High Plains Drifter – Tuesday 6th May 2025

I love a good Western.

Stories about (often) lone men riding into town, defeating the bad guys, and then riding out once justice has been done, are hard to resist. There’s something primal about them; satisfying our desire to believe that heroes exist. Heroes that will defend the helpless, especially when the law seems to work in tandem with the bad guys.

It’s an American myth, that is supposed to propagate the ideals that America was supposedly built on.

Of course, we now know better, and ‘revisionist’ Westerns seek to redress the propaganda by showing us that the so called ‘good guys’ are no different than the ‘bad guys’.
I guess High Plains Drifter falls into this revisionist category, as the truth about the ‘innocent townspeople is slowly revealed.

Although the film had all the right ingredients, with a cold-hearted, sharp shooting, anti-hero as the protagonist, a story about injustice and revenge, and a brilliant Clint Eastwood pretty much playing reprising ‘the man with no name’, I just didn’t enjoy it that much.

The protagonist is hard to like, and the story moved pretty slowly. There wasn’t really anyone in the story to latch on to, or care about. If you don’t care about anyone in the story, then you find yourself asking why the hell you’re watching it?

The music wasn’t anything special either, and a good Western needs an iconic soundtrack!

There’s a novel twist at the end, but it didn’t redeem the viewing experience for me.