Authors: Richard Schickel
One gets an impression of Clint riding easily, even proprietarily, through high-celebrity country during these days, sure of his own power, confident that he could now pause to investigate whatever byways he encountered along the trail—as, for example, the curiously memorable picture he put into production in the late summer of 1972.
High Plains Drifter
was a western from an unexpected source, Ernest Tidyman, who had written the
Shaft
novels and the films based on them—the latter offering the movies’ first black private detective—as well as the screenplay for
The French Connection
. It had come to Clint as a very brief treatment—somewhere between three and ten pages, depending on whose memory one consults—and was developed by Tidyman into a full-scale script, then put into final form by the faithful Dean Riesner, who, much to Clint’s annoyance, was denied on-screen credit in a Writers Guild arbitration.
The movie partakes of some western conventions—mostly by extending and varying the
High Noon
theme—but it transcends them, largely through the manner of its realization. Its premise, much of it revealed in flashbacks, is that a town called Lago depends for its prosperity on a nearby mine. The mine, unfortunately, is on federal land. In order to prevent that information from leaking out, the leading citizens hire a gang of three bandits to work for them as enforcers; they flog the town’s
honest sheriff to death when he threatens to reveal the community’s secret, most of its citizens impassively watching him die. Thereafter the townspeople betray the criminals to the law. Now, having been released from jail, the bad guys (headed by Geoffrey Lewis, an actor who would become an Eastwood familiar, eventually appearing with him in five more films) are heading to Lago, vengeance very much on their minds.
So, too, is a tall, bearded stranger, wearing a flat hat and frock coat, who emerges out of a shimmering heat haze at the beginning of the picture. It is, of course, Clint, truly a man with no name this time. He quickly establishes his credentials as a gunslinger in Lago, and the townspeople beg him to defend them against the oncoming killers. He agrees to train some of them as a sort of self-defense force. Before their climactic confrontation, however, he obliges them to paint the town (constructed of raw wood) bright red and to rename it—Hell. Whereupon, he deserts them, allowing most of them to be killed by the marauders before he reappears to wipe them out. As he leaves town for the last time, a midget (Billy Curtis), who has been his one trustworthy ally—he has actually appointed him sheriff—asks him what his name is. “You know my name,” the drifter says.
But therein lies the rub, and the largest interest of the picture. The midget doesn’t know the stranger’s name or anything else about him. Neither does anyone else in the film. Or anyone in the audience, for that matter. Some critics wrote confidently that the drifter was the ghost of the martyred sheriff (though in the flashbacks it is clearly Buddy Van Horn playing the part, uncredited). Others insisted that he must be the murdered man’s brother. Still others identified him as an avenging angel. Bob Daley remembers Clint telling him not to respond to this speculation, to let the enigma hover unanswered.
Clint now says the script definitely identified the drifter as the murdered sheriff’s sibling and that “I always played it like he was the brother.” He adds, however, that “I thought about playing it a little bit like he was sort of an avenging angel, too,” and surely his performance has a touch of the ghostly about it. Indeed, as he admits, the drifter’s detailed knowledge of previous events, expressed in dreams, suggests he possesses information he could not have acquired except through supernatural means.
It is, however, the film’s setting and realization, its firm and quite original directorial slant, that give
High Plains Drifter
its distinction and lifts it definitively into the realm of allegory. It is not usual for directors—especially star directors—to act as their own location scouts, but Clint did so in this case. His first thought was Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and he and Bob Daley drove there to look it over. As they headed back
to Las Vegas, their car ran out of gas. The producer, who was driving, was beside himself with apologies and offered to get out and thumb a ride to the nearest gas station. That was fine with the fuming Clint, but Daley had no luck; cars kept whizzing heedlessly by them. Time, Clint thought, to exert some star power. Time, he soon discovered, to learn its limits. He was no more successful than Daley. Finally some Hispanic farmhands in a battered pickup recognized and rescued them. He has always found in this story, which he often recounts, a nice ironic lesson about fame and too great a reliance on it.
