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Annihilation before purification for the High Noon hamlet. "The price of progress" is a cloak for corruption and cowardice, the mining town by the lake is sun-blasted yet sick with shadows, Brecht-Weill's Mahagonny out West. The stranger (Clint Eastwood) rides along for a bottle of whiskey and a warm bath, three corpses and a rape later and the citizens are begging him to be their enforcer, "unlimited credit" and all. Sagebrush rot has its roots: The recurring nightmare-memory is a marshal lashed to death on Main Street before a craven audience, the culprits are just out of jail and on their way back for revenge. "Forgive and forget, that's our motto!" As much Sergio Leone aria as Kaneto Shindo phantom, Eastwood's first Western as a director is a remarkable genre apocalypse. Desert spirit, avenging sibling or knighted beast, the gunslinger helps himself to the town's secrets and fears—a militia trained and abandoned, a hotel taken over and blown up, such are the Dantean degrees, not even Verna Bloom's scolding gaze escapes the communal sins. "I knew you were cruel, but I didn't know how far you could go." "You still don't." Wicked prosperity calls for a violating conscience, Teorema figures in the stark expressionism subsequently winnowed (Pale Rider, Unforgiven). A judgment for the living and the dead, Poe for the put-upon dwarf (Billy Curtis) given sheriff's star and mayor's hat. The central image has nascent America painted crimson and rechristened Hell, a low-angled, handheld circular pan surveys the calm before the inferno. The cowboy at the close rides off into a distorted wave, just the horizon for a nation forcibly coming to terms with its collective bloodied hands. "Then you live with it." Cinematography by Bruce Surtees. With Marianna Hill, Mitchell Ryan, Jack Ging, Stefan Gierasch, Walter Barnes, Geoffrey Lewis, Ted Hartley, Scott Walker, Anthony James, and Buddy Van Horn.
--- Fernando F. Croce |