending the town, with the caveat that if he protects the town that the townsfolk must give him anything he wants. He takes full advantage, buying rounds for the whole bar at the saloon, loading up on supplies at the town store, and appointing Mordecai (Curtis), a dwarf, to the position of sheriff and mayor of Lago. The Stranger begins to devise a plan and instruct the townsfolk on how to defend themselves from Bridges’s gang. The Stranger’s plan involves painting the town red and staging a welcoming party for the gang, during which the townsfolk will ambush them. However, when Bridges and his outlaws are about to arrive in Lago, The Stranger rides off, leaving the townsfolk to fend for themselves, and the gang overruns the town and begins to burn it down. The Stranger returns to the town, emerging from the flames, to stalk and murder the Bridges gang. The next day, The Stranger rides out of town as Mordecai is engraving the previously unmarked grave of the murdered marshal.

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That plot summary of High Plains Drifter is a bit more involved than the one-sentence summary that had first piqued my curiosity about the movie, but its essence can really be boiled down into the fact that it is a movie in which Clint Eastwood paints a town red and calls it “Hell.” When I eventually got around to seeing the movie sometime in my early 20s, I found the pervasive strangeness and otherworldly tone of that abstract but powerfully evocative summary informed the film completely. High Plains Drifter seems equally influenced by Eastwood’s directorial mentors Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, and by Italian horror masters Dario Argento and Mario Bava. The film initially seems to hew close to the blueprint that Leone and Eastwood had established in the “Dollars” trilogy, but it quickly adopts a rather unsettling tone and it contains supernatural elements that are rare in the Western genre. It contains a level of violence, gore, and nihilism that would have been thought unseemly for the All-American film genre just five years prior. This is a revisionist Western, through and through, and it establishes Eastwood as a director who would continue to be interested in exploring and shifting the boundaries of the Western genre. Though it’s a bit of an uneven effort, High Plains Drifter is only Eastwood’s second feature in the director’s chair, and it deserves special commendation as a wholly unique vision of the West and of the Western film.

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High Plains Drifter isn’t a great movie; in fact, I think many people would say that it isn’t even a very good movie. It doesn’t really feature any standout performances, as Eastwood is essentially reprising his Man With No Name role, and the rest of the cast suffers from sorely lacking character development. These are stock Western characters, meant more to stand in for types than to differentiate themselves from one another. The movie’s production value is also fairly low, although its sets are decently impressive, featuring full buildings rather than false fronts, which gives the town of Lago some sense of depth. Rewatching High Plains Drifter, I was struck by the sense that some of the scenes weren’t finished, featuring abrupt endings, seeming extraneous to the plot, or just not quite matching up with the tone of the rest of the film. However, I still find this to be an incredibly enjoyable viewing experience. While it isn’t perfect, High Plains Drifter nails the right balance of pulp, action, and horror, even peppering in moments of levity. It’s schlocky and campy, but I’ve always found something intriguing about Eastwood’s injection of the supernatural into a Western revenge story. It’s a fresh take on the Western and one that I’m pretty happy to explore whenever the mood strikes me. For a movie that was introduced to me in such an inauspicious way, it’s one that has become a go-to Western, despite its obvious flaws.

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I don’t know if High Plains Drifter is underseen, or if I just don’t know that many people who like Westerns, generally, but I think that it’s a really fun movie that deserves a little more attention. It isn’t as iconic or groundbreaking as Eastwood’s work with Leone in the 1960s, or as paradigm shifting as something like The Wild Bunch, but it continues the revisionist ideas of the West that those films started to explore. It’s a refutation of the idyllic vision of American society in the Old West, and despite its supernatural overtones, it’s a position that rings true to me as a viewer. Watching this movie and High Noon in succession for this project, I was struck by the honesty that the townsfolk of Lago who would stand by and watch their Marshal whipped to death in the street are a natural extension of the cowardly townsfolk of Hadleyville who abandoned Marshal Kane, leaving him to face his fate alone. The major difference is that in a classic Western such as High Noon, the basic decency and virtue of the hero is assumed, whereas in Eastwood’s savage vision of the West, decency has been stripped away in favor of vengeance. I think it’s also interesting that both of these films drew the ire of none other than John Wayne, who posited that they both misrepresented the good, honest people of the Old West. I don’t bring that up to paint Eastwood as some sort of progressive in contrast to the virulent, reactionary Wayne. I think that Eastwood is presenting the same sort of paranoid, cut-throat world view that was on display in Dirty Harry, but something about the transposition to the Western setting makes it easier for me to stomach as a viewer in 2018. There are a couple of other Eastwood films that I’ll be writing about for this project, and I’m sure that my relationship and consideration of him as an actor, star persona, and director won’t get any less complicated, but I think that High Plains Drifter is a movie of his that I can pretty wholeheartedly endorse. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a really fun Western that inverts many conventions and traditions of the genre, and it offers enough stylistic variance to please fans of other genres, as well.