Pyramid Lake stands on Paiute Indian land, and the tribal council was deeply divided about leasing it as a movie location, so someone suggested Mono Lake in California as an alternative. Clint had visited there in the past and remembered its eerieness. Situated in a desert, it was not quite a dead sea, but the fresh water that once ran into it had in those days been diverted to supply Los Angeles (in recent years the lake has been rescued). Stalagmites could be seen rising above the radically lowered surface of the water. Arriving in the vicinity, Clint drove down a rutted, disused road, came to a point overlooking the lake and said, “Yeah, this is the spot.” Within a four-minute drive from it he found all the other locations he required, save one—the bleak desert out of which the drifter rides at the beginning of the picture, and to which he returns at the end; that was shot outside Reno.
The town itself was the work of genial, gifted Henry Bumstead, whose career as a production designer encompasses almost the entire history of sound film. He had designed
Joe Kidd
, and Clint would call on him almost twenty years later to design Big Whiskey for
Unforgiven
as well as several subsequent films. Bumstead built the village in twenty-eight days, complete with interior sets, and in its rawness, its suggestion of impermanence, it is something of a masterpiece. Reminiscent of silent-film western towns (one thinks of
Hell’s Hinges
, the William S. Hart film), its primitiveness says something about the heedless greed of its residents, their lack of rootedness and their lack of interest in building for the future. It—and they—parody the western town in most movies, where neat churches and schools bespeak hopes for more civilized times to come.
Clint stoutly denies that this movie—any of his movies—constitutes a critique of middle-class values. “I have great respect for the middle class, because they’re the people who are trying to make things happen in the world,” he says. But the kid who contrived to get himself expelled from Piedmont High remains alive in him. The only thoroughly bourgeois character he ever played is the banker in
The Witches
, in which, of course, he satirized the type, and excepting his next film,
Breezy
, it is
impossible to recall an Eastwood movie in which a middle-class citizen is portrayed sympathetically.
High Plains Drifter
is almost entirely populated by mean-spirited hypocrites, entirely absorbed by economic self-interest.
As always he was a considerate director. Verna Bloom, the female lead, was about to marry Jay Cocks, the critic, and discovered the picture’s schedule conflicted with their wedding trip. To oblige her Clint hired a double to do some long shots he needed to make early in the shoot, permitting her to report a few days late. That thoughtfulness continued when they settled in on location. Bloom played Sarah Belding, wife of Lago’s hotelkeeper. At first seemingly hostile to the stranger, she alone seems to understand that there is some connection between him and the murdered sheriff. As for the drifter, he knows—just how is never explained—that she alone tried to aid the sheriff when he was undergoing his calvary. Eventually, they come together and share a very discreetly handled night of love. Too discreet, Bloom now thinks. “
I would have liked some hot stuff,” she says—speaking strictly as an actress, and speaking correctly, too. There has been tension between these two characters from the start, and the sequence begins with Sarah attacking the stranger with a pair of scissors. Some of their edginess should, perhaps, have been reflected in their sexual encounter. But the scene ends with their first embrace, and they are next seen the morning after, happily glowing.
This is typical of Clint’s handling of the comparatively few romantic interludes he has directed himself in, up to and including
The Bridges of Madison County
. There is always something gentlemanly about them, as if, as a director, he does not want to seem to be imposing himself, as an actor, on his female colleagues, obliging them to some possibly embarrassing display—even if some dramatic edge is lost as a result.
This is, of course, of a piece with his general manner as a director, his reluctance to enforce his opinions about how a scene should be played unless he is asked or unless the player is in visible trouble. As Bloom puts it, “He doesn’t give you a specific direction about how to go about doing this or that, but he has a very clear idea about what the scene is about, and how he wants the scene.” She, like other actors who have worked with him when he was directing himself, reports no sense of him disengaging from the scenes he was in so as to keep an eye on himself. “When he was doing a scene he was just as much involved in [it] as anyone else.”
