High Plains Drifter

High Plains Drifter (1973) begins with a nameless man riding into a town in the desert, and it takes the western apart from inside. The town is afraid: three men are getting out of prison and coming for revenge. They offer the stranger money. He accepts, but demands the whole town in return. He makes a dwarf the mayor, lets the shops be looted, and finally has every building painted red and the town's name changed to Hell. This is not a revenge story but a punishment story. Something was done in the town's past and everybody watched and said nothing. Who the stranger is is never explained; the film leaves it deliberately open. It was Eastwood's second film as director. After seeing it John Wayne wrote him a letter to say he disliked it. To Wayne the film was not about the settling of the West or the pioneers, and that was what the genre should be. Eastwood described it years later: we were two different generations and there was no way he was going to understand what I was doing; High Plains Drifter was a fable, it was never meant to show the drudgery of pioneering. That exchange reads like a record of where the genre was going. The town was built from nothing for the shoot and genuinely burned at the end. It runs 105 minutes. Good for: westerns, Eastwood, and dark fables. Less good for: there is a rape scene and the film's attitude to it is indefensible now; the tone is cold and unpleasant.