Ghosts of the Old West: HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and PALE RIDER

Take a seat for Clint Eastwood’s Weird West duology: two cowboys united in vengeance. Ron’s beard meets Clint’s squint in supernatural combat.

A mysterious stranger appears out of the shimmering desert on the back of a bedraggled horse. He doesn’t say a lot; he generally lets his gun do the talking for him. As it turns out, he’s a man on a mission of vengeance. It’s a set-up that could describe any one of a hundred Westerns, but for the most famous cinema gunslinger this side of John Wayne, it’s a role with a twist in two of his most famous movies. Clint Eastwood’s nameless characters (The Stranger and The Preacher, respectively) aren’t coming back to avenge their wrongs. They’re coming back to avenge their deaths.

Despite being 12 years apart, there are a lot of compelling similarities between HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and PALE RIDER. Namely, the avenging spirits are summoned literally out of nowhere by people who are suffering at the hands of oppressive mining company goons and the crippling indifference of otherwise good people who stand aside and do nothing to stop the crimes being committed.

In HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, The Stranger is summoned by the anguished dying whisper of Marshal Jim Duncan as he’s bullwhipped to death by Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and the Carlin brothers (Dan Vadis and Anthony James). With his dying breath, he begs for help in front of a mostly indifferent town. Even those that want to help are in no position to stand against the interests of the Lago Mining Company, who hired the trio as fixers to take care of the pesky marshal. It’s not a coincidence that The Stranger appears the moment the Bridges gang gets out of jail and heads back towards Lago with vengeance on their mind.

In PALE RIDER, the LaHood Mining Company sends its goons to terrorize the people of Carbon Canyon in an attempt to take over their gold claims and wreck the otherwise beautiful valley. After a ride-through by the goons leads to more injuries and a dead puppy dog, Megan (Sydney Penny) Wheeler’s quiet prayers summon The Preacher, who comes out of the middle of nowhere to ride into town and immediately starts setting wrongs to right. There’s not a delay this time; Preacher shows up in LaHood and immediately comes to the defense of Hull (Michael Moriarty) when he’s accosted by thugs with ax handles.

Weirdly, the two movies also share a strange cuckolding angle when it comes to the Clint Eastwood character’s relationships with women. In HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, immediately after shooting some goons, The Stranger grabs Callie Travers (Mariana Hill) and drags her to the nearest empty stable stall to aggressively have his way with her while the town does nothing in response. He also sleeps with Callie voluntarily later in the movie, as part of a complicated plot by Callie’s boyfriend Morgan (Jack Ging) to catch him with his pants down and beat him to death. It fails, because you can’t out-squint Clint, and not only does he kill most of the party who tried to jump him, he also has sex with the hotelier’s wife to punish him for his part of the little plot.

PALE RIDER doesn’t exactly go to these extremes, but Megan and her mother Sarah (Carrie Snodgress) both have feelings for the Preacher, despite Sarah’s relationship with Hull and the Preacher’s relatively standoffish demeanor. It’s not acted on, aside from one kiss between Preacher and Sarah, but the text is clear: if Hull wasn’t such a nice guy, Clint Eastwood was going to take his girlfriend to the boneyard. Clint Eastwood is the horniest ghost since 1989’s GHOSTS CAN’T DO IT.

The crucial similarities between the two movies are that in both cases, Eastwood’s ghost is out to avenge his death first and foremost. The Marshal is whipped to death in Lago by the Bridges gang; so HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER has his ghost going back to Lago, killing anyone who crosses him, and literally turning Lago into hell on earth to properly discombobulate the Bridges gang and the Lago goons. It’s deeply effective, and it’s with the help of the good people of Lago that the forces of evil are vanquished and The Stranger gets his revenge.

A crucial scene early in PALE RIDER reveals that the Preacher has six bullet wounds in his back courtesy of LaHood’s latest fixers, Marshal Stockburn (John Russell) and his six deputies. While he’s there to protect Hull and the Carbon Canyon townsfolk, Stockburn’s involvement takes precedence. It’s almost as if Preacher killed so many of LaHood’s goons he gave him no choice but to call in Stockburn for a climactic showdown in the deserted streets of LaHood, California. It’s not hell on earth in the way Lago becomes, but it’s a deserted, twisting liminal space where behind every corner, death waits for Stockburn’s men until Preacher gets his deserved justice by gunning Stockburn down in the middle of the street. LaHood himself gets taken out by none other than Preacher’s new friend, Hull, who walks into town and gets the final kill in for a job well done. Carbon Canyon’s nicest guy saves the day for his people with a little assistance from Clint.

Are HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and PALE RIDER sequels to one another? No, I don’t think so. Both men died under different circumstances, in different places, and in different time periods. However, there are enough similarities between the two movies to reveal that Clint Eastwood, who directed and produced both movies (and undoubtedly had a hand in shaping the story despite not being credited on either picture), has a certain fascination with revenant gunslingers coming back from the grave to get revenge on those who wronged him, and a fetish for putting someone in the cuck chair.

Thinking back, that might explain that whole “speech to an empty chair” thing at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Maybe it was the inexplicable third act in the weird west fetish show that began with HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER. Clint Eastwood as the undead bull slinging johnson and justice at every upside-down pineapple across the Old West.

Ron Hogan is a writer, podcaster, gadabout, and raconteur from Louisville, Kentucky. You can read his written works at Den of Geek, Film Stories, and at several magazines and sites that no longer exist. You can hear his voice (and potentially see his magnificent beard) on the Film Strip Podcast. 

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