He indulges himself no more than he indulges other actors; two or three takes are his typical limit. But he can be as patient as the situation requires, and Bloom was witness to a prodigious effort of that kind. She
had a scene with another actor that required her partner to make a fairly long speech. She observed the player poring over the script all morning and thought it just possible that they might be in for trouble when they did the scene after the lunch break. The man did well enough, however, in the master shot. It was when they came around for his close-up that his problems began. He just couldn’t get all the way to the end without blowing his lines, and the takes began mounting up. According to Bloom, Clint’s pleasant demeanor never wavered. Finally, on the twenty-second take, the actor got far enough along so that a pickup of his final words could be smoothly made. At which point the actor said, “Clint, I know you’re gonna hate me, but I just can’t help it, I gotta ask—can I have just one more?” This indulgence Clint did not grant him, but Bloom says she still admires the man’s nerve.
The movie is worthy of admiration, too. In its bleakness of setting and its view of human nature, in its refusal to present any psychological rationales for its characters’ behaviors and in its determination to strip the western to its brutal essence, it owes more to Sergio Leone than any other Eastwood movie. Indeed, to turn that stock western character, the mysterious stranger, into a figure that can be persuasively understood as apparitional is to take revisionism into previously uncharted realms.
Two or three years later, John Wayne wrote Clint protesting the movie. Wayne had always been encouraging and supportive of him. Dropping into the dead-on vocal impersonation of the older actor he sometimes does, Clint recalls Wayne saying to him more than once, “We ought to work together, kid.” So when he found a script in which he thought they might costar Clint sent it on to Wayne, noting in his cover letter that the piece, though promising, needed more work. Too much more, in Wayne’s estimation. But in rejecting the proposal, he launched into a gratuitous critique of
High Plains Drifter
. Its townspeople, he said, did not represent the true spirit of the American pioneer, the spirit that had made America great.
It was, like all the arguments about Clint’s work in those days, most basically an argument between modernism and traditionalism, but the actors didn’t acknowledge it any more than the critics did, and “out of respect for his seniority,” Clint made no rejoinder. The West has always been a location for Clint, not a passion. He has never identified the region or its people as the font of American virtues, and he has certainly never seen himself as their personification as Wayne did. “I never considered myself a cowboy,” he once said, somewhat testily, “because I’m not. I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was.” Period. He’s an actor, you know. Once, at a press conference in France, a critic rendered woozy by one of his own
interpretive flights accused Clint of trying to diminish Wayne by casting Billy Curtis in this film; the midget, he said, bore a powerful facial resemblance to Wayne. It was a startling idea to Clint, who for a brief, panicky moment found himself thinking, “Damn, does he really look like John Wayne?”
That much of a revisionist he was not. Dave Kehr, the critic who is one of Clint’s most faithful supporters, makes a more useful observation about the film. At: the end, he notes, when the drifter is riding back into the shimmering emptiness of the desert, he just pops off the screen; one frame he’s there, the next frame he isn’t. It is a device, Kehr observes, that Clint would repeat at the conclusion of several films—
Firefox, Pale Rider, Unforgiven
—and the director acknowledges his fondness for it: “I just like it.… Time passes and it’s gone, the whole thing. The fable has ended.” Is life itself the fable? Or is he talking only about those fables of heroic action that we—moviegoers and moviemakers—conjure up together out of need and nothingness? The point is simply that Clint, more than most of his public, more than most movie stars, more, certainly, than John Wayne, whose identification with the character he played, the values he personified, became almost total, is always aware that the imaginary figures he embodies are fictions. They are created out of thin air and bound to return there. It is akin to his consciousness that his public persona is a megafiction, an abstraction from reality—and also a chimera.
Not that
High Plains Drifter
, deliberately austere and eerie though it is, is compulsively calculated. There is, for example, an early passage in which the town whore, played by Marianna Hill, deliberately bumps into the drifter on the street. There is no particular reason for her rude approach and even less reason for its consequences. He hauls her into a stable and rapes her, with pain turning to pleasure, in accordance with the traditional male fantasy, as the act proceeds. “Isn’t forcible rape in broad daylight still a misdemeanor in this town?” she cheerily asks at the end. Well, no, and it probably never has been—which is such point as the scene has to make. But the sequence plays gratuitously, as Clint now admits: “I might do it differently if I were making it now. I might omit that.” Even at the time, he knew it was (as he anachronistically puts it) “politically incorrect.” He has no good explanation for why he went ahead with the sequence anyway.