High Plains Drifter

"Who are you?" the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) asks Clint Eastwood's Stranger at the end of Eastwood's 1973 western High Plains Drifter. "You know," he replies, before vanishing into the desert heat waves near California's Mono Lake. Adapting the amorally enigmatic and violent Man With No Name ...more

High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood's first Western behind the camera -- and only his second effort as a director, may owe a lot to his former collaborator Sergio Leone, but it also marks the point at which he begins to come into his own as an artist. The leisurely, dialogue-heavy asides may bog this film down at times, but it's an approach that would bear fruit later in Eastwood's directorial career. But Drifter works quite well even outside the context of Eastwood's other work, thanks to a ...more