I too thought that I’ve had my fill of Clint Eastwood’s Westerns yet here’s a last one. Not only was this the very first time he both acted and directed in a Western himself but it is probably his morally ambiguous role. Indeed the film is notorious for having his character rape a woman soon after he arrives in town. The rest of the film isn’t quite that shocking unfortunately and in the end I liked the concept of it more than the execution. This has a rough and ready gritty feel but I think it would better achieve what it is trying to do with a more polished look.

A lone stranger rides into Lago, a remote mining town on the shores of a lake. The townsfolk stare silently at him as he makes his way to the local saloon to buy drinks and sits down at the barber for a shave. Three local toughs trail him with jibes and insults. When they move to attack him, he casually shoots all three dead. The shocked townsfolk do nothing but a fancily dressed woman mocks him in the street so he carries her off to a barn and rapes her. That night as he rests in a room at the the local hotel, he dreams of a U.S. Marshal being whipped to death in Lago while bystanders watch on. The next day, the leaders of the town offer the stranger a deal. The three men who killed the marshal are due to be released from prison and the townsfolk are scared that they will be back for revenge. The three toughs he had already killed were supposed to protect the town. They’re now offering the stranger whatever he wants to take their place. The stranger accepts and proceeds to extravagantly take or give away goods from the general store, appoints the local dwarf as both the mayor and the sheriff, orders the saloon to serve everyone with free drinks and clears out the entire hotel of guests except for himself.

Movies about villagers or townsfolk hiring a warrior to protect them is a staple of the Western genre. However High Plains Drifter tries hard to establish from the onset that this unnamed stranger is no hero. Indeed it soon becomes clear that he isn’t even there to protect the townsfolk. By his very presence, he indicts the townsfolk for their cravenness, their unwillingness to take action even in their own defense. As the stranger’s demands get more outrageous, casually taking wives from their husbands and ordering the demolition of a barn, and the day of the outlaws’ release draw near, the townsfolk get more desperate. It turns out that pretty much all of them are collectively guilty for arranging the death of the marshal and then betraying the outlaws they had hired. Eastwood leaves the true identity of the stranger open to interpretation but deliberately hints at a supernatural origin. He already knows the history of the town without having to ask anyone, appears and disappears mysteriously and seems invincible. He might be the ghost of the dead marshal, an avenging angel or even the devil himself.

Eastwood does justice to the genre by opening the film with a spectacular shot of the stranger arriving in town. It seems that he scouted out and picked the location himself and does indeed look unique with the desert sand giving way to grass and then the waters of the lake. It’s similarly impressive how he built a set of real buildings to serve as the town and then had them painted to become a hellscape. Yet in general the film isn’t polished enough and has a sort of ad hoc feeling common to Westerns of that era. It even tries to be a little funny at times with the stranger dodging shots from the woman he rapes and using the dwarf character for cheap laughs. I think this would have been so much better if it had been made with the production values and ethos of the much later Unforgiven. It’s a film that needs the high budget, slick Hollywood treatment to really sell the gradual transformation into a horror film.

The rape scene is dismaying for many but it’s not explicit and does cement the fact that the stranger is there to pass judgment on everyone, even that specific woman for her sins. What’s cringe is that the women always submit to him after he has sex with them which is needlessly misogynistic and actually downplays the horror aspect. This is a unique and interesting take on Westerns and so it deserves to be watched. But Eastwood made this when he was still at the beginning of his directorial career and so it isn’t as good as it could have been.