Clint Eastwood directs himself in High Plains Drifter, his first western as a filmmaker, which resurrects The Man With No Name to come out of a Leone-esque widescreen desert haze and settle things in the troubled town of Lago. Three bonafide badmen have just been released from prison and are heading to Lago with bloody retribution on their minds. The townsfolk hire The Stranger’s steely gunslinging for their defense, and all at the amoral price of: whatever he wants. This creeping nihilistic western ticked off conservative stalwart John Wayne so much that he penned an angry letter to Eastwood complaining about how the West wasn’t really like that, full of opportunistic criminals and cowards, and that’s not the way a western should go. Don’t threaten us with a good time, Duke.
“What’s most notable is how Eastwood holds fast to the rebel spirit of the spaghetti Westerns and revisionist New Hollywood Westerns of the previous decade,” – Noel Murray, The Dissolve
“There’s a boldness, confident stylisation, and genuine weirdness to the movie that totally escaped other post-spaghetti American Westerns, with a real sense of exorcism running both through and beyond it.” – Time Out