A Fistful of Dollars

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A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Dir. Sergio Leone

Written by: Victor Andrés Catena, Jaime Comas, Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Gian Maria Volantè, José Calvo

 

Often credited with being the first Spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars, the first film in Sergio Leone’s seminal “Dollars Trilogy,” is undoubtedly one of the most famous examples of that mode of Western, and one of the best of the early period of these Italian-made takes on the Western. Leone’s film isn’t without precedent, but his partnership with Clint Eastwood became the blueprint for European Westerns, and was the first to make a splash in the American market, solidifying the viability of these cultural imports and sparking a torrent of imitators of varying quality. Adapted as it was from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars also points to the cultural universality of these tales, and the malleability of the Western genre to fit into various settings and cultural motifs. Leone’s and Eastwood’s epic final collaboration, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, was my first experience with the Spaghetti Western, and I quickly sought out the first two chapters in the trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars lacks the budget and flair that Leone’s later films would come to embody, but plenty of the director’s trademarks are on display here, and the film obviously points to further great work to come. Maybe A Fistful of Dollars falls short of the masterpiece designation that I have readily given to Leone’s later work, but it’s a great film in its own right, and likely more cinematically important than any other Western of the 1960s.

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In A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone filters the influence of the great American Western auteurs John Ford and Howard Hawks, throws in a dash of world cinema influence, bakes it all under the Spanish sun and adds a transgressive, violent flair, resulting in a Western movie that would set the paradigm for a new form of the genre. The film opens with a lone rider, Joe (Eastwood), arriving in the town of San Miguel. Upon his arrival, Joe meets Silvanito (Calvo), the town saloonkeeper who tells him that San Miguel is controlled by two feuding gangs, the Rojos, a family of outlaws, and the Baxters, headed by Sherriff John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy). Though Silvanito warns the stranger that he should leave town, Joe sees an opportunity to fortuitously position himself by playing both sides of the fence in the feud between the Rojos and the Baxters, and begins to clandestinely sell information to both sides. Though his motives seem to be purely financial, Joe meets a woman, Marisol (Koch), who is being held prisoner by Ramon Rojo (Volantè), and he tries to help her. He frees Marisol and gives her and her family the money that he has gotten from the Baxters and Rojos, and tries to make it appear that it is the Baxters who have freed her. When Ramon realizes that it was Joe who freed Marisol, he captures and tortures him, and in the meantime, the Rojos murder the entire Baxter family, who they believe are protecting Joe. Joe escapes the Rojo compound and is smuggled out of town in a coffin by the undertaker, Piripero (Joseph Egger). With the Rojos searching high and low for Joe, the stranger takes time to convalesce and plan in a cave on the outskirts of San Miguel, but when he finds out that Silvanito has been captured by the Rojos, he must return to town to face off against the gang and save his friend.

I don’t know that I could narrow my list of favorite filmmakers down to something like a personal Mt. Rushmore, where I chose even half a dozen of my favorites to be immortalized, but I do know that Sergio Leone would have a place on that monument, almost regardless of its size limitations. Besides David Lynch, Leone has been one of the most constant presences in my life as a cinephile. Despite his relatively scant feature output, Leone’s work has had a seismic impact on my taste in and appreciation of film. From the first time I was introduced to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly when I was 17 until earlier this year when I finally got around to watching and writing about Leone’s final Western, Duck You Sucker, I have been enamored with his parched, fly-bitten, primal vision of the American West. I discovered Leone, at least partially, through my teenaged obsession with Quentin Tarantino. The former video store clerk famously wore his cinematic influences on his sleeve, liberally “borrowing” from his favorite filmmakers, and championing B-movies, pulp cinema, and foreign films along the way. I discovered a lot of movies and filmmakers this way, but Leone was the one who stuck with me. I saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly independently, but after having seen the second half of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and the way that that film aped the Spaghetti Western aesthetic, I started seeking out the rest of Leone’s movies.

