Mordecai (Billy Curtis) lights the way for a stranger (Clint Eastwood) in HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER
HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (Clint Eastwood, 1973)
Bryant Park
Sixth Ave. between 40th & 42nd Sts.
Monday, August 8, free, sunset
Festival continues Mondays through August 22
www.bryantpark.org
Director and star Clint Eastwood paints the town red in High Plains Drifter, one of the best films of his long, distinguished career. In the ultimate revenge drama, Eastwood stars as an unnamed stranger who rides into the town of Lago, where a motley group of men are terrified that a trio of outlaws (Geoffrey Lewis, Dan Vadis, and Anthony James) will be returning to terrorize them further after having previously murdered their marshal while they cowered, offering their lawman no help. Hired by the town to defend them from the outlaws, the Stranger quickly starts changing things, making little Mordecai (Billy Curtis) both the sheriff and the mayor and infuriating the town’s businessmen and political leaders, cowards all, including Dave Drake (Mitchell Ryan), Lewis Belding (Ted Hartley), his wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom), Lutie Naylor (Paul Brinegar), Mayor Hobart (Stefan Gierasch), and Sheriff Shaw (Walter Barnes). The final showdown is a doozy, with a great twist ending. Written by Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection, Shaft), who was influenced by the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese as a Queens community listened and watched and did nothing (events that have been called into question by the recent documentary The Witness), High Plains Drifter of course owes a huge debt to the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, who made such classic Eastwood oaters as A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as well as Robert Altman’s anti-Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Eastwood is as bold and confident, as cool and calm as ever as the mysterious, haunted Stranger, whether taking a bath, smoking his slim cigars, or teaching folks a lesson they’ll never forget. High Plains Drifter is screening August 8 at the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival, which continues August 15 with The Big Chill and concludes August 22 with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.