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A Fistful of Dollars was the next Spaghetti Western that I encountered, and I have to admit that the first time I watched the movie I was a little bit disappointed. When compared to Leone’s epic later work, his debut seems slight. In hindsight, of course, I can recognize the importance of the film, both in terms of propelling the Western genre forward in a different direction, and in launching the career of an immensely important and visionary filmmaker. All of Leone’s soon-to-be familiar directorial tropes are on display in A Fistful of Dollars. This fully formed vision is likely a result of a career working as an assistant director in the Italian film industry that stretched back to the 1940s, providing Leone with the technical chops and industry know-how to deliver unique, artful feature films from the outset. A Fistful of Dollars, with its minimalist dialogue, heavy reliance on extreme close-ups, whiplash editing, and heretofore unseen violence, became the blueprint not just for Leone’s continued work, but for a new vision of the Western, in general. Shortly after the film’s release, European filmmakers across the continent, but particularly in Italy, were attempting to recreate the film’s aesthetic and mood, in hopes of capturing lightning in a bottle, to varying success.

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While some of these copy-cat Westerns are interesting in their own right, most are forgettable, at best, and unwatchable, at worst. Most of the studio directors working in the genre in Italy lacked Leone’s singular vision and visual flair, but what they all lacked was the undeniable star power and screen presence of a young Clint Eastwood. Eastwood wasn’t Leone’s first choice to play Joe in A Fistful of Dollars, but it’s impossible to imagine the film and its sequels without Eastwood as the lead. Though he is explicitly named (differently) in each of these films, Eastwood’s character(s) in Leone’s Westerns has frequently come to be referred to as “The Man With No Name,” perhaps because of Eastwood’s tight-lipped, minimalist performances in the films. His iconic performances in these films set the standard for a new type of cowboy, emerging from the shadow of straight-laced, moralistic defenders of virtue embodied by Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, and, of course, John Wayne. Eastwood’s Joe is a quiet, cold, and efficient instrument of violence. His line delivery in the film is clipped, and the dialogue is terse, giving the impression that Joe has little regard for other people, or for human life, barely deigning to open his mouth when he communicates, even with those he seems to like. Eastwood’s Joe isn’t a nihilist, however, as he obviously shows care for Marisol, even hinting that he has a past when he remarks that he is helping her because he “knew someone like [her] once and there was no one there to help.” These brief glimpses of emotionality give the character an unexpected depth, as does the natural humor that Eastwood imbues Joe with. Throughout the film, he makes wry, offhanded retorts and observations, but the humor never feels shoehorned, despite its existence in the brutal universe of Leone’s West. This multifaceted performance as a complex anti-hero turned Eastwood into a bona fide star, and helped to raise A Fistful of Dollars head and shoulders above its imitators.

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Another major factor in the success of A Fistful of Dollars is its source material, with the film being an adaptation of Yojimbo. Though Leone denied that Yojimbo is the sole inspiration for his film, and quite obviously it is not, there is no denying that that film is at least the primary influence at work here. The two films share a symbiotic kind of bond, with Yojimbo retroactively being thought of as a Western, due to its influence on A Fistful of Dollars, and examination of Kurosawa’s samurai films reveals the obvious influence of the American Western. One of the things that I like so much about A Fistful of Dollars is that it is a great example of the cultural cross pollination that cinema can provide. The movie is a Western directed by an Italian, shot in Spain with a cast of Spanish and German actors, starring a barely-known American television actor, adapted from a traditional Japanese samurai film, which was, in turn, influenced by American pulp novels and Westerns. The 1950s and, particularly, 1960s became a boom period for international cinema as film industries in Europe began to rebuild after the devastation of World War II, and the arthouse movement in America began to open up American eyes to movies from around the world that differed significantly from the stories being produced by the recently-abandoned Hollywood studio system. Though it was dismissed as campy and schlocky, nihilistic and excessively violent, by critics upon its American release, A Fistful of Dollars was a major hit with audiences, and it has come to be seen as an important film, aesthetically and culturally, in the broader conversation of the history of world cinema. The cinematic interconnections made here, and throughout Leone’s body of work, indicate the kind of cultural universality that makes great cinematic texts so valuable and so relatable across cultures. A great movie is a great movie, regardless of its language or its visual and cultural aesthetic, and the kinds of pleasures that people take in the visual telling of a great tale are universal.

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As I’ve alluded to, Leone would go on to make bigger, better Westerns and movies that I enjoy more than this one, but without A Fistful of Dollars none of those films would likely exist. A Fistful of Dollars changed the landscape of the Western genre, with the once-quintessential American film being reimagined by an outsider. Leone embraced many of the traditions of the classic American Western, but rejected those parts of the genre that he saw as fallacies, replacing them with a more real, more raw, more savage West, peopled by men of dubious character and duplicitous motivation and painted with buckets of bright red blood. This gritty realism would come to inform the revisionist Westerns of the later 20th century, as well as the hardcore action films of the 1970s. There’s no understating the importance of this movie on the Western genre, helping as it did to revitalize a form that had probably gotten too mired in its own tropes and pretenses by the end of the 1950s. Without this movie we might not get The Wild Bunch, and certainly wouldn’t get Unforgiven, but we also might never get movies like Pulp Fiction or Taxi Driver whose creators were sparked by the unique vision of Sergio Leone. I’ll always prefer The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for its maximalist impact, and because it was my first foray into the world of a filmmaker whose entire body of work I celebrate, but when I don’t have three hours to truly immerse myself in that epic, A Fistful of Dollars is a perfectly fine substitute. While the later film expands upon all of the best tropes of the Spaghetti Western, Leone’s debut establishes them, concentrating them down into their most essential qualities, and providing a blueprint for the rest of the genre to come.

 

 

Dirty Harry

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Dirty Harry (1971)

Dir. Don Siegel

Written by: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, and Dean Riesner

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Andy Robinson, Reni Santoni

 

Clint Eastwood was one of my cinematic heroes when I was growing up. I came of age watching his films and modeling my impressions of cinematic masculinity on his stoic, skillful, ruthless archetypal characters. Whether he was the Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s famous trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns, or William Munny in Unforgiven, or Inspector Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films, Eastwood stood out to me as an example of American cinematic machismo. Throughout his career, he embodied so many famous characters and character types that it was easy for me to pick an Eastwood film for every mood. Sometime in my early 20s, that started to change, as I became more aware of Eastwood’s personal politics, and as he began to age, publically, and ungracefully. Though Unforgiven will likely always have a spot in my personal top ten films of all time, Clint Eastwood and his films became an early lesson for me in learning to appreciate and separate an artist’s output from his or her personal politics or persona. While I found little common ground with Eastwood as his politics became publicly more and more reactionary and right wing, I still found myself appreciating of many of the films that he directed and starred in as works of art. However, I found other films of his to fall into a grey area, where their content seemed too influenced by Eastwood for me to feel totally comfortable enjoying them. Dirty Harry, unfortunately, falls somewhere in this category.

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My reservations about the film aside, Dirty Harry is considered one of the definitive action films of its time, and deservedly so. The film, which would be followed up by four sequels of varying quality, introduced the world to Inspector Harry Callahan (Eastwood), a hard-boiled, no-rules San Francisco police detective who believes in bringing in his man at any cost. In Dirty Harry, Callahan is tasked with tracking down and apprehending Scorpio (Robinson), a serial killer who is threatening to murder one San Franciscan every day until the city obliges to pay him a ransom of $100,000. Callahan and his partner Chico (Santoni) track Scorpio across the city, nearly catching him several times, but the killer manages to elude apprehension over and over again. Scorpio teases the police department and mayor’s office with another threat, this time telling them that he’s buried a teenage girl alive and they have just a few hours to meet his demands before she suffocates. Callahan finally manages to track Scorpio to Kezar Stadium, where Scorpio hands out programs for the 49ers games, and confronts him on the football field. Harry shoots Scorpio, and tortures him by stepping on his wound until Scorpio gives up the location of the girl. However, when the police check the location, they find the girl already dead, and Scorpio is released from custody because Harry violated his civil rights. Scorpio continues his crime spree, hijacking a school bus and demanding a plane ticket out of California, but Harry is quick to cut him off. The two square off in an abandoned quarry, where Harry is quicker on the draw and manages to shoot Scorpio down. After killing Scorpio, Harry tosses his badge into a lake, unwilling to be a member of a police force upon which he cannot shoot first and ask questions later.

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I can assume, based on my editorials in that plot synopsis, that you can gather my attitude towards some of the more political or socio-political content in Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry is the story of a rogue cop who flaunts departmental procedures and scoffs in the face of citizens’ civil rights, ruling over a city with an iron fist and a .45 Magnum, daring criminals to test his authority. Of course, on the other hand, Dirty Harry is the story of a crazed serial murderer who would hold a major city hostage were it not for the endeavors of one cop, willing to make the sacrifices that others aren’t. Where your sympathies tend to fall when watching Dirty Harry is largely dependent on your existing worldview and political stance. I certainly don’t mean that anyone watching the film would necessarily be drawn to rooting for Scorpio, but that the extent to which a viewer can sympathize and root for Harry is largely dependent on their own views on authority. Clearly, the audience is intended to root for Harry Callahan, as he’s the hero of the action movie, but I personally find it really difficult to reconcile my anti-authoritarian stance with a film that asks me to root for a renegade cop. I hate cops. Always have, always will. I do understand the need for law enforcement in a society, but the brand of highly militarized law enforcement practiced currently in America is antithetical to my worldview of treating other with dignity and respecting their rights as human beings with agency. To me, Harry is just as much a psycho killer as Scorpio, and his refusal of the badge and the moniker of official power at the film’s end isn’t something to be celebrated, because Harry’s lust for power and violence doesn’t stem from his position as an authority figure, but from some deep-seeded defect inside of the character. Harry will continue his brand of vigilante justice (in no fewer than four sequels) whether he has the backing of the badge or not.

Dirty Harry is a particularly difficult film for me to watch in 2017 in light of the ongoing revelation of widespread and heinous abuses of power by police officers across America. Institutional and individual abuses of power on the part of law enforcement are certainly nothing new, but the existence of cell phone video technology and the prevalence of social media have shed a light on what I feel is the most important news story happening in America today. Every week, a new video surfaces of a cop somewhere gunning down a citizen, who is often unarmed, and almost always hasn’t committed a capital offense. Police in America have taken to playing judge, jury, and executioner in the street and on the beat, and too often the targets of their ire are young black men. Seeing Harry Callahan pointing a massive pistol in the face of a black man who is cowering on the ground, and teasing him with the famous catchphrase, “Do you feel lucky? Well do you, punk,” is simply too disturbing to me. The actions that Dirty Harry takes throughout the film and his casually bigoted attitude towards any nonwhite characters in the film are beyond the pale. While Siegel crafts an engaging and original action film around his rogue inspector, Harry Callahan simply isn’t a character that I can stomach spending any time with. His reckless, sadistic behaviors simply hit too close to home after seeing dozens of examples of modern day cops acting out their own vigilante fantasies on grainy cell phone video. As engaging and groundbreaking as the film might have been for its time, its current relevance really sours me on it.

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As I mentioned, there is an important lesson for me to learn in the films of Clint Eastwood, both those that feature him as an actor and the films that he has directed, about separating a work of art from its creator. In Dirty Harry, in particular, there’s a micro lesson that I can glean about admiring aspects of a work of art while being uncomfortable with or out of step with its overall message or presentation. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the many positive aspects that do exist throughout the film. One of the things that jumps to my mind immediately when I think of Dirty Harry is the film’s unique score, composed by Lalo Schiffrin. The soundtrack to the film is a psychedelic jazzscape, featuring unusually syncopated rhythms and atonal melodies. The acid jazz underscores the film’s many chase scenes and heightens the tension of the images, creating a natural sense of unease in the viewer through its use of dissonance. The film is also well shot, its rapid zooms and quick cuts became genre staples throughout the 1970s. Dirty Harry stands as a massively influential film, not just in its own time period, but into the present day. Unfortunately, its influence doesn’t seem totally limited to the cinema. In the film, we have examples of a rogue cop who wantonly acts out street justice, and of a psychotic killer who would, almost certainly, be one of today’s mass shooters who have utilized easy access to high-powered, military-style weapons to enact their terroristic fantasies, killing hundreds. I’m not suggesting that the current state of police/citizen relations is in any way impacted by a 45-year-old film, but that the culture of American hyper-masculinity that lionized a vigilante cop in Dirty Harry has evolved and mutated to such a degree that our society is beset with an epidemic of gun violence and of institutionalized, state-sanctioned murder of citizenry. Dirty Harry is a well-made action movie, but because of its inherent conservatism, it isn’t any fun. The film’s current relevance saps it of any of its levity for me, and it isn’t a film that I’ll likely be watching again.